Via Waxy, we are treated to a spread of sci-fi comic panels of as reimagined by a generative adversarial network (see previously) trained by Frank Force. These brilliant runs of landscapes and backgrounds are fully customisable with switches and sliders to adjust for colour, shadow, star-type and more.
Friday 11 February 2022
Wednesday 9 February 2022
the tavistock letter
We learn that aided by machine learning, researchers have been able to finally decipher the “savage stenographic mystery” (see previously) of the brachygraphy of Charles Dickens, a shorthand he learned during his first career as a court reporter and developed into an idiosyncratic script of his own design for taking notes on his working manuscripts during his later literary career. Though select correspondence and marginalia has been cracked, there is quite a huge corpus of drafts left to decode. Much more at Open Culture at the link above.
Saturday 5 February 2022
i choo-choo-choose you
Graduating beyond their last Valentine-themed experiment with those sentimental chalky hearts (tag yourself), our resident Artificial Intelligencer Janelle Shane (previously) returns with an awkward greeting card exchange, reminiscent indeed of those compulsory ones from element school with the same slightly antiquated, non sequitur, generic energy. There were just too many weird ones to pick from but especially liked the terms of endearment: You’re the snail’s poise! or Hugs for your Valentine, from the inside! and Boop-rah, sexy fried heart! See more plus illustrations at AI Weirdness at the link above.
Saturday 29 January 2022
laser beige
Revisiting one of their first experiments—certainly one that caught our attention—our Resident Artificial Intelligencer, Janelle Shane (previously) tasks a new generation of neural networks with not only naming a palette of bespoke colours but also to define the colour coordinates. It was hard to pick from such a comprehensive swatch of choices but a few of our favourites were Whiskerboard—a nice slate hue that seems fitting for a hipster barber shop or cocktail bar—complemented by Lucky Chalk or Indecent Taupe. Also among the top contenders were True to the Narwal, Well Pencil and a nice olive Mocking Cloud Candy. Tag yourself or at least your colour scheme. More at the links above.
Saturday 22 January 2022
k-e-double l-o-double good
To varying degrees of success, our Artificial Intelligencer Janelle Shane (previously) has put several generative adversarial networks through the paces to see how they might re-interpret breakfast cereal American style. The more sophisticated third generation autoregressive language model DaVinci seemed to understand the task best, concocting the highly plausible Eggo Nut Frosted Strawberry Pancakes with confetti sprinkles, but other models did not seem to grasp what’s part of a complete breakfast with “Orb Crumpets” or the unpalatable “Original Cool Ranch Cheese and Dried Cranberry Oatmeal.” More at AI Weirdness at the link above.
Friday 14 January 2022
like dear old alfred always said: eat a dinner, mattress wayne
Courtesy of Super Punch, we discover what a neural network will generate after being primed with a thousand pages of captions and quote bubbles from old Batman comics. More at the link above, including panels illustrating the text. Joker is a clown but insane. Two-Face is a man but attorney.
Thursday 30 December 2021
achievable goals
Courtesy of our friend artificial intelligencer and Smithsonian’s designated futurist-in-residence for next month, Janelle Shane (previously here and here) we are treated to a neural network’s attempt at coming up with a New Year’s resolution. With a few prompts, it generated suggestions like, “Make broccoli the national currency and then paint that,” or “take photos of my toes daily,” and intriguingly “act like a cabbage for a month,” “dress in a way that only a ghost could love,” “throw a birthday party for a tree” and “attempt to find peace living with an army of puppets.” More at the link above and see if you can find a resolution that’s particularly resonant for you. “I will now treat every worm I see as if it is an old friend.”
catagories: ๐ , ๐ค, libraries and museums, networking and blogging
Wednesday 15 December 2021
7x7
the hallmark channel: a treasury of classic festive films from Eastern Europe
savage garden: the ruins of Rome’s Colosseum was once a wild green oasis full of exotic plants—via Messy Nessy Chic
touching the sun: the Parker Solar Probe enters and safely exits the corona
barcode architects: a new triangular high-rise for Rotterdam’s maritime district
smart tweed: artificial intelligence predicts the next holiday, must-have gifts
็ฌ็ต: Japanese in-situ heating solutions called kotatsu (see previously) have been around for a long time
what day is it boy: the labour shortage hits Scrooge & Marley
Wednesday 1 December 2021
7x7
dress rehearsal: for a quarter of a century, an individual attended his own funeral
dominical letters: how the artificial unit of the week came to govern our lives—see also
carceral publications: a collection of US prison newspapers
yes or no questions: celebrate the conclusion of Futility Closet’s eight plus year run with a final episode of lateral thinking puzzles
hvorugkynsnafnorรฐ: despite progress in the choices for human naming conventions, the Icelandic governing body for horses is still highly gendered
regenerative medicine: researchers develop “xenobots” capable of biological self-replication—via Waxy
amigone: aptly named mortuary services—via Super Punch
Saturday 27 November 2021
can’t resist a list
Our AI Intelligencer (see previously), expounding on how the above protocols or inventory—being perhaps what artificial intelligence is—has this remarkable tendency to derail otherwise passingly competent machines as they carry instructions out to their unnatural conclusions, like with the prompt for baking a cake with the nth steps being Wait for the timer to ring. Smell the baked good. forgot to take it out. Hide it all under a carpet. Or the next cue to generate traditional wedding gifts after being supplied the first four anniversaries:
5th Year: Fowl Feathers, etc.
9th Year: Small Dainty
11th Year: Soapsugar Jelly
17th Year: Green Surpluses & Leaves
25th Year: Paper, Spreads and White Sea Shells
34th Year: Wool/Reindeer Hair
48th Year: Lying In Blankets
I seriously want this bot to be my personal shopping concierge for Christmas as it seems to have no problem conjuring up an inexhaustible wish-list. Much more at the links above.
Tuesday 9 November 2021
collared
Buried within the pared down yet still massive and significant US Infrastructure Bill is a rider that encourages in the pursuit of public safety the tagging of pedestrians and bicycles with transponder beacons so as to make it easier for autonomous vehicles from running them over—thereby, like the crime of jaywalking, shifting the responsibility away from the manufacturers to public and shared spaces.
Sunday 31 October 2021
spot me up
Made in collaboration with Boston Dynamics, we learn courtesy of Laughing Squid, 1981 Mick Jagger and the rest of the Rolling Stones perform a Tik-Tok style duet with a trio of robot modules for a performance (previously) of their classic—the video produced as part of the fortieth anniversary celebration of the release of their Tattoo You album. What do you think? It’s fun and the tribute choreography is scarily brilliant but perhaps another example of normalisation and propaganda for the police state.
Saturday 30 October 2021
the brain that wouldn’t die
First airing on this day in 1993 during the series’ fifth season, the lampoon of the Rex Carlton and Joseph Green 1962 collaboration from the crew of Mystery Science Theater 3000 helped elevate this film about a mad scientist who is working on methods of preserving dismembered bodily organs to allow for future viability who experiments on the his decapitated girlfriend whilst keeping a Frankenstein’s monster captive in a broom closet to the status of a cult classic. Because of an imperfect copyright notice, it entered into public domain upon theatrical release and was in 2018 the subject of one of the first fully machine produced movies. The episode was long-time writer Michael J. Nelson’s second appearance as host and features a segment with Mary Jo Pehl as Jan in the Pan, the actor to later replace Dr. Clayton Forrester in their secret underground lair, Deep 13.
Saturday 16 October 2021
7x7
pour homme, femme, et grenouille: Amphรญbฤซa, Kermit the Frog’s signature scent from 1995
hampsternomics: a look at how the attention economy has matured through the lens of a quarter-century old meme—see previously
a day without rain: Endless Enya (previously) from Mischief Magazine—via Web Curiosmemento mori: a treasury of macabre reminders of death’s inevitability
corvid catalogue: counting crows of literature
sneakernet: non-existent virtual trainers dreamed up by artificial intelligence (see also)—via ibฤซdem
pietra per pizza: a deep-dive into the history of the cooking accessory convinces one individual it isn’t just a trendy gimmick
Friday 15 October 2021
spook it up
Through some experimentation with text style-changes—dialing-up the fright-factor—our artificial intelligencer (previously here and here) has been able to solicit recommendations for Halloween costume improvement, surpassing her initial concept in terms of keeping with the reason for the season.
More about methodology and algorithmic improvement at the link above, but we were particularly intrigued with the below prompt and response:Input: I’m dressing as a princess for Halloween!
More interesting: You are preparing to confront the powerful Uber Faerie, one of the rulers of the week, he who commands the forces of week, including faeries, goblins, toadstools, lampposts, and fleas. It is to be your first confrontation with him, and you are secretly afraid.
Whilst I might not be able to visual convey my distress, I do very well to better understand my character’s motivation. Be sure to check out how machine-learning altered the tone and tenor of a beloved Winne the Pooh theme song with the same parameters in mind.
Friday 8 October 2021
effective calculability
With its roots in the Latinisation of the Persian mathematician Muhammad bin Musa Al-Khwฤrizmฤซ as algorimus, we were quite pleased to learn about the education, contributions and legacy of the scholar of Baghdad’s House of Wisdom in the ninth century, in Greater Iran—presently Uzbekistan—whose the namesake for the unambiguous computational instructions that machines can act upon through tributes by several local artists hosted by a Tashkent gallery. Entitled Dixit Algorizmi after the opening line of his comprehensive manuscript, Thus Spake Al-Khwฤrizmฤซ, there is much more to explore at the links above.
Friday 1 October 2021
botober
Wednesday 29 September 2021
7x7
kรกdรกr cube: a practical, mass-produced boxy house (Magyar รpรญtลmลฑvรฉszet) from Communist-era Hungary is staging a comeback
the new english canaan: revisiting the banned publication that mocked American’s puritanical ways—see also
you’ve got a habit of leaving: the first single from the unreleased David Bowie album, coming in January
merfolk and melusine: tritons and mermaids entertained by enlightened minds
facebookland: the social media giant ought to be treated like the autocratic rogue state it is—via Waxy
roll over beethoven: a team of musicologists using artificial intelligence complete the composer’s unfinished tenth symphony—to premier in Bonn next month, via Kottke
ะณะพััะธะฝัะน ะดะฒะพั: a rotating arch for a shopping arcade in St. Petersburg—via Pasa Bon!
Sunday 26 September 2021
unknown foods
Also growing up with grocery store chains named Piggly Wiggly, Food Lion, Safeway and Skaggs Alpha-Beta (wherein items were originally stocked and arranged in alphabetical order for ease of location and retrieval), we could appreciate this exercise from AI Weirdness (previously) that trained various neural networks on generating suggestions for naming supermarkets. We especially enjoyed how quickly it picked up on real world marketing conventions and served them back to us. Some of our favourites in addition to the entitled included: See How Much! Jumbo Boost Built in Juice, Fair-Oil Edible Foods and Little More Large Brook. Discover more about the methodology behind machine learning and be sure to subscribe to Janelle Shane at the links above.
Friday 17 September 2021
6x6
pontifices maximi: the denatured bridges of euro notes
top banana: the fruit label collecting community—via Weird Universe
toccata and fugue: Bach’s compositions—see previously—from eight perspectives
trolley problem: pedestrians recruited involuntarily in self-driving car trials—see also
trivia killed the video star: a look back on how quiz games replaced arcade fascination
soli cui fas vidisse minervam: polymath Lauri Maria Caterina Bassi Veratti, nacknamed after the goddess of wisdom, first salaried female professor