"Participating in their strange bureaucracies is a major concession of our time that we could use for our animal purposes, to observe and make sense of the world, and to describe OUR visions. I propose that we stop playing along. I am imagining a type of degrowth, a disassembly of dominant structures, a refusal."
kind of the essence of what the west looks like imo
presents "code using physical tools like pencils, brushes, and paint as inspiration. [...] By observing things and attempting to express them in code, you can develop your skills and perspective. The freedom to design your own tools can be an invaluable asset for your creativity."
"Picasso is the twentieth century’s great Mr. Potato Head, constantly being taken apart and reassembled with his nose in his eyehole and his mouth upside down, because he made himself a plastic body of work and celebrity and left it unattended when he died."
"a game about going to the museum to get away for a bit and to think about feelings you like to feel"
"A curated list of code and resources for computer-controlled drawing machines and other visual art robots"
"My interest in 'data as medium' is partly motivated by the horror of that, the misery of the being watched, being gathered, with no real opportunity to revoke consent. And also, in truth, by the closeness of that — the touching of me against the whole world." [...] "I want queerness not as a condition under which we are labeled and are made to suffer, or even as a condition under which we are labeled and find individual joy, but as one (of many) gifts for the world."
"nature inspired linoleum block prints" that I want in my house
on the perils of "art-as-investigation": "Latour was influential in asking people to question the ways that knowledge is produced. But late in life, he made an important clarification: in questioning tools and infrastructure, he said, he never meant to pave the way for post-truth. As Farocki and Latour advocated, we ought to abandon our faith not in truth but in tools. [...] Art does not have protocols for verification or accountability the way other disciplines do"
gorgeous procedural geometry in blender (via lynn cherny's newsletter)
'I sat through two hours of “Unsupervised.” I can’t think of a single image in it that evoked any feeling in me besides curiosity about what it might be referencing.'
using pgp for artificial digital scarcity. lol
early form of palette swaps
"Extraction—of natural resources and of labor—is the defining American act, at home and at war. Inasmuch as art is for the statement of itself, earthworks such as Heizer’s extract for the sake of extraction. To me he is the most patriotic of artists. The effect of an earthwork is never big enough to critique its circumstances nor generative enough to counter the harmful effects of its creation. In this, the NFT producers have accomplished something great, and outdone the 1970s land artists. With minimal labor, no pretense of theory or contextualization, no aesthetic clarity, and no object to speak of, they have set off exponential extractions. It’s not new; it’s just worse." [...] "Art can’t fill the damage done by extraction and enshrining a site of extraction through installation, reframing it as a cultural space, is a softened blow rather than an elucidation. When art fills a void, it justifies the void."
brilliant essay on nfts, arts, politics, economics: "This comparison isn't really rigorous at all so i won't spend more time on it, i just thought the concept of a bourgeois failson containment zoo was funny." also: "The artists have exactly as much depth of existence as everyone, but they had the time and means to develop tools to communicate it in specific ways, and access to specific platforms. Any attempt to naturalize these privileges into an intellectual, emotional, creative superiority of artists over the rest of the people is absolute garbage, and should be treated with the disdain it deserves."
"the new and the first are temporalities that often attract and accrue value in the art market"
matches skull pose to photograph of animal with matching pose! actually a good example of (benign but illustrative) algorithmic bias, e.g., all of the upside-down skulls are bats, all of the skulls viewed underneath are birds
"The turn towards process is also a good thing; everyone should have the opportunity to create art. From that perspective, it's true that Suum Cuique Labs infringe nothing with these pieces. From an art perspective, though, that's sort of beside the point. They cynically take advantage of open culture to enclose it again, aspiring to use blockchain to create Supercopyright with ludicrously high buy-in. And more to the point perhaps, this free ganking is a tacit acknowledgement that the artists they got were simply not good enough to achieve anything other than a bad copy of a dead black artist's style."
'The product being labored over for the contemporary artist of social media is not "the work of art" but "the gestalt experience of art-posting".'
some helpful historical and technical threads, comparing the immersive art room to Palazzo Te, Kusama, VR, raree shows, etc. what's interesting to me is how the space in question is treated like an interchangeable substrate
"The organizers of NT initially sought to consciously accompany and form the historical transition in which the computer was perceived as medium of artistic creation. They set computer generated works in relation to Constructive and Kinetic art (1968/69) and to Conceptual art (1973). The arts of the electronic media were not considered as an isolated phenomenon but rather incorporated into the history and discourse of fine-and performing arts."
lds temples as lovecraftian hellscape
"...the method here is quite different. DALL-E is trained end-to-end for the sole purpose of producing high quality images directly from language, whereas this CLIP method is more like a beautifully hacked together trick for using language to steer existing unconditional image generating models." good history of the emergence of CLIP art
golan's overview
such a fantastic career, so much amazing work
imagining a tile-based tactics game that uses these exclusively
there's some extent to which these are just genre tropes at this point, but still a valuable reference!
"Icons are not primitive or rudimentary attempts to duplicate the physical world; they are nuanced and complex attempts to embody the spiritual world."
lovely CC0 mix-and-match character art illustrations (would be great for, e.g., prototyping Ren'Py games)
"White Savior Complex causes a lot of money to be wasted in order to, for example, give children sneakers and headphones that are of little to no use to them. At its most harmful, it can lead to an entire country being colonized. Creative Savior Complex works in similar ways: without proper consideration, many of the ways we try to help as creatives may mean valuable resources that could’ve done a lot of good are wasted, or, at its worst, it can lead to people getting hurt."
lovely
this guy absolutely had his head on straight about shape and color
"I search craigslist for compelling photos of mirrors for sale."
"Artists aim differently than sharpshooters. They are not typically trying to take something out, but to draw something out. The mark Holzer hits in this case is the mark in the most cave-drawing sense: the effort to leave (or find) a trace of something that is not an opinion, but a register of some kind, certifying a lived experience. There may be no such thing as a permanent record, but the fact that the Washington Post contributor found Holzer’s work dangerous is a sign in and of itself that it has achieved one of its goals: it has carved a deep enough mark to leave a strong impression (for that writer, a menacing one). That’s the most any language or other kind of mark-making can hope to accomplish."
lots of detail and variation, this would be a cool set to make a map generator with!
"Spectre, a new interactive installation by Bill Posters and Daniel Howe, reveals the secrets of the Digital Influence Industry in a cautionary tale of technology, democracy and society, curated by algorithms and powered by visitors’ data. Premiering at the Sheffield Doc/Fest Alternate Realities exhibition, Spectre leverages the technologies and techniques of the tech giants, advertising firms, and political campaign groups to show how our behaviours are being predicted, influenced and controlled."
"[S]oft little kitty kisses these are not; they are “deep kisses,” in which the cat full-on plants its lips on Schneemann’s often open mouth. 'The intimacy between cat and woman becomes a refraction of the viewers’ attitudes to self and nature, sexuality and control, the taboo and the sacred,' [Schneemann has] written. 'The images raise questions of interspecies communication, as well as triggering unexpected cultural taboos.'"
"...the fiction that speech casts visible shadows. [...] converts speech into whimsically animated letters and shapes that appear to float upwards from the shadow of the speaker's head. Visitors can also manipulate these forms directly, using the shadow of their own body. When a phoneme is recognized by the software with sufficient confidence, it is spelled out on the installation's display."
"Social-practice artworks with a commitment to sociopolitical change have the inexplicable potential to be valued as morally good works, regardless of the impact of the project as measured by the community’s criteria. They allow sociopolitical issues to be subsumed into aesthetic issues, such that a work can fail a community but still be considered good art. [...] Perhaps the takeaway is: The limited attention span for art is not enough. Do the work, and do it whether it’s in the context of art or not. Don’t pretend that doing good as part of a creative practice is better than just doing good. And definitely don’t pretend that good intentions make inherently good acts."
"Dotgrid is a distractionless vector tool with line styles, corner controls, colours, grid-based tools, PNG and SVG export."