This is… something special:
Since Embodied marketed Moxie as a companion and development toy for children, there’s concern about kids potentially suffering an emotional toll after the robot abruptly becomes inoperable. Embodied has responded by promising to provide a guide for telling children about Moxie’s demise.
I finished this very version 1 initial prototype of a robotic drawing arm made from willow branches from my garden, and using syringe hydraulic actuators (no electronics or motors). Terrible picture again, sorry. One day, I’ll do some better quality photos of all these things.
This is one style of a SCARA arm used in robotics, where the S and C stand for selective and compliance, in that it can move horizontally in xy axes, but not vertically in z. In this case, the movement is provided via a human operator pulling and pushing the water-filled syringes and tubing to actuate the joints of each arm segment. (Here’s some related concept art I did for this using AI before/during the actual build.)
I spoke about this and some of my other low tech human drawing bots (or “biobots“) in this episode of the Silicon Synapse show. I’m trying to find that mystical crack in the world between human-whatever and AI-whatever where something stops being a human-ish thing, and becomes a “mere mechanical process” such that it becomes according to the bureaucratic gods who deem it their role to interpret such omens… UNCOPYRIGHTABLE!!!
I, of course, have a lot more to say on these topics, but am trying to document at least minimally some of the highways and byways that I have traversed this past year while investigating these issues creatively. I’ll also do a demo drawing with this machine in the coming days and post that here.
Unfortunately, this initial design is pretty limited in its range of motion, which is okay because I was more just trying to understand how the mechanisms work, and now I have something adequate to experiment with which I think will be able to tell me through experimentation proper dimensions and alignment for an updated version with a greater range of motion.
I have used Spotify less and less over the years, generally leaning into wifi radio instead on dedicated devices. That’s how I have escaped it algorithmic clutches. I decided to check in anyway on this year’s “Wrapped” offering, and anxiously loaded it up while the shitty AI DJ voice you can’t change or turn off told me what my favorite song of the year was… literally a song I could barely recognize, by an artist whose name I had no idea. Clearly this was not my best song of the year… in fact, it turned out to be a song that I only barely minimally “liked” (more like tolerate), and which Spotify is literally the one who is always forcing me to listen to it. Which is more the primary function now of that app, as far as I can tell: connecting customers to the payola crap it needs to play to my demographic in order to satisfy its paying clients. That’s not a good model for success. After that, my top songs were all from Joni Mitchell’s Hejira, which I wrote about recently. Not very surprising or interesting. Yet another in the now sky-high pile of epic streaming app fails which have become the norm nowadays.
Here is a satirical gen AI image set I made for a fictional event called “CEO AID” in which the top health insurance executives from the US recently banded together to perform an amazing cover version of 1985’s classic song, “We Are The World” in order to raise funds at Christmas time to pay for their private security details.
These images were made in Recraft, which is one of the front-runner image gen models right now, imo.
(Feel free to share these on social media with attribution, and provided the watermark stays intact.)
A Few Highlights:
Happy Holidays!
[Also a related somewhat recent artist’s statement.]
I’ve been experimenting with the new-ish Photoshop Remove tool. And no, I didn’t completely quit Adobe like I hoped/promised, but I did deeply downgrade from the all apps pla to the Photography 20GB plan, and bought the Affinity suite of 3 apps at half price on Black Friday in order to fill in any other potential gaps of functionality as I work on other projects.
But I just wanted to share this one interesting early result where I ran the Photoshop Remove tool on a photo of a painting of mine:
For this I selected most of the original painting in the middle with the Remove tool, waited a few seconds and it spit that out, which I actually think is a very interesting piece in its own right, but also when paired like this with the original source material, to explore these sort of parallel latent versions of a given work, or even a historical moment. Reality isn’t going to be the same anymore.
Here’s a historical riff, removing the flag and pole from the famous Iwo Jima photo:
Outside comic or ironic uses though, the possibilities here get quite dark quite quickly. Consider this flung together xample from the famous Tianamen Square standoff moment – Tankman? What Tankman?
Similarly dark, but in a different direction: shooter, what shooter?
Nowadays, you don’t have to hire an army of re-touch artists to toss your old comrades turned enemies out of your pics anymore, you can do it yourself in a few clicks.
At the same time, I could see this tool and its deep hyperreality effects as being a potent tool for iconoclastic political critique in a world gone completely mad… Don’t like current political situation? Here’s a filter you can use to live in a parallel reality where that person/party/place/thing never even reaches your digital eyes or ears…
Plus, I think it would be pointless to try to regulate this. Where would you even start? To ask for that would be to invite tech companies to implement ever greater filtering and restrictions, and put more and more content decisions into the hands of AIs tied to corporate profit-engines. I mean, that’s going to happen anyway, but at least let’s not go begging for it. At least not until we’ve had a chance to kick the tires a bit before it gets nerfed.
Made my first and second attempts at wooden automata over the past week or so. I tried uploading videos of them but the internet is stupid and I don’t feel like jumping through a million hoops to make it work right now. So pictures will have to suffice for this round.
This is the first one I did, where the central bee is fixed on an upright dowel, attached to a horizontal circle which acts as a friction wheel/cam follower, which an eccentric cam raises up and down, while also turning it round in circles. The two flowers on either end simply rotate on friction wheels. The bee looks like he can’t decide which flower to land on when you turn the crank.
This is the second in the series, a robot whose body and hands (connected by paperclips) go up and down offset from one another by eccentric cams pointed in different directions. I tried initially on this one to do a different configuration for the cam followers, where they were square with wings extending down from them to keep them riding the cams, but with the wood I cut everything from and however I had it, I could not get them to work that way. So I just cut the circular cam followers instead. Since they naturally travel a bit while the crank is being rotated, the end motion effect is also that they rotate a little while bobbing up and down, and the motion is slightly constrained by the paper clips joining them together. Also discovered on this one how not being careful about aligning the holes in pieces does not make for good consistent planar travel of parts as they rotate.
These are extremely fun to make and figure out. I made them using a scroll saw (a Dremel Moto-Saw, the newer portable one, not the older one by that name) that I got and a Dremel 4300 with flex shaft kit – both of which I bought for being able to fabricate small mechanical parts for drawing robots and other little fun projects like these automata. I’m replacing this portable scroll saw from Dremel though with a larger Wen instead, as I think a more substantial scroll saw would be better for more serious scrolling – which is a whole wide interesting craft world and online subculture in its own right.
This one is a few weeks too late, but I’ve been meaning to post about an album that I was listening to obsessively for a few weeks straight, Hejira by Joni Mitchell, 1976. I first caught wind of this amazing album via Radio Paradise Mellow Mix which I listen to on a standalone wifi-based radio in my house, particularly via the tune Song for Sharon:
I thought this song was amazing, and when I read this comment on it, it piqued my interest to actually BUY THE CD!!!
For me, Hejira was one of the greatest work of art of the 20th century
Having listened to it a lot now, I think I would tend to agree. Someone else called it, paraphrasing, cinema for the ears. Utterly agree with that one. It’s one of the most lyrically complex albums I think I’ve ever heard, and the deeper I got into it, I was more and more surprised how little I’ve ever heard anybody talk about it. (I had to listen all the way through about 3-4 times before I really felt like I “got” it.) Plus, amazing Jaco Pastorius 70s melodic fretless bass… what else can I say?
The Wikipedia page on the album has tons of interesting morsels, some that are expressed in greater detail in songs on the album, others that provide good context and texture for the music. A sampling:
On her way back home, Mitchell met with Tibetan Buddhist master Chogyam Trungpa in Colorado, an event she credited with curing her cocaine addiction and leaving her in a selfless “awakened state” that lasted three days.
During some of her solo journeys, Mitchell donned a red wig, sunglasses, and told the varying strangers she met that her name was either “Charlene Latimer” or “Joan Black”. Despite the disguise, Mitchell was still sometimes recognized. She traveled without a driver’s licence and stayed behind truckers, relying on their habit of signaling when the police were ahead of them; consequently, she only drove in daylight hours. […]
Mitchell grew increasingly frustrated by the rock session musicians who had been hired to perform her music. “…There were grace notes and subtleties and things that I thought were getting kind of buried.” The session musicians in turn recommended that Mitchell start looking for jazz instrumentalists to perform on her records. In addition, her relationship with drummer John Guerin (which lasted through a significant portion of the mid-1970s) influenced her decision to move more towards experimental jazz music and further away from her folk and pop roots.
After recording the basic tracks that would become Hejira, Mitchell met bassist Jaco Pastorius and they formed an immediate musical connection; Mitchell was dissatisfied with what she called the “dead, distant bass sound” of the 1960s and early 1970s, and was beginning to wonder why the bass part always had to play the root of a chord. She overdubbed his bass parts on four of the tracks on Hejira and released the album on November 22, 1976. […]
The album title is an unusual transliteration of the Arabic word more commonly rendered as Hijrah or Hegira, which means “departure or exodus”, usually referring to the migration of the Islamic prophet Muhammad (and his companions) from Mecca to Medina in 622. Mitchell later stated that when she chose the title, she was looking for a word that meant “running away with honor”. She found the word “hejira” while reading the dictionary, and was drawn to the “dangling j, like in Aja… it’s leaving the dream, no blame”. […]
Mitchell has described the album as “really inspired… there is this restless feeling throughout it… The sweet loneliness of solitary travel”, and has said that “I suppose a lot of people could have written a lot of my other songs, but I feel the songs on Hejira could only have come from me.”
Anyway, just wanted to leave this signpost here for other musical adventurers to explore, or come back to. Here’s the opening track on the album, Coyote, which is probably more well-known than the one above.
This subject keeps coming up. I looked at it and I guess I don’t really care that much. 8000 books in a year is probably a lot less than whatever Amazon prints for print on demand customers. $5000 is too much to spend on pretty much anything for seat-of-the-pants small publishing. The AI angle doesn’t seem all that strong here to me personally, as I keep thinking that running any of my weirdo AI-hybrid books through a purely AI editor-ing system will absolutely destroy the novelty and nuance of the way I pieced everything together in my very human “bursting at the seams” style of editing.
This has been making the rounds in the AI/Art infospace, that a group of testers of OpenAI’s upcoming Sora video gen model broke ranks and leaked access to the model publicly when they weren’t supposed to, and posted this open letter on Huggingface in support of the effort (signable version here).
ARTISTS ARE NOT YOUR UNPAID R&D
☠️ we are not your: free bug testers, PR puppets, training data, validation tokens ☠️Hundreds of artists provide unpaid labor through bug testing, feedback and experimental work for the program for a $150B valued company. While hundreds contribute for free, a select few will be chosen through a competition to have their Sora-created films screened — offering minimal compensation which pales in comparison to the substantial PR and marketing value OpenAI receives.
▌║█║▌║█║▌║ DENORMALIZE BILLION DOLLAR BRANDS EXPLOITING ARTISTS FOR UNPAID R&D AND PR ║▌║█║▌║█║▌Furthermore, every output needs to be approved by the OpenAI team before sharing. This early access program appears to be less about creative expression and critique, and more about PR and advertisement.
I guess I feel mildly sympathetic about “sticking it to the man” in a general way, but maybe I feel mostly confused on the specifics here. Not to sound too cynical, but were the people behind this letter not aware of what the nature of the agreement must have been when they presumably signed it?
None of what’s being described by them seems all that new or different for software companies, which routinely leverage unpaid labor out of their user base (ahem, social media anyone?), and *of course* inviting artists for early access is part of PR & advertising. That’s just a given for me on something like this. I can understand not wanting to be a part of that for sure, but I just end up wondering: why sign up then in the first place?
All that said, let’s find ways to pay artists for helping build these technologies, and let’s actually actively listen to their feedback (instead of, for example, banning them), because artists bring a whole other holistic and humanist set of skills to AI development that are so well-represented by the overwhelmingly technical, academic, PhD, research, math and engineering-types who currently populate the halls of AI power.
Made with Dalle.
Four years is being extremely optimistic, in my opinion.
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