I’ve wanted to do a book by this title for ages and finally did it. I used Mistral 7B for most of it (which I used as completions for my own seed texts via TextSynth playground), with an ending via Llama to mix things up, and an intro by ChatGPT. This is more or less the same tech combo I’ve used on the text side for the past few books. It’s good enough, but I think I’m reaching the end of what I can get from Mistral using it that way. It gets repetitively psychotic after a certain point (or, maybe that’s just me?).
Something I dove more into here that I maybe only touched on obliquely at points in other books is sort of me as the writer voice talking into the completions text box on TextSynth, trying to direct its output at points verbally, even though it’s not a chatbot and cannot really understand or speak back to you used in this formulation (I don’t think, anyway). I feel like the way its included in this already surreal piece adds even more grit to the texture (like mixing sand in paint, as some of the early Cubists did). I haven’t seen anyone else experiment with this facet of AI writing before, and I think there’s a lot of interesting potential there stylistically. I have other ideas of where to take that mode of writing in the future.
Here’s the image preview:
Much but not all of the image content is by Ideogram, a few Playgrounds, a few Leonardos, a few Dalles. Some of the art references other projects I’ve been discussing lately on this blog.
I don’t have a ton more to say on it, except to highlight how much I absolutely despise people asking me to like, subscribe, and follow. I think that kind of algorithm-chasing behavior leads only to madness at worst and unhappiness for certain. It’s time to tear all that shit down and start anew.
Biobots is the latest name I have come up with to house the art explorations I am doing around building IRL drawing machines of the low tech and human (or nature) powered variety.
The first one I did used a little motor and battery. The second was a pulley system rigged up to control a gondola with a marker taped onto it to be able to drawing lines on the wall. It worked, but imprecisely. This is my third iteration, tentatively titled “Gondolier” since that word describes the human oar-bearer who directs the flow of action on the river.
Apologies for the shitty photos, but I have a small studio space:
So the device functions by the user standing in the middle, and rotating the wood dials clockwise or counter-clockwise. The dials are glued to toothed timing pulleys, which engage with a mating toothed timing belt. So as each dial turns independently or manually synchronized, it causes the gondola to move around (itself weighted with batteries), and an acrylic paint marker is duct-taped to the bottom.
Here is the close up of the v2 version of the dial-pulley mechanisms:
Wood dowels are 8mm, as are the bores of the timing pulleys, so they had to be filed down and sanded out a little to allow for free spinning. There was a failed earlier prototype of this I won’t go into, but suffice it to say having good quality dials securely connected to the pulleys is essential to having this be a fun and fluid experience to use.
An early stage of the initial test:
While I think the motorized and electronic controlled wall plotter stuff is interesting, I’ve learned something about myself, that I don’t enjoy tinkering with coding stuff (Arduino, etc) more than absolute minimum, but I love tinkering with physical stuff.
So my theory behind all this is, why not take things that are commonly robotic, and sort of rip out the robot part, and replace it with a human processor, a human being? In effect, a biobot?
Turns out, of course, like everything, that “biobot” is a term already in common use, but it’s meaning is incredible, and strangely complementary thematically to the ideaspace I am trying to explore with this series. I blogged about them previously as xenobots & anthrobots, but biobots also speak to this “third state” that is supposedly emergent for some kinds of cells in some conditions after the death of the host organism. Popular Mechanics quote:
Unlike some cells such as tumors or organoids that continually divide after death, these xenobots took on new behaviors beyond their biological roles. Studies have also found this ability in human lung cells, creating anthrobots capable of self-assembling and moving around.
I think this makes “biobiots” an acceptable area of overlap thematically with the project I’m undertaking (Freudian slip), in that it speaks to breaking the duality between accepted positions of “life” versus “death” or “good” versus “bad” or “human” versus “technology,” and moving beyond all that to a third state where new behaviors and ways of being become possible, self-assembling, and autonomously moving around and having this new kind of life which serves purposes we’re only just beginning to understand.
This was an important solution, a hole drilled through the dowels once they were mounted on the wall to prevent the dial-pulley assembling from traveling off the dowel. Then a nail slotted in holds it in place:
It might not be evident in these pictures (or in person) what’s going on with the plastic bags, but they contain dead batteries as weights, where it actually ended up being easy to find three sets of approximately the same weight batteries to put into each bag as resistance and into the gondola itself.
In future versions, I will cuteify those into some other form (maybe small vertical willow baskets?), but for this solidly working prototype, it’s “good enough.”
Here’s the first finished painting in this series, all done entirely using the Gondolier drawing device and paint markers taped to the bottom.
I’m really excited about the level of control I could get out of it after some initial experimentation and learning. I haven’t processed my videos yet, but the motion is very smooth and satisfying to use. It could probably be “better” somehow but there’s a lot of experimenting left to do here to know in which specific directions to take it next to find its best form. It’s wonderful and raw feeling right now though just like this in person. A video won’t express that anyway.
The only current drawback is that the dials are mounted fairly high up, above shoulder level, and somewhat far apart. I’m still adjusting as to what is actually the maximum usable drawing space, and the relative dimensions of the arrangement, this is just what presented itself in the moment. After a few hours of playing with it though, it’s absolutely tiring to use with your arms up in the air for a long time. In shorter stints (an hour or 2 maybe) it is highly usable and enjoyable.
I found my next project last night in the biobots series, a combination of these two, a syringe-driven hydraulic robotic arm, but as a SCARA arm capable of drawing on a table. So the control system from the first video used to replace the electronics and motor in the second:
I also happened to finally fall down the Theo Jansen Strandbeest rabbit hole last night while investigating mechanical linkages, and this video interview of him is the best one I’ve seen so far. The Strandbeests totally seem to be “biobots” to me, as they have behaviors of their own, powered by natural forces (wind) and responding to different kinds of stimulus, like walking into the ocean, or bumping into something with its feeler. Incredible:
The only thing I don’t like about these is they are made of plastic, but having seen his method for assembling them using heat to form custom joints, I can see why it is desirable for his application. I’m left wondering though, what kinds of biobots could be made out of locally-grown willow branches?
The last bit that has been on my mind here is thinking about “robots” that might pass through the legendary Butlerian Jihad of the Dune universe, where all thinking machines were destroyed and outlawed, to be replaced by human calculators, mentats, etc. And how these biobotic “robots” I’m exploring seem like they could pass by without arousing the ire of the Butlerian Jihad authorities… plus, these kinds of devices would survive an EMP blast, since they have no electronics at all.
Interestingly, as I was writing this, I asked ChatGPT for the relevant quotes from Dune’s Orange Catholic Bible, which I believe to be canonically is:
“Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.”
However, ChatGPT then came up with its own plausible other quote:
“Man’s flesh is his own; the maker has given it form, and man’s spirit is free.”
Totally non-canonical, but fits the style and themes to some degree. As I understand it, Herbert didn’t leave us the complete text of the Orange Catholic Bible, so… you never know! Also this neatly illustrates why we might not actually want to over-rely on thinking machines either…
In 1979 Jansen started using cheap PVC pipes to build a 4-metre (13 ft)-wide flying saucer that was filled with helium. It was launched over Delft in 1980 on a day when the sky was hazy. Light and sound came from the saucer. Because the saucer was black against a light sky, its size was difficult to determine. The police even stated that it was 30 meters wide, and some people swore they saw a halo around it. Jansen has claimed that this project “caused a near-riot”. He said that the machine was never found, and that it probably landed somewhere in Belgium. He later repeated the project over Paris.
Painting machine
Jansen’s painting machine was developed in 1984–86 in Delft, and it was a somewhat larger project than his flying saucer. It consisted of a tube with a light cell situated at its end. When darkness was detected, the machine would begin to spray paint, creating painted silhouettes of people standing in front of it. This machine was also attached to a large piece of wood that was hoisted against a wall, where it would move back and forth to create 2-D images of everything in the room.
Luckily, we have video from both:
Also, this is a bonus: someone else who made a two legged “centaur” strandbeest leg assembly in their garage who is having a good time:
As I’ve been exploring very basic mechanical engineering with natural and/or wood components (and no motors), I’ve noticed that AI image generator systems REALLY don’t understand these kinds of physical systems. *Sometimes* they can interpret images well (sometimes not), but in pretty much 100% of the cases if you say something like draw me a schematic build diagram for ____ with ____ features, especially Dalle will just invent some impossible nonsense that is not only unbuildable, but if it were buildable would not function. When AI systems reach a place where they can more accurately understand and compose real world objects, well, it’s going to be “nuts.”
Until then, we’ll have to make do with some approximatic facsimiles. This image series is a loose interpretation mostly from Ideogram of what was intended to be a SCARA robot drawing arm. Normally, the motion of this type of arm runs parallel to the ground in XY axes, so forward/back & left/right, and they are rigid in the Z axis, up/down. Ideogram either doesn’t understand that or simply doesn’t want to do that because all the wooden SCARA robot arms I tried to get it to make are not actually correct. But some of them are still pretty cool and give idea fodder, if not accurately representing mechanical engineering principles. More at the link here, and highlights below.
How those joints are supposed to move, I have no idea, but not a bad try aesthetically.
The one I’m about to build will use syringes and tubing for manual operator-controlled hydraulic movement in order to replace motors and other electronic control elements. It won’t be big like these but at least these give some fun ideas about what scaling up could be like.
Anyway, will post pics of the IRL one later on once we get it working!
I wrote a bit about this artist, Harvey Moon, and his artwork with robotic elements here. Finally had the chance today while finishing up a new basket to listen to a 6 or so month old interview with Moon via Google Design’s podcast (I guess). I found it worthwhile as it touches on many thematic elements I’ve been exploring here on this blog lately:
I found this art manifesto on something called Hypercubism, and I am into it. Looks to have maybe originated circa ~2013 or so. It’s a little wordy, as manifestos tend to be, but bear with me. Some highlights:
Hypercubism is a temporal aesthetics characterized by the simultaneous experience of multiple timelines. […]
Hypercubism is an aesthetics of dimensional collapse contingent on what we see as the formal limitations of the basic units of visual digital media: the pixel and the frame. […]
Hypercubism is an aesthetics of simulation and speculation which suggests a possible future medium whose basic unit can be described poetically as a hypercube – a volumetric unit of hypercubist space which is frameless and generative. […]
Hypercubism values synthesis over analysis Hypercubism values transcendence over critique Hypercubism values transformation over destruction Hypercubism values object-orientation over objectification Hypercubism acknowledges the limits of sensory perception Hypercubism strives towards a higher dimensionality Hypercubism is not a movement but rather a vantage point […]
The concept of an ontograph which “records the presence of many potential unit operations, a profusion of particular perspectives on a particular set of things.” as detailed in the book Alien Phenomenology (Ian Bogost, 2012). […]
Aspects of this closely follow what I was getting at independent of the above in the idea of the hypercanvas, and with narrative topologies.
This is a good one, referenced in the aforementioned Hypercubism manifesto. It’s the Dimensionist Manifesto from 1936 by Hungarian poet Charles Tamko Sirato. Best part:
IV. And after this a completely new art form will develop: Cosmic Art. The Vaporisation of Sculpture: “matter-music.” The artistic conquest of four-dimensional space, which to date has been completely art-free. The human being, rather than regarding the art object from the exterior, becomes the centre and five-sensed [öt-érzékszervü] subject of the artwork, which operates within a closed and completely controlled cosmic space.
Many sources have already reported on how a Halloween-themed SEO company’s website used AI to auto-generate content about non-existant related holiday events, including a Halloween parade in Dublin:
“Please be advised that contrary to information being circulated online, no Halloween parade is scheduled to take place in Dublin City Centre this evening or tonight,” the official social media account of the Gardaí posted last night.
“All those gathered on O’Connell Street in expectation of such a parade are asked to disperse safely. Thank you.”
But what no one wants to admit, is that there was indeed a Halloween parade in Dublin, but that many people were not able to see it for various reasons. I have incontrovertible hard photographic proof here, something which is as impossible to fake as the original event listing. Here’s a sample below, with the full set at the link.
What most people don’t know is that in the mythological lore of Ancient Quatria, the pivotal Return of the Magicians to our world from the Hypogeum at the most chaotic and troubled time is at first not recognized. It is said that initially they would appear as ghosts or strange animals when they first arrived on our plane, strange and insubstantial… And that it would only be the children and the pure of heart who would be able to see them. And in doing so, in bearing witness using the eyes of imagination, their true bodies would be made fully manifest in our world, and likewise their magic too. So, no surprises here!
Time to post an updated welcome note, as I expect there may be a few new visitors from a podcast I’ll appear on in short order (details to follow on that).
If you’re new here, I recommend diving into my About page and following whatever trails pique your interest.
My AI-assisted books can be seen here. The most recent ones are at the top.
Check out my prior welcome note from the end of August of this year for more in-depth links to explore. Lots of details there I won’t rehash again here.
I’ve written in the past (2023 especially) about the intersection of art, copyright & generative AI in this submission to the US & Canadian copyright offices’ public consultation, reproduced here on Berkeley Law.
I’ve also been getting into building low-tech “human-powered” robots and drawing machines, which you can see some examples of and thinking around here, where I am trying to get to the bottom of what it means to be a “real artist” exercising the creative spark/modicum of creativity (and required for copyrightability) versus merely executing purely mechanical processes.
That’s already a lot of links for anyone curious enough to dive in. Enjoy!
