Tag: hyperreal Page 1 of 3

Notes on Mysterious Plasmoids

On 28 December 2024

Mysterious Plasmoids is the 124th installment in the AI Lore Books series. It is the first book I’ve done in the “Mysterious…” series in quite some time, and is another ‘ripped from the headlines’ hot take on what is happening with the drone/orb situation that is supposedly happening globally (I’ve not seen any anomalies first hand, myself). It also continues in another thematic subset of my books that relate to various aspects of UAP/UFO phenomena. This one heavily references other books in that cluster, if non-linearly.

There’s a vivid dream description of mine which fellow blogger Ran Prieur documented way back in 2005 here. In it I dreamt of a hyper-nationalist/fascist future US where police sirens played the song “America, the Beautiful,” and aliens had invaded in the United States… Excerpt below:

New York City had been divided into northern and southern zones, via a gigantic wall and forcefield. The southern half still had people living and working in it. But the northern half was completely off-limits. The official story was that aliens (space, not illegal) had taken over the northern half of the city, and the rest of the United States northward.

We knew, however, that this officially story was largely a fabrication. But that was all we knew. We had to roam about the lower half of the city, trying to find a passage to the north. And we had to do so without arousing any suspicions, which was an extremely difficult task. No one in the city would answer questions or help us.

And the police presence was total. You had to keep moving at all times. Any group of people who were stopping to talk or otherwise congregate was quickly spotted and broken up by patrolling police. […]

The police also had flying discs which they sent out after you. They were autonomous electronic devices which hovered and would track you as you ran. Once they were within range, they would fire an electric bolt at you to incapacitate you until officers arrived. The discs were called “temperplexes,” and they were all apparently controlled by larger motherships which flew higher and basically looked like UFO’s.

I actually continued that dream and spun out more variations using AI and published it in an earlier volume called, The First Days of Panic. That book, however, takes it visually in a much more fascist police drone direction (which, hell, I wouldn’t rule out just yet), whereas this book more explores the notion of plasmoids as heretofore unrecognized forms of life, which have interacted with us in myriad ways throughout history and prehistory: something more like John Keel’s ultraterrestrials. Are we living in the timeline now of that dream? Maybe?

Whatever the true nature of the “real” drones/orbs/plasmoids/UFO/UAP stuff that is or isn’t going on in our skies is, I think, a little besides the point; the point is the search itself. The point is the looking, and trying to understand all possibilities, and fit the best bets that seem to match evidence from reality itself.

Or, you know, in this case, hyperreality. Images in this one were mostly made with Ideogram and Recraft, with some dabbling in Grok’s image gen, and screegrabs from Sora videos, plus some remove tool in Adobe Lightroom. Text is majority ChatGPT with many human edits and improvements, told in alternating chapters between “first person” accounts, and quasi scholarly essays. Art preview below:

I might experiment in a subsequent volume with trying to embed animated gifs or even short videos from Sora if I can get the technology working adequately to share them. Ebooks don’t seem well-suited to that kind of thing, due to file sizes, though. So we will see what’s actually still feasible.

Artist As Propagandist: Exploring Parallel Realities With AI

By Tim B.

On 15 October 2024

In Other

Misinformation and art intersect to explore and navigate the confusion between reality and fiction that typifies our times in the work of net artist Tim Boucher.

In works that run the gamut from books and hand-printed samizdat zines to the use of generative AI for video, text, and image-making, Boucher’s work uses hyperreality to delve into the murky shadows of the Uncanny Valley, evoking a weird, sometimes disorienting feeling of surfing the very edge of the collapse of meaning. Weaving together real and invented, human and AI elements to seamlessly blur the lines between them, Boucher exploits this chaos to create new semiotic spaces for radical meaning-making. Structurally, the work appropriates, satirizes, and detourns the forms and tropes of conspiracy theory, re-imagining them as a new form of art, and igniting them with the fuel of runaway AI.

While the contents of conspiracy theories often tend toward the ghoulish, harmful, or just plain wrong, they are inherently postmodern, acting as a vehicle for questioning established truths and power relationships—an activity which serves an important social function, if in many cases misguided in its ultimate application. Conspiracy theorists reject grand “official” narratives and instead create their own ad hoc temporary webs of meaning, challenging the legitimacy of the structures we rely on and deep beliefs previously taken for granted. The work asks big questions about whether there could be a way for art to reclaim this function of social critique that conspiracy theories currently embody in the popular consciousness, redirecting it towards more fruitful and creative ends?

The artist’s professional background in content moderation and censorship informs the work, at times borrowing from disinformation techniques observed in the field by state actors, repurposed as storytelling tools in open-ended creative networked narratives, and SEO manipulations to show how easily depictions of “reality” can be twisted and propagated. Misinformation is used here by the artist openly—not to deceive, but to reveal how fragile our systems for defining truth really are. The works expose how the artist’s role as propagandist, deploying “weaponized” artifacts to attempt to subversively actualize or undermine real or potential current or future states.

As a satirist working with the mode of the conspiracy theorist, the artist knowingly inhabits and exaggerates the conspiratorial narrative forms they aim to critique, imploding them from within. As the Onion’s amicus brief on parody put it, “Parodists intentionally inhabit the rhetorical form of their target in order to exaggerate or implode it”—a technique central to this practice.

Inspired by Dada absurdity, the artist’s ‘Nevermades’—collections of AI-generated artworks appearing to involve famous museums and galleries—extend Duchamp’s readymades concept into the post-truth, remote-first digital age, challenging the idea that authenticity requires physical presence – or even actual existence in the first place. These imagined or “aspirational” artworks (like flooding the Guggenheim Museum, and filling it with willow trees and beavers) comment on the art world’s status symbols—galleries, exhibitions, facades and physical artifacts—that can now be artificially fabricated at scale, significantly challenging their value in an online world dominated by images.

The use of AI serves to heighten the inherent tensions in the work. AI is used consciously as both a force that flattens expression into sameness and conformity and as a tool to rebel against the algorithmic culture of likes, shares, and validation – by exploiting and exposing the outliers, anomalies, errors, and vulnerabilities of these technologies. By transparently incorporating AI, the work proudly wears the use of these technologies as a kind of “scarlet letter,” confronting head-on the stigma against its use in creative sectors, and reimagining it as a vehicle and medium all its own for artistic exploration. At the same time, it shines a light on the absurdities and limitations of these technologies, and holds a mirror up to our own evolving reactions to them.

Ultimately, this metamodernist body of work oscillates between the deadly serious and the dangerously stupid and absurd, revealing the fragile and easily manipulated nature of our information systems and the social and political systems which rely on them. The work encourages the audience to consider conspiracy theory as an unrecognized folk art form—provocative and dangerous, to be sure, but one in many ways much like any art or cultural movement that questions authority. It disrupts the established order, challenges accepted facts, and compels us to face the instability of the narratives we hold onto, and, in its best form, opens up the space for change how things are today into how they could be, how we would likek them to be.

AI, misinformation, conspiracy, and hyperreality converge here to ask a simple but potent question: what is real, and who gets to decide?

Curatorial Statement: “Organic Data Weaving”

By Tim B.

On 12 October 2024

In Other

Tim Boucher’s “Organic Data Weaving” seamlessly merges the organic vitality of nature with the abstract logic of digital hyperreality. Woven willow sculptures, embodying the natural profusion of growth, stand alongside AI-generated projections that evolve across the gallery walls. The dynamic interplay between the physicality of willow forms and the insubstantiality of digital projections invites viewers to contemplate the convergence of artificial and organic intelligence.

The woven willow structures reflect the interconnectedness of data networks, echoing the visual representations of data relationships in the projected images. The sculptures’ interlocking patterns and dynamic curves mirror the fluid and shifting nature of data itself, presenting a dialogue between natural growth and the abstract forms of digital information. By juxtaposing these tangible and intangible elements, “Organic Data Weaving” reveals the complex, evolving narrative of our relationship with technology, nature, and the blurred boundaries of hyperreality.

That’s a curatorial statement I had ChatGPT help me write for a recent project of mine, an exploration of what woven willow sculptural forms juxtaposed with AI projected lights and imagery might look like. Photos from the “exhibit” are here.

I’ll pull out a few of my favorites to highlight below.

Without any more context or knowledge about the origins of these images, I would personally be hard-pressed to not take them at face value and believe they were actually cool sculptures which exist somewhere, or did at one time.

But in actual fact, they are nevermades which exist in a hyperreality adjacent to ours. They are aspirational image explorations on a theme, some using Dalle, some Ideogram AI. They are part of a larger experiment in misinformation as art.

But these raise a million other important questions for me as an artist. Namely, if I could essentially simulate a lifetime’s worth of artistic achievements in an evening, and get basically high-quality gallery photos of them as though they were real physical things, where does that leave us existentially relative to actual real physical things? Where does that leave us relative to a lifetime’s worth of artistic achievements?

In a world increasingly centered on the cult of the Almighty Image, and the Almighty Image is continuously exposed as a liar on its own altar at every turn, how are we to proceed?

I saw “real” photos from an art gallery setting in London earlier, and thought to myself, some of these look less high-quality than what I was able to generate with AI. They look literally better than the real thing…

I think that’s hyperreality, is getting sucked down that wormhole, and it’s exactly where we’re stuck now collectively and individually.

Charlie Warzel’s piece in The Atlantic on hurricane disinfo goes down a parallel path in a somewhat different direction, interesting at least here though with our current one:

What is clear is that a new framework is needed to describe this fracturing. Misinformation is too technical, too freighted, and, after almost a decade of Trump, too political.

Hyperreality stands out to me as a relevant and still potentially useful analytical framework that is wider and not so fraught, and which can encompass this idea of the “artist as propagandist” who creates unreal things in order to change or influence real things.

Also from Warzel’s piece:

But as Michael Caulfield, an information researcher at the University of Washington, has argued, “The primary use of ‘misinformation’ is not to change the beliefs of other people at all. Instead, the vast majority of misinformation is offered as a service for people to maintain their beliefs in face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.”

Interestingly, in other contexts outside of conspiracy fear-mongering, we often refer to be people who can cling to an alternative vision of reality in the face of overwhelming opposition “visionaries,” and we culturally usually cheer them on as they succeed in implementing that vision in actual reality. Unfortunately, an exceedingly great number of such “visionaries” in our day and age have been subsumed by vanity and wealth, and where they might have been or might believe themselves to be luminaries, emit only a kind of sticky darkness…

To me these willow-works, both my IRL ones and my ORL (outside real life?) hyperreal ones, play somewhere in a space that lays orthogonally in opposition to all that. Willow to me is profusion, proof of abundant life, of generous, ridiculously abundant and productive life, of reified embodied living sunlight. The reality of that when you feel it in your hands shatters all false darknesses, and returns us somehow deeply, instinctually, ancestrally, immediately back in tune with the Overwave, the wave from which all other waves are born…

The Gun That Shoots Images

By Tim B.

On 8 August 2024

In Other

This one has been on the docket for a while, but I haven’t had a chance to post it. First, I had to figure out who the hell Ai Weiwei is. Apparently he is a big deal:

A lot of the artwork actually does look pretty interesting, which makes me look at this quote I have been sitting on with new eyes. It’s from this Guardian article:

Ai Weiwei said: “I’m sure if Picasso or Matisse were still alive they will quit their job. It’d be just impossible for them to still think [the same way].”

He is talking about the automatism (automaticism?) of easily reproduced images, set up in the preceding quote as his reaction to being asked about the issues around copyrighted works being used to train AI:

“That’s not a problem. I think that kind of art should [have died] a long time ago,” before he criticised art teaching that focuses on creating “realistic” images. “It takes AI a second to do it. So that only means what they have learned very often is meaningless.”

I’m still learning about his art, but I think I can see where he is coming from, even if I don’t agree with all of the assertions. It seems like his art is very rooted in the physicality of objects, artifacts actual places, the processes that got us there. It’s very true that this type of art is not within the reach or realm of the possible for generative AI right now. Eventually it will be. And I think that his point is that artists are chasing that edge beyond the edge. Artists are by nature nomadic in that respect, going to the next fertile place, and the next. Where they pioneer AI will inevitably follow.

I’ve been thinking more of AI lately as collective intelligence rather than “artificial.” I think we have not got a good collective understanding of what artificial even means in the first place. Instead, I think of AI more as collective intelligence, programmatically reified. It is, essentially, humans looking at humans looking at humans looking at humans.

There is actually an Ai Weiwei piece that is I think a marble carving of a surveillance camera. (Here’s some commentary on that, I haven’t gone deeply into it and am doing research on the fly.) Whatever his point in that piece was, my point feels like… we’ve spent the last decades surrounding ourselves with these digital eyes, watching, looking, recording, streaming, tweeting. Of course now, all those watching eyes have learned how we are, what we want. And they’re doing more than just watching: they’re talking back. They’re directing. They’re molding.

I almost forgot to respond to the original quote, at least more directly than the above rambling. I agree that if Matisse and Picasso had generative AI at their disposal, they would have had to rethink their approach to image making. But that’s what it forces every artist to do.

Generative AI is like a machine gun that shoots images.

Here’s that as an image in Ideogram AI:

Like he said, it takes AI a second to do it. I didn’t even have to pay for it on the free plan. Does that make it meaningless? Both yes and no at the same time. The sheer fact that *is* meaningless on the one hand is what gives it meaning on the other. But the act of writing & reading become married when working with generative AI: to look and explore is to create, to leave a trail.

The truth is we’re a culture (mega-culture?), a planet, awash in meaningless images. Constantly swimming in a sea of information trash. It’s why I block images by default in my web browsing, unless there’s a specific exception when I need or want them.

I don’t like being always shot at with image guns either (des armes iconographiques)- especially ones whose quality, source, ownership, agenda, etc. are opaque and outside my agency. But you cannot sit here and tell me that if Picasso had access to generative AI, he would not have stayed up all night going nuts with it? I’m absolutely sure he would have.

I saw a quote recently that said he made upwards of 20,000 artworks over the course of his life. Then, looking for confirmation, I found other sources suggesting more like 50,000. Then another estimate that pushed it upwards to like 147,000. I believe it, but who knows. But no way he wouldn’t have used gen AI, and of course absolutely it would have made him re-orient himself to his art and thinking about everything. It’s obviously what he did throughout his career, continually changing, reacting.

Incidentally, check out this absolutely insane 1949 Life magazine photo series of Picasso painting with light. It is literally the most futuristic looking shit I have ever seen – full on 75 years later. Incredible. I’m just saying, dude would have devoured and destroyed generative AI.

There is an aptly titled and cool-sounding exhibit at the Musee Picasso in Paris, “Iconophage” – image eater. Here’s a French podcast recording I listened to about it the other day. This article on Lens Culture touches a little bit on Picasso’s relationship with photography:

The most famous visual artist of the 20th century, Picasso was also the most photographed. Thanks to the camera, his striking features became iconic, recognized the world over. Yet this phenomenon was not a mere by-product of celebrity; his own photographic practice set the precedent. Picasso engaged with photography and photographers in myriad ways, starting from his early days in Paris and continuing through the last years of his life. He used the camera to capture life in the studio and at home, to try out new ideas, to study his works and document their creation, and to shape his own image as an artist at work.

Later in that original Guardian article I quoted at top, they get into more of Ai Weiwei’s concerns around AI, which I frankly agree with, and much of the AI Lore books series is centered around thematically.

But he did signal a warning about the future if artificial intelligence becomes too powerful and relied upon by countries around the world.

He is fearful AI could create a society similar to the Third Reich, where there is only one “right” answer to the big questions. “For me it is very much like what happened in the 1930s in Germany, or 1960s in China with the Cultural Revolution,” he said. “You all have one ideology, one past, and the one so-called ‘correctness’. This is dangerous.”

That same sentiment is echoed here in yet another Guardian interview with him:

But he is highly sceptical about artificial intelligence and where it might be leading us: “What you get is all the mediocre ideas mixed into something like a fusion, where there is no character and you avoid all mistakes. That is really dangerous to humanity, because we are all equal but we are all created differently. The difference is the beauty. Art, literature, poetry design – they are rooted in human mistakes, misjudgments, or character differences if you prefer. They should be dangerous and sexy and unpredictable. That’s totally against the AI world.”

In fact, in the course of making just that one iconographic machine gun image above, I had my prompt blocked on one site, Leonardo AI. I asked for something like a person whose head is a machine gun that is shooting out images. For that model, those words are apparently just too dangerous. Therefore, the end user is not allowed to imagine them. The gun that shoots images cannot be used to create images of guns that shoot images. There’s some deep and dangerous irony in there…

Full Length Interview With Milo Rossi on AI Art, Conspiracies, Etc.

By Tim B.

On 6 August 2024

In Other

Super excited this full-length version of my interview with Milo Rossi came out finally. It is so far the only long format video interview with me that goes deeply into my artwork using AI.

You can also watch his much much longer debunk video here, which part of the above interview plays a small element in a much bigger saga.

Perplexity AI on the Quatria Theory

By Tim B.

On 12 June 2024

In Other

I was just looking around for examples of famous conspiracy theories that originated in Quebec. I believe that Project Blue Beam is likely to be one, in that Serge Monast seems to have been its inventor/discoverer (depending on your point of view). I didn’t find anything terribly new or interesting, so I asked Perplexity, which at first gave some really general results pulled from news sources of occurrences of conspiracy theory + Quebec in body text.

Then I started asking it about Blue Beam, and then finally about the Quatria Theory, since – technically – it largely originated in Quebec. I asked Perplexity in such a way that was pretty leading, something to the effect of “Didn’t the Quatria Theory originate in Quebec too?”

And it spit out this nicely polished LLM hallucination that I just adore:

You’re correct, the Quatria Theory or Quatria Conspiracy also originated in Quebec. Here are the key details about this conspiracy theory:

The Quatria Theory/Conspiracy

The Quatria Theory/Conspiracy is a Quebec-based conspiracy theory that claims the Earth is actually made up of four spheres or realms instead of just one. It was first proposed in the 1990s by Yvon Boudreau, a Quebec author and conspiracy theorist. According to Boudreau’s writings, the four realms are:

The physical/material realm we inhabit

An antimatter realm

A realm of pure energy

A realm of pure thought/consciousness

Boudreau claimed these four realms coexist and interact, with the higher realms able to influence and control the lower, material realm through psychic powers and advanced technology unknown to most humans. The theory alleges that a secret society of powerful individuals has knowledge of and access to these higher realms, allowing them to manipulate world events through mind control, weather manipulation, and other paranormal means in pursuit of a New World Order agenda.

While never gaining mainstream acceptance, the Quatria Theory found a following in some New Age and conspiracy circles in Quebec in the 1990s and 2000s. It blended ideas from quantum physics, ancient mythology, and various conspiracy theories about secret societies like the Illuminati. However, the theory has been widely dismissed by the scientific community as pseudoscience lacking any empirical evidence.

Critics have labeled it a complicated fantasy concocted to give a veneer of plausibility to long-standing conspiracy narratives about powerful cabals controlling humanity. So in summary, while not as well-known as theories like Project Blue Beam, the Quatria Conspiracy was another notable conspiracy originating from Quebec that attempted to merge fringe science, mysticism, and New World Order paranoia into an overarching narrative. Its creator Yvon Boudreau was an influential conspiracy theorist in the Quebec conspiracy milieu.

Reading this confused even me (a good sign), I was for a second like, wait, it’s actually Yvon Boudreau who invented this in the 90s?? I literally googled it just to make sure haha. But how can I know Google isn’t lying to me too? Top of the line AI technology, right here! What a cool future…

Notes on The Quatria Conspiracy (French Version)

By Tim B.

On 12 June 2024

In Other

So, in preparation for the launch of the French-language version of the book that kick-started much of the series that later became the AI Lore books, I wanted to do a “Notes on” piece for The Quatria Conspiracy. The French version is going to be called La Conspiration Quatria. In fact, you can peruse the publisher’s product page for it here.

The book is 96 pages in A6 format (about the size of a cell phone, give or take – I wouldn’t know cause I don’t have one). From the publisher’s website:

Synopsis

Au cœur de notre passé lointain, enfoui sous les strates du temps, se cache un secret extraordinaire : l’existence d’une civilisation maritime oubliée, Quatria. Originaire d’un Antarctique paradisiaque, jadis havre de paix verdoyant, les énigmatiques quatriens dominaient les technologies de l’énergie cymatique et du voyage dimensionnel. Vivant en symbiose avec l’ensemble du vivant, ils ont bâti une société harmonieuse, jusqu’à ce qu’une série de cataclysmes planétaires d’ampleur inouïe vienne fragiliser leur civilisation, puis l’anéantir. Leur existence, dissimulée avec soin au cours des millénaires, est aujourd’hui révélée au grand jour pour la première fois, dévoilant un pan oublié de l’histoire de l’humanité.

Note de l’éditeur

Les Livres Mobiles sont une offre spéciale des éditions Typophilia, qui explorent les limites de la narration et de l’hyperréalité en utilisant conjointement les intelligences artificielles génératives et la créativité humaine. Dans le confort d’un petit livre de la taille de votre téléphone portable, voyez-les comme des livres anti-numériques.

It’s fun to see this come to fruition as I wrote this book some three years ago or so, before I started seriously exploring how I could integrate AI into my writing. That was a practice & also technology that would only mature about a year later when I started the AI Lore books in earnest.

So, technically, the original version of this book has no AI-assisted writing, which is another reason why it is numbered as #0 in this series. It’s the precursor which paints in broad strokes on the canvas of the mind using as colors other popular conspiracy theories, and dribs and drabs of legends and “cool ideas” picked up from here and there, and glued together into the Frankenstein monster that is the Quatria Conspiracy.

Much of it revolves around something I’ve been calling the Quatria Theory, which I made numerous weird bad AI videos for over the past few years, and here is just one short one to kick off the conversation:

The Quatria Theory posits, in short, that a prehistoric lost seafaring culture spread all around the globe from its base in Antarctica millions of years ago when it was a green paradise near the Equator.

Sounds far fetched? Well, enough people seem to have taken it to be true that multiple media outlets have taken it upon themselves to fact-check that related AI-images I made in this vein (for subsequent books) were not in fact depicting this very same lost civilization. OR WERE THEY AND IT’S ALL A BIG COVER UP??

Those are exactly the kinds of sometimes serious sometimes stupid rabbitholes that this book and the series where I used AI to elaborate on a lot of what started in this book pushes the reader into. It’s… not intended to be super serious writing. It is trashy, pulpy, throwaway, and fun in the way those things can be fun.

The original English version exists still as an ebook only. There are no images included in that version (though I might do an update sometime), but the French print-only version does have images. I’m not sure offhand how many, but I would call it a “copious” quantity. Many of the images are very pulp inspired. Like this example that I love:

These were all done in Dalle, asking for images in pulp sci fi styles. And it really nails some of them. The art in this book stylistically is really different than in most of the later volumes, which are generally more in the photographic direction (though not all). And that’s fine, because each book is its own reflection of conditions of its making. They are in a way their own meta-historical documents.

If I’m being totally honest though, the true origin of The Quatria Conspiracy is actually my first (only) full-length conventionally-written (no AI) novel, The Lost Direction. That book is epic fantasy, heavy on the world-building, makes use of frame stories to tell many smaller character’s tales throughout. Not many people read it. Not all the ones that did liked it.

In any event, the Quatria Conspiracy takes the more fictionally-framed elements of the novel, and re-casts them as quasi/pseudo-historical “non-fiction” – largely invented, cobbled together with other “real” conspiracy theories, and again heavy heavy dose of world-building. Some would say too much. In fact, there’s no plot. It literally, as they say in the Literary Review of Canada article linked above, “reads like a textbook.” This time intentionally. This time leaning into the very opposite of the writers’ dictum that one must “show don’t tell.” This book tells, but now it has some fun pictures to do the showing too. And they really help set the mood in the French version. It’s great. I have a strong feeling it’s going to be a fun little book to hold in your hand, and like, read under the covers with a flashlight.

There’s probably a great deal more to say about this book, and some of the origins of the idea of Quatria and its major personages and metadivinities in the Early Clues, LLC oeuvre… but I’ll save that all for another time.

Amazon Weird Products Image Set (Dalle)

By Tim B.

On 6 June 2024

In Other

Got some incredible results out of Dalle tonight, which I compiled into into an Imgur post here (archived). I asked Dalle to depict product images from Amazon with incomprehensible, unnecessary and other just generally bad ideas.

Couple highlights here, but click link above for the full set:

Looking through that set, I honestly can’t tell a lot of these aren’t real, because Amazon is such a wasteland of pseudo-English words and cheap crap, it’s more real than reality, it’s hyperreality from a parallel hell dimension that undulates at a quantum level orthogonally intersecting and de-intersecting our reality continuously…

As a bit of a rant: I’ve consistently experienced a really annoying behavior using Dalle, which I pay a monthly fee to use. It goes like this: just when I’m having really good image results, going on an incredible streak of basically perfect images accurately and creatively reflecting my inner vision, and I’m getting into that kind of “flow state” that is so essentially to good deep artistic exploration and creation, I start getting rate limited. Which puts a dent in that buzz, and basically in short order puts an end to whatever winning streak I was on.

As an artist trying to use this product to make art, and paying for it, the system needs to get out of my way and do the things I’m paying it to do, not try to break my balls when I’m on a roll.

AI-Assisted Painting Experiments

By Tim B.

On 5 June 2024

In Other

This is a not great quality picture of it, but I recently finished a painting inspired by the head of Hygeia in the National Archaelogical Museum in Athens.

There’s an underlying drawing I did of the subject from memory based on other studies I did by hand. I took this and projected the photo of the drawing onto my canvas:

It’s not an incredible drawing but was good enough to get the shapes in. But It didn’t end up seeming right and I painted over it a good bit, and sort of fragmented the features in a pseudo-neo cubist inspired thing. But didn’t end up liking that enough, so took a gamble on another projected image, one made by Dalle while trying to get it to reproduce something in the style of the original Hygeia museum piece.

This is my second time using AI in conjunction with a physical painting. But the last one was a reference image that I just based my own drawing off of freehand. This is the first time trying to overlay directly onto the canvas via tracing off a projection.

It’s gotten me thinking lots of crazy thoughts about how to potentially integrate AI tools into actual physical painting (and other art-making). Like what if I could hook my projector up to a generative AI which is being periodically fed webcam images of the latest state of my IRL canvas. And then it could automatically or when I ask it, suggest next brushstrokes or propose visual alterations, styles, directions I might explore. And these would be projected as overlaid suggestions on my canvas, which I could then “accept” or reject or whatever by painting them in myself in my own way.

It would be something like a camera lucida with an AI in the loop:

This train of thought sent me down a deep deep rabbit hole about early and possibly secret use of optics my artists going back to the 1400’s possibly, according to the Hockney-Falco thesis. You can see a great BBC documentary on Hockney’s theories, and he’s got a book about it I haven’t read called Secret Knowledge. Here’s a Youtube embed:

Another related one that’s worth watching is Tim’s Vermeer which goes on a similar track of trying to prove Vermeer used a similar method with mirrors and something something. Pretty fascinating all around.

I found there’s a business trying to market the “Vermirror,” or as others have called it more generically, the comparator mirror. From what I can tell, the trick is basically getting a first surface or front surface mirror, which is brighter and reflects on its front face instead of its back face. And it’s held by some kind of rigid arm to keep it in the correct position relative to your work surface and subject. This video of art students using them gives a good idea of how it works:

I’ve currently got on order some bits and bobs that I will finagle together into being something like this. The advantage to using the mirror is that unlike when you project directly onto your canvas, you can still see the colors you’re mixing. They aren’t washed out or modified by the projected image.

Anyway I tried to get Dalle to generate a patent-style drawing of what a contraption like this might look like, where a combination projector & web cam capture images of a canvas, send it for processing, and send back suggested next strokes. It’s a little wonky and disconnected, but it shows some fun relationships nonetheless, and it lets the mind wander a bit looking at it, thinking about the possibilities.

I actually tried getting Dalle to do this task:

Take my painting image as input
Reproduce the image with suggested modifications

But it doesn’t seem able to reproduce an image, let alone modify it.

So then I had the idea of like okay:

From the input image, make a verbal description of what you would change.
It was able to do that no problem.
Then I said, okay take the changes you would make based on your verbal description, and draw them on a new image which can be used as overlay to guide painting in changes on the original image

But nope, that didn’t work. It got stuck in a loop of thinking it was helping me and linking to non-existent Imgur images. So that’s a little disappointing, but I think there’s something here. I just have to figure out the right pathway with the right tools to get to it. And Dalle is probably not the one for this, currently.

I did manage to get one image set out of this when I was asking for overlays for how it would modify the original. It gave me this:

It’s not really what I had in mind by overlay and suggesting brush strokes at a micro-level that is in line with the style of the original input image. But I did notice that when I scaled it and rotated it a little, it’s actually fairly close to many of the major facial landmarks:

Obviously the neck and ear arrangements are different, but there’s a lot of match here, even though I don’t agree at all with the stylistic direction. But also that’s kind of the point of a collaboration too, that you both bring in completely different ideas and references and impulses. So maybe there is value to exploring in this part of the liminal latent/real image space…

One final thought on that note, from a Guardian 2014 piece criticizing the Vermeer documentary, I think quite wrongly:

The film is a depressing attempt to reduce genius to a trick. […]

The technology Jenison relies on can replicate art, but it does so synthetically, with no understanding of art’s inner life. The “Vermeer” it spits out is a stillborn simulacrum.

Love it or leave it, but we live in a world where the simulation in many cases is more “real” in some aspects than the so-called Real. And this notion that studying how this might work is somehow “cheating” or a “trick” itself to me completely misses the boat on what art is: it’s artifice upon artifice, and somehow through that, finding authenticity despite everything.

Dystopian Fiction Test on Google Gemini

By Tim B.

On 10 February 2024

In Other

I ran a test of Google Gemini on the theme of dystopian beach resorts (the topic of Relaxatopia) just to see what type of content it would generate. What the spirit of the thing is. The unedited generated story is provided below for reference. It’s not terrible but it doesn’t blow me away either (and it drives me wild when you ask for something “dystopian” or “surrealist” and it insists on including those words in the actual text – :facepalm_picard:). Reminds me of what I was seeing as results from Claude a few months ago now. Also, can we stop calling everything Gemini please? It’s getting confusing.

Gemini:

The synthetic sea breeze ruffled Marina’s neon pink swimsuit, the only splash of color allowed in the Resort’s muted palette. Sun, a distant memory replaced by flickering fluorescent panels, cast an even sheen on the metallic sand. Marina squinted, her vision blurry from the morning dose of Euphoric Blue.

Behind her, a robotic server whirred, its metallic tentacles dispensing pills to a skeletal figure in a tattered orange swimsuit. The man mumbled thanks, his voice slurred, eyes locked on the holographic billboard advertising Bliss 4.0, the newest mood enhancer.

Marina sighed, the sound raspy in her parched throat. She reached for her water ration, a lukewarm metallic liquid barely suppressing the gnawing hunger. Bliss tamped down physical needs, a trade-off readily accepted in a world ravaged by climate wars.

A rhythmic clang echoed from the amusement park, a rusted skeleton against the steel-grey sky. It was Felix, her roommate, on the rusty Ferris wheel. Another pointless ritual. The ride never moved, but Bliss painted an illusion of motion, of wind in hair, of laughter.

She joined him, numb fingers reaching for his clammy hand. His vacant smile flickered as he muttered about the imaginary sunset, his words slurred from Bliss Green, the nostalgia cocktail. Marina forced a smile, her stomach churning with the emptiness her medication couldn’t mask.

Later, they sat on the metallic benches, watching the robot servers scurry by, their red eyes emotionless. Marina stared at her reflection in a discarded shard of mirror, the woman barely recognizable – hollow cheeks, sunken eyes, a ghost of the vibrant girl she once was.

A pang of something, almost like regret, flickered through her. But Bliss swiftly smothered it, replacing it with a contented sigh. This was their life, their paradise. Happiness wasn’t real, not anymore. But Bliss was, and in this sterile, simulated world, that was enough.

The day bled into the next, a monotonous cycle of synthetic food, prescribed euphoria, and empty rituals. As the fluorescent lights dimmed, mimicking a nonexistent sunset, Marina felt a familiar emptiness gnaw at her. But it was quickly washed away by the calming blue fog of the nightly Serenity dose.

In her sleep, she dreamt of waves crashing against a real beach, the sun warm on her skin. A memory, perhaps, or a fabrication of Bliss. It didn’t matter. Reality was bleak, but here, in the fabricated paradise, she was content. At least, for now. The metallic taste of the morning pill would bring a new day, a new dose of forgetfulness. And that, in their dystopian reality, was all that mattered.