Tag: art

Clever Soup

Alphabet pasta letters in a spoon spell out "SOS"
~ Will Forrest ~ Leave a comment

A holodeck and a human actor: a best-case scenario for AI filmmaking. Human actors reacting in human ways to whatever scenario the filmmaker invents, which is not much different from what goes on now.

The thing is, you can’t fake human, and maybe it’s not worth trying.  Everything else in filmmaking—sets, props, locations, eldritch horrors—can be represented artistically and therefore generated with digital imaging.  It’s the people you can’t fake.

Consider: we pay people to do nothing but be good at emoting.  Certain people emote i.e. act more skillfully than others, and we make them millionaires and give them gold statues and big parties and all our attention.  One individual, idiosyncratic human with their asymmetrical face and personality quirks and gut biome, singular among all other humans currently alive, can win the hearts of millions.  You’re telling me a calculator (which is what a computer is, writ large) is going to be able to fake that any time soon?

AI research has over the years taken up billions of dollars, and we’re still nowhere near faking people.  Maybe it can’t be done.  A computer as intricately modeled as the human brain might need to be either the size of a mountain or be an actual biological brain, grown in situ.

We are clever soup.  But we are like nothing else.  We’re cheap to make, easy to teach, endlessly inventive.  Why bother trying to mechanically replicate what’s already so abundant?

No flash photography

~ Will Forrest ~ Leave a comment

Banksy is one of the greatest living artists.   Because we don’t know if anything he’s ever told us is true. 

Even when he says he’s telling the truth.  Particularly when he says he is, as in his film Exit Through the Gift Shop.  Tracing Banksy’s often reluctant involvement in the abrupt rise and fall of another street artist, the film is either a shocking record of true life, or a sublime fake.

We don’t know.

That’s the art. 

Not the spray paint, not the ruined theme parks, but the very inscrutability of the artist’s existence. The art is in the fact that we will carve out of our very walls a rock he is said to have touched and hang the rock on an art gallery wall then charge other people money to view it.  The art is the news story about the painting which shredded itself the moment it was sold. 

He is invisible, criminal, liminal.  We might never see his face.  That is his art, and our psychology is his canvas. 

photos by Lewis Roberts / Robin Wersich / Cole Patrick on Unsplash / treatment by The Fixer

The chipped stone wall of an insurance firm’s downtown office, the alley which never sees sun, the corner of the underground parking garage where a drift of dead leaves has gathered: this is the mental state of so many of us.  Waiting for the unknown to express itself upon us. 

A vivid red balloon, a bunch of flowers, a rat with a felt-tipped pen scrawling a name, any name.

Making something from nothing. 

Making us into art.

Not For Trade

~ Will Forrest ~ Leave a comment

or

“Do you ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?”

I don’t align with all of Brian Eno’s public opinions, but I can’t find fault with him on the subject of NFTs.  Like him, I can’t say that I’ve ever understood why they need to exist.  How does making something owned make it better?  “A person claims exclusive ownership of this.”  So fucking what?  If anything, the thing owned has lost value, because now it is removed from public meaning-making. 

Putting your art on the NFT marketplace fees like fighting other artists for the coins some rich idiot tossed from the upper deck of the RMS Titanic. We’re all going to die in about an hour, but by all means, let’s fight for that silver. Something to grip in our teeth on the way down. Something to pay the ferryman.

Crypto-bros like to think they’re anarchists, but the point of anarchism (not anarchy, but capital-A Anarchism, as in the political philosophy of localized self-governance, with special emphasis on governance) isn’t to “fuck the system” but to create a system that is incapable of fucking us.  There’s still going to have to be A System. None of the comforts of the modern world exist without a cohesive society with ample financial resources. If we burn the world, the internet goes too. Oops.

The more we do what crypto-bros think is best, the less livable the world becomes. Right down to, where do they think their microwaveable pizza crust comes from?  Their own ingenuity?  Or hundreds of workers in a supply chain that will collapse if we keep burning the world by mining cryptocurrency. There will be no pizza. No Soylent, no poké bowl delivered by an Ubereats driver whose take won’t cover the cost of the gas to get it to your house.  If push comes to shove, the crypto-bros can always eat each other.  Looks like they’ve already begun.