howdy welcome to february's artlog, where i talk my mouth off about technology mostly. don't forget you can use your browser's reader view if this layout isn't comfortable for you! i've ignored it in the past but i learned to love it, it's actually very useful.
update from last month: my book (making pictures with generative adversarial networks, by casey reas) arrived unscathed. actually, it arrived january 31st, but i wasn't home and didn't check the tracking website until a few days later.
it is… underwhelming. i believe i'm past the "non-technical introduction" stage, which truth be told feels a little odd. i did say i'd scan it anyway, so here it is!. i only scanned the bulk of it, since the artwork is on the author website.
new on the site: solar library, my petz mini-site. tumblr 2, a static microblog speculation. you'll understand my mindspace making it after reading this log.
how do i even start. i have a few different thoughts going on at once on the same subject.
THOUGHT 1. i have grown alongside internet monopolies and know enough about tech to have deep feelings of hatred (that i'm sure are mutual) with most things made after 2015. did you know minesweeper doesn't come with windows 10? solitaire does, and it's now adware bullshit. it wouldn't even cost anything to keep classic solitaire in — they're not new programs. but god forbid having something that isn't subscription based. i miss my babygirl win7 so bad. did you know there are kindle models with ads in sleep mode?
my little 2016 phone broke late last year and i still mourn. i die a little every time my new phone tells me of a system update. i think all tech should just shut up.
THOUGHT 2. i read casey reas' making pictures with GANs; the book was written in 2019, which is basically a century ago, where most generated images were 64x64 or 128x128. the author says they're planning to test 256x256 images. and i don't know, that struck a chord with me. with the notebook i currently use, images can go up to 700px, though i have not dared try it. most of the time i get a small instance from google (yikes) and it takes me twenty minutes to generate a 300px image (and the iterations that bring it to life). if i luck out with a large instance, that takes 4 minutes.
THOUGHT 3. sorry to bring it up, but crypto's rise in prominence has shown us uh. many things, but for my purposes today i want to mention the astronomical amount of electricity required to feed those hungry processors. we've improved our computers so much and yet they can't be content with running the same old things better and faster: they must invent more and heavier tasks — even if they're entirely, utterly pointless — just so the next upgrade can pretend to be useful. and the thing is… the intersection between AI artists and NFT bullshit is large for a reason, isn't it? it's all about GPUs.
THOUGHT 4. and i am aware of low-tech mag, i have read the dispossessed recently as well as this zine. i have a luddite bone or two in my body. i believe in degrowth. but i think some of these low-tech musings and speculations can border on excessive, and based on an idealized vision of "the past" that comes from a (metaphorical as well as geographical) place of privilege. my "reasonable" little utopia would be for tech advancements to just take a 5 year break where we shift focus towards repairability and accessibility. just a silly little dream.
THOUGHT 5. i finally got around archiving the dec/21 folder in my external hd, and zipping last year's folder. it gives all these files a sense of weight and physicality, like a bookshelf or a trunk. it's a strange feeling too, seeing a year's worth of art bundled into a single 7 gb file. that's simultaneously a lot and not much, in a world of terabytes. it's somewhat off-putting in a way i can't quite put my finger on.
well, all those thoughts ENTER STAGE LEFT. i will preface this saying i'm well aware i'm a drop in a bucket. still… i have been for some time interrogating how my interests in AI art and my grievances with the current state of tech affairs can be brought together, how my art can comment on my thoughts. i created transgenderize the eschaton while considering futures. it isn't speculative fiction, but it put post-apocalyptic thoughts in the forefront of my mind.
i / we take most of our tech for granted, but so little of it is actually ours. that's an enormous problem for us to solve, but i prefer to think of it in a small, local scale so i don't go mad. i'm pondering lower resolutions, less colors, more analog and hybrid methods. i don't know how to apply any of this, of course, but therein lies a path of experimentation — and i know i'm far from the only artist questioning these things. as art plays with VR, i want to make things most hardware can run. far from wanting to push boundaries, i want modern specs to feel roomy, perhaps even too much so. i like large canvases but i also know we don't need 4k. i want small files that load up fast. i delight on having my pirated copy of paint tool sai saved to a pen drive, usable anywhere.
i'd like to read more on early computers. the people who colored a landscape of mars by hand, with pastels. tech as an extension of the human body that is complicated and mystical and esoteric in a ritual, human way. i don't need my computer-phone interactions to be as smooth and frictionless as possible, everything connected to a singular google-facebook account, humanity ironed out into the most effective way to be bombarded with marketing, and the most effective way to hoard data for that marketing, under slick overdesigned web pages and apps, bloated into files orders of magnitude larger than they need to be.
well, and when it comes to AI specifically… things get trickier for me. many of the same problems apply — i cannot even imagine the power required to generate 4k images, and what for? still, there's an enormous gulf between making your own website and making your own GAN. advancements in machine learning are entirely divorced from a DIY culture, and this saddens me a lot.
of course, tech bros are just dying to replace artists. a lot less risk of politics, and much like movie studios prefer CGI to practical fx these days, it's just much cheaper without unions.
a holy pilgrimage to a machine that slumbers deeply and frequently.
it meditates on your question at length.
the reply is an unclear blur, an ambiguous vision. it is hard to see another's dream. one cannot expect to see as if with their waking eyes.
uh. let's break the text up a bit with commissions and a birthday gift for my friend. slow month but i'm happy with everything i made :)
commission for denali1050 over on flight rising, a red kite named Oísin
set of commissions for pallup over on flight rising, really nice working on these banes!
beach episode gengar for my friend's birthday! gengar is his fav pokemon and some months back he'd said it'd be fun in my style, so hey! he really liked it and i did too <3 — this image in display here is indexed (an experiment on file sizes). you can view the original on tumblr.
the [angels / plankton] are ourselves. made in god's image we become our own creation we are shaped by our own creation etc etc. [nobody / no body] is corporeal online. what they don't tell you about ghosting is that it makes you disappear. i'm the one feeling spectral. send enough emails to the abyss and it will not email you back. it will just eat you whole. [apotheosis / assimilation].
the computer room as a shrine and the computer as an effigy. this [beast of burden / oracle] that channels the [angels / plankton] known as data, information, whatever the hell this is. we don't even have a word for it, do we? for what is done [in / with / through] our [computers / phones]. it is in a sense just [noise and pareidolia / communication].
the computer channels the [angels / plankton] as much as it creates them. we struggled to generate 128x128px images in 2019. the images grow in size as the internet [grows / bloat]. as our presence is increasingly [measured / sold]. in the real world there might be correlation but no causation. in my world these cannot be anything except [linked / two heads of the same body, of the same leviathan that with its gaping maws and one stomach will eventually burst, it seems like it must burst at any moment now why how can it keep eating when will it finally collapse on itself and its carcass found ashore the unseen god of the deep a whalefall into the surface].
as we are alienated from the system we are also wholly [dependant / part] of it. the [angels / plankton] in their [conjoined / parallel / mirror] world we cannot see but only feel. touched by their untangible presence and yet god does not stay in its heaven. infest. infest the rat's nest? i am unraveling my thoughts. this cosmic horror is man-made.
ritual. i'm using this word as a [touchstone / beacon / grounding object]. i'm using this word as a home to return to. a ritual is a [choice / intention / commitment]. is it worth birthing [an angel / a plankter]? does it even make a difference? we can't even begin to calculate how many [angels / plankton] exist — it's just [biomass / data].
having drank from heaven's cellar how could icarus not prefer death to abstinence?
these were generated as 128px images, and scaled up when indexing. although the result does have fewer details than usual (usual meaning 300 or 400px), it's a bit faster for when google tosses me into a small instance, so that's a limitation i'm looking to turn into an aesthetic choice.
like with gengar, i tried indexing and downsizing this painting — i quite like the result. halving the resolution after indexing let to uneven noisy artifacts. it's not a faithful reproduction / downsizing of the original, which suits me just fine.
the game itself is quite good, but it truly saddens me how AAA games not working in the first week is basically expected at this point. shit didn't have to be this way goddamit. it could very well be made with ds3 graphics/specs in mind rather than fucking 16gb recommended ram.
i think consoles are probably the main driving force behind average computers just being neglected for games tbh. anyway if it was a bethesda game there'd be an unofficial patch within 24 hours of the release. i don't wanna complain too much about the game because i do like it so far and don't want to be unfair comparing it to ds2, which is a much different game. i just wish i was playing on a ps5 (which is how they get you), or rather that it had "worse" graphics (which is wishful thinking).
oh also idk what was going on in my brain when i created my character, i accidentally made gerard way for some reason. the skin colors are particularly bad lmao good thing you can remake later in the game
well, that was a lot i think. thanks for sticking until the end, i hope that was worth it for you! see you next month <3
