Heavens, bots and Coca Cola bottles

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things I found

1. The virtual body as an encoded aesthetic artefact
“The Subject Changes is a poetic live simulation of a capricious character, endlessly shape-shifting while negotiating his/her ambiguous world. The character sets out on an indefinite dérive – a frantic exploration – where fragile relationships with the world-cum-stage and its occupants are established or broken down.”
Created by Vienna based Depart (Leonhard Lass and Gregor Ladenhauf).

2. Essai d’ouverture
Essai d’ouverture is a 1988 short film by French director Luc Moullet. It’s about a man and his many bizarre approaches to opening a Coca-Cola bottle.

3. Heaven banning
”Heaven banning” is not real, nor are the articles that people are sharing about it. But it is a fascinating concept nonetheless, that can be read as an extension of the Dead Internet Theory. According to some sources, it is just a resurrected joke post from HackerNews.

4. AI and the future of image-making
I recently got an invitation to test the MidJourney beta, which is an amazing new AI app that generates images from text inputs. I’ve been playing with it for a while but I also spent hours just watching other people using it in a dedicated Discord server. It was a very funny and interesting experience and I got some amazing visual results, especially when I came up with the idea of feeding the algorithm a literary input instead of a merely descriptive sentence. Here are some images the app produced based on some famous books incipits.

[P.S. if you’re interested in learning more about how these systems work, I suggest you watch this very good video by VOX.]

PROMPT: imagine/ The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel. – William Gibson, Neuromancer, 1984

PROMPT: imagine/ It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. — George Orwell, 1984, 1949

PROMPT: imagine/ “Psychics can see the color of time it’s blue. – Ronald Sukenick, Blown Away, 1986

5. When a harm ends, how can we make Amends?
In his latest work “Amends”, artist Kyle McDonald is auctioning three sculptures – from which the proceeds will pay to mitigate the historical emissions of three major art NFT marketplaces. The sculptures are both digital renders and physical handcrafted glass blocks, each filled with a material used for carbon removal and prevention. But they will only go on sale when Ethereum (finally? actually?) transitions away from proof-of-work. And the sculptures will be shipped to the owners of the NFTs—if they burn their NFT.

6. VRChat, the Metaverse People Actually Like
I really enjoyed watching this video published on People Make Games YouTube channel. It gives an amazing perspective on the topic of virtual worlds beyond hype and corporate bullshit.

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new entries on my bookshelf

Ben Davis, Art in the After-Culture, Capitalist Crisis and Cultural Strategy, 2022
Erik Davis, TechGnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information, 2015
Nicolas Bourriaud, Inclusioni, Estetica del capitalocene, 2020
AA.VV., Videoarte in Italia. Il video rende felici, 2022

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things that are coming soon

10th June 2022 - “Incantagioni”. Book presentation with Mariano Tomatis. Rome, Teatro India

17th June - And We Thought / Food Data Digestion, an AI project by Roberto Fassone, Torino. Talk with Roberto Fassone and Federico Bomba.

20th June - Representing and (re)Imagining Online Crowds Beyond Data Reduction - Online talk, curated by Nicola Bozzi - King’s College, London

7-9th July - Simposio 2022. Non è la fine del mondo, Borca di Cadore - Talk & Workshop

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things I did recently

15th May - Tecnocene. Il potere dell’arte nell’epoca della sua riproducibilità digitale, Bologna. Talk with Marco Mancuso, Bianca Cavuti and Amerigo Mariotti - VIDEO AVAILABLE

25th May - I wrote a new text for the PostScriptUM Series by Aksioma. The publication is part of the 4th instalment of the “New Extractivism” programme, with the amazing Ben Grosser. The title of my essay is “The Great Algorithm”.
Read it as a 𝗳𝗿𝗲𝗲 𝗣𝗗𝗙 or print on demand in English and Slovenian: aksioma.org/the-great-algorithm

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That’s all for now! Feel free to send me an email or leave a comment.