Whimsical Creatures, Deadly Headsets and Infinite Conversations
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things I found
1. This is What I call Extreme Art
Cat Graffam recreated Judith Beheading Holofernes by Caravaggio using Kid Pix Studio, a bitmap drawing software released in 1995. Using THE MOUSE. It was kinda painful to watch, but really amazing.
2. The Salt and the Women
Eryk Salvaggio is an interdisciplinary design researcher and new media artist. I’ve been following his work for years and I am always amazed by the quality of his writings. Lately, he has published a series of great articles on AI and art on his Substack newsletter, Cybernetic Forests. He also made a fascinating film assembling music produced by mushrooms, text from GPT3 and images from Stable Diffusion. The title is The Salt and the Women (read more about it here).
3. The Internet Aesthetics Spiral: #corecore
Yes, you read that right: there is a new trend named CORECORE. According to KnowYourMeme, “Corecore refers to an aesthetic that’s prevalent on TikTok under the hashtag “#corecore,” specifically within so-called NicheTok circles of NicheTokers, that plays on the -core suffix by making a “core” out of the collective consciousness of all “cores.”
Things are clearly spiraling out of control in the world of Internet Aesthetics. And this feels more like a parody than a new style or mood. Anyway, the best article I found about this thing is here.
4. Ghostwriter
Designer and engineer Arvind Sanjeev created Ghostwriter, a one-of-a-kind repurposed Brother typewriter that uses AI to chat with a person typing on the keyboard. The “ghost” inside the machine comes from OpenAI’s GPT-3, a large language model that powers ChatGPT. The effect resembles a phantom conversing through the machine.
4. Meet Mestre Ensinador, the Whimsical Little Creature of TikTok
“Me When I Was A Baby, also known as Whimsical Little Creature, refers to videos of the TikTok account MestreEnsinador1. It features videos of a flying white puppet wearing a green hat named Tiburcio. The name translates to “master teacher” in Portuguese, with the gnome puppet being referred to as a “forest being” by the TikToker in his comment sections. The videos often show the puppet flying and twirling, sometimes doing a little dance and sometimes undertaking mysterious rituals. Maestre Ensinador went viral in the fall of 2022 after a series of duets where people showed his videos to their younger siblings and tried to convince them that the puppet was them as a baby.”
“Tibúrcio is a strong gnome,” Jhonatan Oliveira says, once belonging to his late grandmother, “and that’s why I like it very much.” He remade the puppet’s body three years ago, before he began making the videos. His uncle appears with him in the first viral TikTok — he’s the one who took Tibúrcio out of the cruse, an earthenware vessel that Oliveira refers to as a buried treasure. “But, he is not a cash treasure, but a spiritual one,” he explains. “The inspiration to make the videos comes from God!”
5. If you die in the game, you die in real life
Palmer Luckey, the man who created the Oculus rift, made a VR Headset that kills the user If they die in the game.
“The idea of tying your real life to your virtual avatar has always fascinated me – you instantly raise the stakes to the maximum level and force people to fundamentally rethink how they interact with the virtual world and the players inside it. Pumped up graphics might make a game look more real, but only the threat of serious consequences can make a game feel real to you and every other person in the game. This is an area of videogame mechanics that has never been explored, despite the long history of real-world sports revolving around similar stakes.”
6. Jolene +
I am in love with this uncanny cover of Jolene, released by Holly Herndon (voice by Holly+ AI, visuals by Sam Rolfes).
7. Affinity to Infinity
Jean-François Lyotard coined the expression “affinity to infinity” to describe how contemporary art, techno-science and capitalism share the same tension towards infinity (infinite progress, growth, production).
The scariest and also the most fascinating thing about AI powered content generators is that they can go on producing content forever. In infinite variations. Without any human intervention. For example, here you can listen to “An AI generated, never-ending discussion between Werner Herzog and Slavoj Žižek.” And here you can watch a never-ending sitcom where characters speak to each other using GPT-3.
new entries on my bookshelf
Eduardo Navas, The Rise of Metacreativity: AI Aesthetics After Remix, 2022
Pamela McCorduck, Aaron's Code: Meta-Art, Artificial Intelligence and the Work of Harold Cohen, 1991
Sara Benaglia e Mauro Zanchi, Le insidie delle immagini, 2022
things I did recently
Roberto Fassone – And We Thought III - Read the text (in italian)
Palazzo Vizzani, via Santo Stefano 43, Bologna
promossa da Alchemilla e Istituzione Bologna Musei | MAMbo – Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna
Digital World: Arte digitale
November 12nd - RAI SCUOLA - Watch the interview on Raiplay (in italian)
with Matteo Bordone
Il rettangolo elettrico - Bookcity
November 17th 2022 - NABA, Milan - VIDEO (in italian)
With: Guido Tattoni, Vincenzo Cuccia, Simone Sarasso, Vincenzo Filosa, Sabrina Saporiti, Valentina Tanni, Mauro Martino
La rivoluzione algoritmica dell’arte
November 4th 2022 - La Portineria / Online talk - VIDEO (in italian)
With: Fabrizio Ajello, Francesco D’Isa, Alessandro Y. Longo, Gregorio Magini, Valentina Tanni.
upcoming
February 14th - Colori e mestieri delle Arti Multimediali - Conferenza presso Accademia delle Belle Arti di Roma
March 3rd-5th - Hacking AI. Usi impropri di intelligenze artificiali - Workshop @ Scuola Open Source, Bari
exciting news
The brand new edition of my book Memestetica is finally out! With a new chapter, a super preface by Alessandro Ludovico and… FOUR different cover artworks. Also, the english edition will be out later this year 🐈⬛🐈⬛🐈⬛. Also n.2: I’m working (very hard) on a new book... Everything by NOT - NERO Editions.
the great wall of memes updates
The Great Wall of Memes is a research project in the form of a visual archive. I started it in 2012 and it’s the place where I collect images and memes that feel relevant. Click here to see the latest uploads
That’s all for now! Feel free to send me an email or leave a comment.