Category: Playful or Cool

$432 000 painting “by AI” sold at Christie’s

A painting created using GANs (generative adversarial networks) sold for $432 000 at Christies today.

Last year a $432 000 painting “by AI” sold at Christie’s. The painting was created by a collective called Obvious. They used a Generative Adversarial Network. In an essay titled, A naive yet educated perspective on Art and Artificial Intelligence, they talk about how they created the work.

Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) analyze tens of thousands of images, learn from their features, and are trained with the aim to create new images that are undistinguishable from the original data source.

They also point out that many of the same concerns people have about AI art today were voiced about photography in the 19th century. Photography automated the image making business much as AIs are automating other tasks.

Can we use these GANs for other generative scholarship?

Writing with the machine

“…it’s like writing with a deranged but very well-read parrot on your shoulder.”

Robin Sloan, author of Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, has been doing some interesting work with recursive neural nets in order to generate text. See Writing with the machine. He trained a machine on science fiction and then hooked it into a text editor so it can complete sentences. The New York Times has a nice story on Sloan’s experiments, Computer Stories: A.I. Is Beginning to Assist Novelists.

One wonders what it would be like if you trained it on your own writing. Would it help you be yourself or discourage you from rereading your prose?

 

Watch Andy Warhol “Paint” On A Commodore Computer: Gothamist

Eric Hayot at the Novel Worlds conference showed a slide with an image of Debbie Harry of Blondie painted on the Amiga by Andy Warhol. There is a video of Warhol painting on the Amiga at the premiere of the Commodore Amiga.

This is discussed in a documentary The Invisible Photograph: Part 2 (Trapped). The documentary also talks about recovering other images from Warhol’s original Amiga that was preserved by the The Andy Warhol Museum.

Technologizer has a nice retrospective on the Amiga, Amiga: 25 Years Later. I remember when it came out in 1985. I had a Mac by then, but was intrigued by the colour Amiga and the video work people were doing with it.

Every Noise at Once

Ted Underwood in a talk at the Novel Worlds conference talked about a fascinating project,  Every Noise at Once. This project has tried to map the genres of music so you can explore these by clicking and listening. You should, in theory, be able to tell the difference between “german techno” and “diva house” by listening. (I’m not musically literate enough to.)

AI Weirdness

I just came across a neat site called AI Weirdness. The site describes all sorts of “weird” experiments in learning neural networks. Some examples:

The site has a nice FAQ that describes her tools and how to learn how to do it.

EaaSI | The Software Preservation Network

I just learned about a new project called EaaSI | The Software Preservation Network. Stanford will be one of the nodes. They are looking at how to provide emulation as a service. They are using technology from Freiburg called bwFLA Emulation as Service.

Emulation as a strategy for digital preservation is about to become an accepted technology for memory institutions as a method for coping a large variety of complex digital objects. Hence, the demand for ready-made and especially easy-to-use emulation services will grow. In order to provide user-friendly emulation services a scalable, distributed system model is required to be run on heterogeneous Grid or Cluster infrastructure.

The Emulation-as-a-Service architecture simplifies access to preserved digital assets allowing end users to interact with the original environments running on different emulators. Ready-made emulation components provide a flexible web service API allowing for development of individual and tailored digital preservation workflows.

Emulation is going to be important to game preservation. Already the Internet Archive is making games and other software available with emulation. There is also the MAME (Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator) project that is a community project that has traditionally allowed people to play older games right from the bit sequence off cartridges.

Missed the bitcoin boom? Five more baffling cryptocurrencies to blow your savings on

One of the oddest Ethereum projects in operation, CryptoKitties is a three-way cross between Tamagotchis, Beanie Babies and animal husbandry. Users can buy, sell and breed the eponymous cats, with traits inherited down the generations.

The Guardian has a nice story on Missed the bitcoin boom? Five more baffling cryptocurrencies to blow your savings on. The article talks about CryptoKitties, a form of collectible pet (kitty) game that is built on blockchain technology. If you invest you get a kitty or two and then you can breed them to evolve new kitties. The kitties can then be sold as collectibles to others to breed. Apparently 11% of Traffic on the Ethereum Blockchain Is Being Used to Breed Digital Cats (CryptoKitties). If you missed investing in bitcoin, now is the chance to buy a kitty or two.

The question is whether this is gambling or a game?

Replaying Japan 2017

Geoffrey Rockwell at Arcade Cabinet
Playing Missile Command at the Strong (Photo by Okabe)

Last week I was at the 5th International Conference on Japan Game Studies, Replaying Japan 2017. You can see my conference notes here. The conference was held in the Strong Museum of Play which has a terrific video game collection and exhibit. (I vote for holding all conferences in museums!)

Continue reading Replaying Japan 2017

Digital exhibit: I dreamed a dream the other night

Entry Page to Site

The British Council has developed a bilingual (English/Turkish) digital exhibit of British Art. The exhibit remediates the gallery/museum as interface, which is not new, but the designers have included other visitors moving around, looking at art and so on. It gives it a more human feel. That said, I found it harder to actually get to the art. I couldn’t move from painting on the wall to the next one without stepping back and then in.

Rez Infinite for the PS4

I finally got around to downloading and playing Rez Infinite on the PS4. This is an upgraded (hi-res) version of the original which SEGA released for the Playstation 2 and Dreamcast in 2001. The game is a beautiful rail shooter and a music game which produces trance like electronic music (and vibrations) as you play. There is a traveller mode where you don’t die and you can just make music and travel through the spaces. I found myself wanting to repeat levels to continue the beat.

The new 2016 version for the PS4 support VR (though I don’t have it). It also has an extra level called “Area X” which, while more sophisticated, lacks the charming Tron-like graphic imagination of the rest. It would be interesting to map all the references to Tron in Rez – it too places you as a hacker going through a computing landscape.

Polygon has a story on the Rez producer Tetsuya Mizuguchi on his return to music games. The story mentions a Synesthesia Suit (PDF) created to go with VR games like Rez Infinite. Below is a video from Siggraph 2016 to show (feel) of the suit’s capabilities. I’m intrigued by this intersection of art and game around music.

And here is link to a video showing the suit.