Destination, Distraction

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Destination, Distraction

I am currently going though my own wider period of ‘Rethinking How I Use Internet’ – conclusions will emerge I’m sure. This goes beyond how I’m thinking about this site, out to where I spend my time online in general, and where I put my attention.

It’s all very much a question of destination, distraction, and pooling of energy, and flow. I sort of think that I need to stake out some new boundaries, It’s a balancing act.

I think I’m going to be moving away from pinboard.in, so i’ve been testing raindrop.io. I like it so far, but i’m still not convinced. I’m so ride or die pinboard that what’s new I strange and alien. The UX I nice, I guess?

I’m, not entirely sure how to move all my link log followers away from my pinboard rss either. but maybe I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.

How Solarpunk Envisions A World We Will Want To Live In

Pulling this out the #LinkGarden and up top, as it was super fun to speak to Nirmal Kishnani about Solarpunk and Sustainability!

The solarpunk movement in fiction, art, fashion, and activism imagines a sustainable civilisation and considers how we get there. After gaining traction for a decade, how does it align with the latest thinking in regenerative design?

Jay Springett is a British writer, podcaster, and strategist with a background in tech consulting and the philosophy of arts. He has been stewarding the solarpunk community as an admin on solarpunks.net since 2014, and has written, given interviews, and delivered talks on the subject for years.

Looking beyond science-fiction speculation, he talks to Ecogradia about solarpunk via actionable initiatives such as permaculture, keyline design for landscape rehydration, urban agriculture, and solar panels as sites of individual agency.

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Permanently Moved

Photo 365

The Ministry Of My Own Labour

• Full day on PROJECT ENTRY
• One call about PROJECT DIVE, kinda blocked until I have a call with the co-founder
• Started work on issue #011 of Start Select Reset
• Finished the first draft of Part 2 of issue #012 of Start Select Reset
• Started thinking about what I want to say in Dec at Trans-Carbon Habitat conference
• Sent some Experience.Computer guest invites
• Had a call with DB about the Tarot Project

Link Garden

Virtual Friends, Real Feelings

I think whilst writing so my Notion and notes/journal app is *full* of scraps. I’ve decided to try and use my blog more like a public notebook. If something (with low effort) be turned into a blog post, then I’ll try to do that.

This post is an extension of my thinking about computational entities that exhibit a sense of aliveness from the other month:

Whilst the mainstream front in the AI Culture War is currently focused on copyright and ‘is it art’, the rest of the AI industry is full steam ahead making and designing virtual agents. The implications resulting from their deployment is really something I really think we should be talking about. 

One of the things I’ve been doing recently when reading about any new company that’s making AI products is to mentally sort them into one of three categories: Tools, Assistants, Companions. 

This post took longer to edit spell check and arrange in the WordPress editor than it took to write the initial draft though! What do to about this!?

Milo 2.0

Prompted by the post above, I was thinking about how some of these systems will manifest as products in the real world:

As the team debated what avatar-based AI systems might look like beyond Minecraft, I couldn’t help but roll my eyes and say “everything old is Molyneux again.” If you squint at work done 15 years ago, you can see the shape of the future.

Terminal Access

Holly and Mat were interviewed by Hans Ulrich in AnOther magazine.

Hans Ulrich Obrist: Can we begin with the beginning? How did you come to AI? We are working on your show for the Serpentine Galleries and we are so excited. You are at the forefront of artists working with AI in the 21st century, but people don’t really know where you started.

Holly Herndon: It’s a good point – AI is not a new thing. We’ve been going through waves for decades. We’ve gone through some AI winters. I like to joke that we’ve been in an AI hot girl summer since 2017. That was a particularly fruitful year for research papers being released – a lot of code and a lot of public-facing AI research was made available. That’s when we started playing around with it.

Mat Dryhurst: Yeah, the Transformers paper came out, and that represented a major breakthrough. The other big breakthrough was the fact you could run quite powerful systems at home, which parallels a lot of the uptake in consumer adoption of cryptocurrency and mining, with people using the new GPUs [graphics processing units] on gaming PCs that were out. It was a perfect storm.

I’m going to the show opening in October. Looking forward to it very much!

Dipping the Stacks

‘Acolyte’ Canceled: Can Best of Star Wars Survive Worst of Its Fans?

The Star Wars fans clamoring for a return to the originals aren’t just talking nonsense, they’re ruining their chances to see the franchise they love grow in any meaningful way.

Against Dan McQuillan’s AI realism and for Holly Lewis’s AI realism

So what does this mean for AI? It means that we do need to analyse the role of political and economic power in creating a sense of inevitability, as well as the challenges involved in finding ‘plausible scenarios’ of ‘disintegration or replacement’ to use Jameson’s words.

your website is not a brochure — kening zhu

why your website doesn’t have to be a brochure that compartmentalizes your infinite self — into three glossy pages. I’ll put these two frameworks side by side: “website as brochure” vs. “website as a digital garden-home-world”

The Decline in Writing About Progress – by Matt Clancy

Taken together, I think this small literature suggests critically influential fiction is increasingly interested in the past, and as a corollary, probably increasingly less likely to reflect a worldview with progress and optimism about the future of society as important constituents. At the same time, we don’t see much evidence of this kind of shift among more widely read books.

Broken Time – Believer Magazine

Evans once told a friend that a musician should be able to maintain focus on a single tone in his mind for at least five minutes—and in playing like this, he achieved a nearly mystical immersion in the music: a state of pure, undistracted concentration.

Reading

I’ve bought new books but not finished any. I’ve been super busy this week and only chipped away at stuff in the hour or two before bed.

With the exception of Gibson’s Zero History. It’s funny, I read it 14 years ago but remember absolutely nothing about the plot other than Japanese Denim was the MacGuffin – strange, almost feels like the first time i’m reading it!

WHY? – The Well I Fell Into

This is the best Why? record since Alopecia. I love this band. Not a single critical thing to say about them ever. Front man and lyracisist Yoni Wolf has kept me connected to reality for nearly 20 years. The album opens with the line “I used to be married, now I drag around the ring on a sling in a barrel of salt.” And that’s the tone for the next 45mins. It’s werird to grow old with your musical heros. This middle age break up concept album has some heart-rentching moments on it. I can’t even imagine.

It’s best listened to in one go – start to finish. Get on board with the tone of the thing and ride it though to the end.

Remember Kids:

“No man can swim unless he enters deep water.”

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky – Studies in Occultism