(Source: artmania-feed)
Miró and Life in General
Conceptual art pioneer John Baldessari’s new London exhibition
Facebook can map more of Earth in a week than we have in history | New Scientist
In a blog post, the social network announced that its AI system took two weeks to build a map that covers 4 per cent of our planet. That’s 14 per cent of Earth’s land surface, with 21.6 million square kilometres of photographs taken from space, digested and traced into a digital representation of the roads, buildings and settlements they show. And Facebook says it can do it better and faster, potentially mapping the entire Earth in less than a week.
This is the starkest example I’ve seen so far of the most important phenomenon in technology – computers doing human work really fast. It’s going to change the way we work forever, and will have massive implications for how we acquire knowledge, cooperate on large projects and even understand the world.
The stated goal of Facebook’s data-science team is to build maps to help the social network plan how to deliver internet to people who are currently offline. It’s a dubious starting point, but whatever you think about Facebook’s internet colonialism, the company’s drones won’t be able to beam Wi-Fi to the disconnected until they know where they are.
What happened to the Chretiens is so common in some places that it has a name. The park rangers at Death Valley National Park in California call it “death by GPS.” It describes what happens when your GPS fails you, not by being wrong, exactly, but often by being too right. It does such a good job of computing the most direct route from Point A to Point B that it takes you down roads which barely exist, or were used at one time and abandoned, or are not suitable for your car, or which require all kinds of local knowledge that would make you aware that making that turn is bad news.
These types of mishaps often elicit sheer bafflement. The local Italian tourist official noted that although “Capri is an island,” the unfortunate Swedes “did not even wonder why they didn’t cross any bridge or take any boat;” the first responders in Bellevue were amazed that the women “wouldn’t question driving into a puddle that doesn’t seem to end.” For their part, the victims often couch their experiences in language that attributes to GPS a peculiar sort of agency. GPS “told us we could drive down there,” one of the Japanese tourists explained. “It kept saying it would navigate us a road.” The BMW driver echoed these words, almost verbatim: “It kept insisting the path was a road.”
Something is happening to us. Anyone who has driven a car through an unfamiliar place can attest to how easy it is to let GPS do all the work. We have come to depend on GPS, a technology that, in theory, makes it impossible to get lost. Not only are we still getting lost, we may actually be losing a part of ourselves.
Parade
Music video for track by Yllis put together by The Rodina uses lo-fi 3D rendering and emojis:
“Parade” explores narcissism in today’s world. It questions the ecstasy of parading the self—duplicating the self or creating the image of the “ideal” self as a means of achieving a sense of value, distinction or immortality. How do we construct our identity in a post-representational digital reality? “Parade” is a fantasy rainy world, where hearts together with hundreds of other emojis orgasmically fly across the screen.
Street view film camera - Jesse England
Many of the fantastical images curated from Street View for artistic consumption would be unremarkable if not for the legitimacy-lending presence of the navigational tools burned into the upper left hand corner and the blurring of faces. Ordinary snapshots taken by regular photographers can look more unusual if they choose to use low-grade film cameras or digital filters that emulate the look of such equipment. I think, if I can combine these contemporary ways of assuring the look of the “real,” can the image be twice as legitimate?
‘YouTube Smash Up’ attempts to generatively produce viral content using video material from the Top 10 most viewed videos on YouTube. Each week, the Number 1 video of the week is resynthesized using a computational algorithm matching its sonic and visual content to material only from the remaining Top 10 videos. This other material is then re-assembled to look and sound like the Number 1 video. The process does not copy the file, but synthesizes it as a collage of fragments segmented from entirely different material. In the video above, for example, Pharrell Williams’ Happy is recreated using music videos by Chris Brown, Lady Gaga, John Legend and Katy Perry, plus clips and trailers from Footloose, X-Men: Days of Future Past and The Voice.
Goldsmiths PhD honoured at Prix Ars Electronica for ‘YouTube Smash Up’ | Blog.DoC
James Vincent: Facebook’s new photo app won’t launch in Europe because of facial recognition at The Verge (ht iamdanw):
Earlier this week, Facebook launched Moments, a new photo-sharing app that uses facial recognition technology to dig up forgotten snaps of friends from your camera roll.
“Regulators have told us we have to offer an opt-in choice to people to do this,” Facebook’s head of policy in Europe, Richard Allan, told The Wall Street Journal. “We don’t have an opt-in mechanism so it is turned off until we develop one.” Allan adds that there’s currently no timeline for Facebook to develop such an option.
Google’s recently-launched Google Photos app — which uses facial recognition to sort snaps by who’s in them — also limits its use of the technology to the US.
(Source: theverge.com)
Transsiberian Slitscan Test - section9.co.uk
Between March and April, 2015, my partner and I travelled over 10,000km. We covered one quarter of the way around the planet, the vast majority by train. Using a small, second hand digital camera and a sticky camera mount, I recorded the majority of the train journeys.
What you see is over 200GB of footage, shrunk into a single image using a technique known as slitscan. Every frame, I take the middle column of pixels and concatenate it to the image. Each vertical column of pixels represents 1/30th of a second. This adds up into a huge strip, which is then cut and pasted into a more pleasing rectangle.
Peak Simulator, 2015, Matthew Plummer-Fernandez for Abandon Normal Devices.
A computer generated landscape in a landscape. In the early eighties the film industry began to adopt computer graphics, and the first film to use a computer generated landscape was Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Khan in 1982. Peak Simulator was designed with the same Midpoint Displacement algorithm.
[Images: Chris Foster, Matthew Plummer-Fernandez]
GIF IT UP 2015 entry, “Dissension”, from Tobias Rothe in Amstelveen, the Netherlands. Source material courtesy Fondazione Federico Zeri—Università di Bologna. Tobias says:
My name is Tobias Rothe and I am an Dutch artist. Working on installations, photography and net art. I’m interested in cross overs: like to share ancient art/culture with contemporary technics/arts.
This GIF is made available under a CC-BY 3.0 License.
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