127 Matching Annotations
  1. Jan 2025
    1. ACCESS AS ART PRACTICE
    2. Designed for, with, and by the disability community, our commitment to make this show accessible raised core questions for us about access: how could we think about access not as accommodation or a measure of minimal compliance, but instead as a creative practice or an underlying aesthetic and design principle of the work?
    3. taking an anti-ableist and intersectional approach to media arts practice that builds in access from the beginning.
    1. wicked problems 1 (sidenote: “Wicked problems” (Rittel & Webber, 1973) are challenges that are especially dynamic due to their fluctuating parameters and require diverse strategies of engagement for generating inquiry. ↩ )

      cf CybLab

    1. Technological sublime varies in its object of worship
    2. “The revenue model behind these open platforms is to be found in the user data and the value that data can represent.”
    3. a more completelearner profile

      more complete: for who? by what means? what implications?

    4. “Collect it all” is a phrase used to encapsulate the mission of General Keith Alexander, director of the US National Security Agency

      cf matters of disclosure, consent, and differing orientation to/with privacy: MIT Tech Review article on CMU Mites in TCS Hall

    5. Epistemic displacement
    6. Pattern of subsuming practicalrationality into technicalrationality
    7. An ethical obligation does not follow from a statement of fact.

      cf cyb readings

    8. gray literature
    9. Critical Discourse Analysis
    10. learning analytics

      for the purposes of Scal we may need to be very narrow/specific in how we define whatever it is that we relate to the algo sublime, if we choose to use this phrase and continue this particular line/theme of scholarly/popular inquiry.

      e.g. are we dealing only in purely textual data? conversational interfaces?

    11. Ideologies dothings.

      Stafford Beer "purpose of a system is what it does"

    12. texts

      what texts and sites will Scal involve? limits and opportunities for each

    13. Ideologies are solutions that address real problems.

      however the "problem" in question is framed, for whichever audience

    1. Slop – in the sense of the flood of information and the calibration of how information is filtered – is power.

      cf Rob Kitchin on big data: capture everything anyway

    1. scientific sterilization of variety and unpredictability in the name of reliable, predictable behaviors.

      cf Adam Greenfield via DIOT?

    2. AI slop breaks down the inquiry and investigation into the world as it is, replacing the critical landscape with text and image fragments that affirm the world as it is imagined. In essence, it circumvents any desire to understand the world because it offers us the immediate satisfaction of having a feeling about the world.

      FMGA; convenient direct binaries, no critical thinking or personal judgment formed, good feelings +++

    3. AI slop is extremely viral, and so is outrage.

      cf hypercasual FMGA

    1. You can see that oh, this is this type of lightbox that everyone uses, and it works really well, but I don’t want everyone's lightbox. I want to design my own lightbox, and I want to make my own weird mistakes. It’s because we want to figure out how the thing works and why, even if doing it that way makes the thing slightly less “good” than the established version.

      it's about learning, knowing your material (cf Daragh text on this from DIOT)

    2. I think it's interesting that you frame it in terms of selfishness, because the parts of a person that are really fascinating tend to be the ones that are kind of orthogonal to the rest of the world — that have these little weird shapes that don't quite fit. Being able to express those things…. [laughs] maybe I’m forcing this, but I find that generous. Like you said, it’s something that’s very specific to a single person. That feels like a gift.

      Dani on wanting to be understood

    1. it’s perhaps time to try and move beyond those anxieties and to stake more of a claim for designing life online.

      what does this mean?

    2. very highly rendered fake world
    3. Mockups are so neutral that they sacrifice personality.

      not quite... / images that construct / structure desire

    4. what is a mockup?

      it is an advertisement in itself

    1. these communities are trying to sift through the layers of the world to see what else might have been left behind at the code level by the developers during the making of the game.

      intertextual (esp wrt code); marginalia; SKAM — transmedia emergent storytelling

    2. Spectator Mode becomes a way to analyze the game world from the outside in, to instantly uncover the secret paths and tunnels in the ground below, to look at the gameworld from within a block, or from under the bedrock looking up through pools of lava, hidden diamonds, and glowing skeletons.

      in what ways do you understand / come to learn a system, a world, an infrastructure? cf. position/where one is situated across an AI tech stack

  2. nicholasmuellner.com nicholasmuellner.com
    1. But the uneasy fascination of the adjacent, vacant landscape rested in its unexpected insistence on presence. Suddenly, this primitive attempt at virtuality
    1. explains it:
    2. Data can be valuable. It can also be debris, abundant and unwelcome clutter generated by organic activity. Data is essential for operating a system, but it rarely needs to be the primary focus of the system.

      cf capturability, rhetoric of maximum vision in my captcha essay (2)

    3. Compostable social media might aim for organic control over its look, feel, and design rather than organized control over the user. It would interpret content as a series of signals: a heap that could attract or repel users according to their own, self-created, emergent incentives.
    4. Anarchist Cybernetics, Thomas Swann
    5. Facebook should first be understood not as a “social network” but as a conversational mediation system. It is designed not to expand your social interactions, but to limit and mediate them for profit. That’s not even a critique! It’s just exactly what the technology is if you define it by what it does.

      Beer, the purpose of a system is what it does

    6. where the boundary of a system truly rests
    7. “Redesigning Artificial Intelligence From Australia Out”
    8. Rather than extrapolating for all time, you could just ask, “what did the last 10 people do?” It would be a great way to create new patterns, as we can’t get big data anyway.

      in what context is this fruitful

    9. There’s a lovely paper on memory metaphors by William Randall published in Theory & Psychology.
    10. The digital brain metaphor works pretty well for computers chugging away at pattern recognition tasks using inanimate objects. It's a solitary, individual model, processing a limited world of static information, making predictions, and acting on those predictions based on limited information — a solipsistic machine.
    11. refine this into narrower categories

      cf Mario Carpo AI pasta or rice. or was it the neural arch reading from Jimmy?

    12. object recognition

      and cf romanticized (or oft-told) narratives of this in CAPTCHAs

    13. ?

      image below i assume is "AI generated" but has the feeling of cracked paint on a weathered painting. new adjacencies and metaphors i guess

  3. Dec 2024
    1. Images of AI Slop reflect an aesthetic of algorithmic power: the amplified feedback loop of social media and AI, of optimization and prediction. We have not trained our eyes to see this in the image yet, because we are so unaccustomed to the scale of what generative AI does – both within and beyond the images.
    2. If everything is up for grabs, everything is transgressive, and nothing matters much at all. The entire landscape of our visual culture can become subject to a detached, aesthetic disinterest. Everything can be reduced to data to be manipulated. Once you believe that, you can easily come to believe wholesale in the ideological project of AI.
    3. The result is often critiqued as soulless. AI-generated text and images suffer from the absence of the weight of the real. The AI slop of AI images and the AI slop of algorithmic decision-making have this in common: they can only point at data. They never base decisions on reality. Nonetheless, the decisions are rolled out into reality as if they did.
    4. They are also restructured references to, primarily, social media content, with the model making aesthetic choices based on what it has learned from the feedback loop of viral posts.

      also saturated with logics of advertising — thats where you get the corporate pop

    5. Another pleasure of an aesthetic experience – at least for Kant – is the absence of a clearly defined category for which to connect and identify that experience.
    6. To the AI critic, referentiality is evidence, not an informed nod to a broader cultural context but of the model's theft of intellectual property.
    7. I keep returning to aesthetic detachment to understand the pleasure of manipulating symbols with AI. Art requires playfulness, and playfulness involves a lack of investment in the thing played with. We would not play absent-mindedly with a sacred object if we understood it was sacred. But history is filled with the sacred artifacts of a culture played with by those indifferent or hostile to that culture. Playing with those images inspires resistance.
    8. a normalization of algorithmic scale

      tag is violence, but more about control — need to distinguish between the 2.

      again, "rhetorics of maximum visibility"

    9. This has given rise not only to scammers and misinformation, but to a more earnest strand of AI Slop: the work of untrained artists using a machine in a very straightforward way, benefiting from the baked-in algorithmic manipulation of social media that rewards them with attention for sharing it. For some who grew up in the algorithmic era, the Slop “aesthetic“ must seem very natural—a kind of aesthetic familiarity or even nostalgia, similar, perhaps, to the feelings associated with 8-bit video games among some children of the 80s and 90s.

      nostalgia for the world that produced images, semantic embeddings like these?

    10. AI slop is thus a reflection of what our social media filters see, reversed to create optimized versions.
    11. "To be disinterested is to take pleasure 'in the mere representation of the object,' not in its existence." AI is not only disinterested, it is wholly incapable of interest.
    1. This rise of the technocrats will have ramifications on tech regulations, sure. But it is also a form of politics that treats government as a social media interface, designed to amplify outrage, bully those in disagreement and make constructive dialogue impossible. It’s a momusocracy: government by force of the troll.
    2. This is a fusion of social media, the ideology of AI, and power, all leveraged to aim the swarm gaze toward harassing civil servants Musk disagrees with.

      cf. swarm gaze and spectacle

    1. what images are meant to look like.
    2. Large language models lack what linguistics calls a referent.

      instead replaced by fetishized notion of "essence of the thing" (referent) as nth dimensional data analytics?

    3. Slop is a problem that can persist through strategic negligence: there is no need to prioritize a problem if that problem is helpful to the people tasked with repair.

      purpose of a system is what it does David Graeber on bureaucracy?

    4. Much of our digital lives occur within slop infrastructure. Slop merits deeper engagement because it is a by-product of the same information system it is now clogging up.
    5. Though almost literally "autocratic," this AI-generated worldview is neither left nor right-wing, but a fusion of cyberlibertarianism and technocratic neoliberalism. Today it is a project with enough entry points to form its own agenda, priorities, myths and abstractions, rituals of inclusion and exclusion, and crucially, an invitation to enjoy its fantasy.
    6. I don't see AI slop as disinformation, but about the reality that information of any kind, in enough quantities, becomes noise. It is, I argue, a symptom of information exhaustion, and an increased human dependency on algorithmic filters to sort the world on our behalf.

      AI Slop as negative image?

    7. "low quality media, including writing and images, made using generative AI technology" used as "filler content that prioritizes speed and quantity over substance and quality."

      slop, metadataslurry, seoification, enshittification (+ dead internet theory)

    8. posting jarring AI content to lure engagement

      specific to locale / culture, too — Chinese AI using MLP + tough lessons about the cruelty of society reflects "warning culture" (no idea how else to describe) very much in vogue across XHS, for instance

    9. Shrimp Jesus

      direct connections to internet chum.

  4. Oct 2024
    1. On an internet without hyperlinks, where every post must be completely digestible in someone’s feed within microseconds of a user seeing it, your face, your physical body, is the last thing left that can connect across platforms. And creators like Cho have figured out that that’s one of the last reliable ways to keep their personas consistent across every platform they have to post on. It just so happens to turn out that the only impulse strong enough to still reliably motivate someone to figure out how to find your website is horniness.
    2. And because it’s not just porn that’s going through this transition from top-down platform to bottom-up creator, it also means that a lot of viral content is beginning to feel a little porny.

      affect of video production itself, too

    3. this breakdown between porn world and not-porn world is having strange side effects on culture.

      SEO speak and metadata slurry, too

  5. Jun 2024
    1. It was bas relief. It wasn't completely in the round, but you could feel the scratchiness of the clothing. You could feel the roundness of the pearls. And so, in that regard, it was a lifelike three-dimensional model of a two-dimensional representation. Is this the way to go? Because, we could do 3D prints of everything in the collection.

      tech for tech's sake; need for context

    2. A very interesting example of just this issue was raised when they had the Treasures of Heaven exhibition at the British Museum, and they brought together numerous relics and the beautiful reliquaries within which they were set, and icons from Byzantium and elsewhere in the eastern parts of Europe and put them on display. Now, the visitors included people of the Eastern Orthodox faith, and, in that faith, the proper way in which to venerate an icon is to kneel before it, to pray before it and to kiss it.Now, was the British Museum going to allow visitors to kiss this exhibition, the items in this exhibition? Or actually, shouldn't the British Museum have obliged everyone to do so? Merely viewing such icons from a distance and not engaging in that sensory interaction with them would be to defeat their sensory presence, their way of being in the world. And so, I would love to see more experimentation with historically appropriate manners of viewing.

      challenging authority of museum as established preserver of cultural history/heritage

    3. there's this phenomenal bureaucratization of the senses that goes on in the way, in which, for example, you go to an art gallery or a museum to see, to a concert hall in order to listen, to a restaurant to taste or to dine, and to a gym to exercise.

      removing context

    1. a lot of these objects were not meant to be put in a museum. A lot of them were in people's homes, in their cabinet of curiosities, or in the place where only men would be able to gaze at them, or in churches or in other different formats. And then now that they're in a museum setting with general visitors, what is the museum's responsibility in how we are talking about this, how we're choosing to display them, how we're choosing to talk about them in the labels, in the catalogs, in the exhibitions? Because all of that is adding to the art historical knowledge.

      BANGER!!!

    2. I think so many things draw me to museums. And I think it depends on, we have multiple identities, right?

      this is such an epic response/approach to replying.

  6. Jan 2023
    1. The question of whether I link to one of my old posts or not isn’t answered by whether they’re related, but by whether the act of linking serves a purpose.

      different approaches to writing and different (conceptions of) audiences... linking with a reader in mind, v. linking with the assumption that only you might return in the future

  7. Dec 2022
  8. Oct 2022
    1. I’ll keep asking for more of the world for more of life for every second to be suffused with the feeling of eternity.

      every second already is, though.

    1. The Internet should be treated like public property, not private property.

      + maintenance

    1. Living alongside our friends, spouses, parents, and children, we wonder if they’re the same people we’ve always known, or if they’ve lived through changes we, or they, struggle to see.

      Do you prefer to regard your family, friends, partner, et al. as people you've known (at some point), or do you prefer to consider them with a fresh impression every day?

      something about memory here...

    2. But others have a strong sense of connection with their younger selves, and for them the past remains a home.

      (1. Is there ever a point at which you can confidently say you know who you are — or who a person is?)

      1. the self as a home to return to; childhood times is when I lay the foundation
    1. And in my personal experience, the stuff I create that comes from my actual emotions and actual passions seems to resonate the most, and when I try and create ‘content’ that I think will ‘have wide appeal’ it tends to fall flat.

      dang i needed this, thank you

    1. 这些拟物化的设计增强了物品的质感与质地,追求于在最高程度上还原现实。

      skeuomorphic

    1. 我们对过往时间湮灭的缅怀 常见于中老年女性群体中的荷花在中国传统文化的语境中常用来表示吉祥 但由于中老年群体的广泛使用 使得荷花的形象开始泛滥 并被重新发掘意义

      puns especially prevalent/prominent in these new iterations of extant "中老年表情“

    2. 它们的美妙就藏在它所要传达的内容里

      一种憧憬, optimism

    3. 与PPT艺术字结合起来

      personally: prominence of GIFs in 小学时代的PPT

    4. 或早期韩流卡通插画的风格

      QQ聊天人物形象

    5. 偏向非主流类的闪亮像素图

      bling, glitter GIFs lialina?

    6. 其次是寓意吉祥正能量居多

      compare with drastically more cynical, ironic communications of millennials/gen z

      80–00后?

  9. Sep 2022
    1. designed to docu-ment failure or deficit rather than to provide opportunities to redress existing inequities

      focus/method of data collection influences possible solutions or opportunities for further work

    2. whose work functions as yet another layer of surveil-lance.

      understand the impact of your work, who it puts at risk. how does it intersect with existing power structures?

    1. cult v. culture, sketchy mobile ad lore — Grubhub lore, "silence brand"

      hard jewelry, soft feelings

      Disneyland hotel?

    2. Buyers become evangelists, who are incentivized to promote their version of the subculture.

      "community" or "culture" begets power/capital

    3. Products begin their life as an unbranded commodities made in foreign factories; they pass through a series of outsourced relationships —brand designers, content creators, and influencers—which construct a cultural identity for the good; in the final phase, the product ends up in a shoppable social media post. Each step, a service rendered that turns a commodity into a cultural item, turning the logic of all manufacturing into this: your brand, our products.

      brand as livable "experience", can adapt to fit whatever aspirational lifestyle/image consumers so desire

    1. That the 2010's never really figured out what they were. Its access to unlimited information and upcycling stopped it from ever genuinely having its own picturesque moment the decades before it saw. It was overwhelmed by its existence within this new framework and the possibilities that came from the internet.

      precisely this: what remains of personal expression when all you've known to aspire to is stuff of the past? it drives this urge to historicize every second as you're living it

      thinking of Nostalgia for Nostalgia by Alexandra Fiorentino-Swinton.

    1. amateur

      to invoke this word in its earlier definition, to love — not as something pitiful — learning technology for the love of expression and sharing your personal experiences, plain and simple

  10. Mar 2022
    1. o see these webs in places they are perhaps not as relevant

      pareidolia?

    2. pg. 9

      reading/writing direction influencing models of knowledge?

    3. With that training, however, the expert loses the ability to see anything that contradicts the form that she knows to be visible. Perception training shapes and sorts the universe, outlining edges and arranging parts into wholes.

      would you want to allow for a fluid kind of back and forth between recognizing and trying to describe

    4. western thinkers saw knowledge the same way they saw the rest of the world: ordered.

      cf. perspectival view — from Camille, as well as Bryson

    5. a more diffuse one, web-like

      wood wide web, mycology

  11. Sep 2021
  12. www.professores.uff.br www.professores.uff.br
    1. Walter Ong claims that writing is a technology and is therefore an artifi cial act

      cf. Paul Edwards, The Closed World

      tools also define our relationships with them

    2. Branding, logos, layout, and context all cre-ate meaning, but, when thrown into the digital environment, such attributes are destabilized, stripping a fully clothed document into nakedness as more variables are thrown into the mix.

      "deterritorial aesthetics"??

    3. “If you are looking at the object, you need not think of it; but if you are having the visual experience by the exclamation [I exclaim “A rabbit!”], you are also thinking of what you see.”

      read/write as a simultaneous process? reading as writing, making meaning

    4. Th is, of course, asks a great deal of what used to be called the reader. He must now perceive the poem as object and participate in the poet’s act of creat-ing it, for the concrete poem communicates fi rst and foremost its structure.

      concretized (?) bits of information. memes

    5. One of the aims of concrete poetry is to render all language into poetic icons, similar to the way that everyone can understand the meaning of the folder icon on the computer screen.

      Metaphors We Live By

    6. Readability was the key: like a logo, a poem should be instantly recognizable.

      Arrival (2016)

    7. By drawing our attention not to what they are saying but how they are saying it, Language Removal Services inverts our normative relationship to language, prioritizing materiality and opacity over transparency and communication.

      revisit terms?

    8. A simple gesture of removal reveals a lot about the visual think-ing, politics, and editorial decisions behind what is presented as stable and objective information, elegantly revealing the structures of power and subjectivity behind the news.

      infrastructure — see Modern Nostalgic Fantasies

    9. a “dinosaur egg,” wrongly titling a song for the purposes of promotion

      +, clickbait

    10. Our digital ecology is a virtual corollary to Debord’s urbanism, and many of the same gestures he proposed in meatspace can be enacted on the screen.

      website defacement, Wikipedia tagging, MARGINS!!

    11. mapping the psychic and emotional fl ows of a city instead of its rational street grids

      also see McEwen, "Profound Modernity." Giorgia Lupi, data manifesto

    12. there was no language acting upon other language to form such ruptures.

      how can our interventions & glitching make meaning?

    13. Of course, this isn’t poetry, nor was it meant to be, rather it shows us that even seemingly meaningless and random sets of alphanumeric can be infused with poetic quali-ties.

      importance of context (of pattern), the encounter

    14. based on the 20 x 20 grid of standard Japanese writing paper. Every “Pure Poem” consists of four hundred characters, each a number from one to three.

      materiality of language & roman numerals: language as architecture on the page; rules/constraints

    15. Reading aloud is an act of decoding.

      Michael Camille, Image on the Edge — mastication, reading as a verbal activity for memorization

    16. Words are no longer primarily transparent content carri-ers; now their material quality must be considered as well.

      cf. Crystal goblet

    17. Yet what happens when sense is not foregrounded as being of pri-mary importance?

      consider Allison Parish, textual compression

    1. a hover can display a piece of data that is contained within themicrointeraction

      "bring the data forward" — how to balance amt of info?

    2. something the target users will recognize as a trigger in context.

      in context

  13. Mar 2021
    1. directly refers to one thing by mentioning another

      do we do this already irl