LAST POST OF 2021 SUNNY SIDE UP RAINING DOWN ON PLACES TO SIT DOWN (non objective pointlessness) #sunnysideup #eggs #rainingeggs #sitdown #standup #clipstudiopaint #covid19 #fuckyourlivevideo #twitch #imahasanhead #reclining #formwithoutcontent #eggswithoutmeaning #meaningwithoutwords #semiotics #poggers #topchef #TYT #BrettUrlich is poggers
“Language isn’t neutral or objective. It is a vessel of cultural stories, values, and norms. And in the United States, everyday language plays into the violent, foundational myth of this country’s origin story—Europeans ‘discovering’ a virtually uninhabited wilderness and befriending the few primitive peoples who lived there—as well as other cultural myths and lies about Indigenous Peoples that are baked into U.S. culture and everyday life.
Cleve Davis (Shoshone-Bannock) points out that everyday language continues discrimination that is an extension of the centuries-long federal policy of genocide, assimilation, and oppression toward the original peoples of North America.
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It might seem harmless when your boss mentions the need for a powwow among the company’s executives or an online quiz promises to reveal your spirit animal, but everyday language like this is a result of centuries of violence and continues to perpetuate stereotypes that have real-life impacts on Native communities.”
Everyone who likes this comic needs to read @aiweirdness ’s amazing book on the limitations of AI and how we silly humans like to pretend it’s a lot better than it is — You Look Like A Thing and I Love You.
I’ve been working with an image-generating algorithm by Vadim Epstein called CLIP+FFT, which uses OpenAI’s CLIP algorithm to judge whether images match a given caption, and an FFT algorithm to come up with new images to present to CLIP. Give it any random phrase, and CLIP+FFT will try its best to come up with a matching image. And now there’s a version that will generate images to go with several phrases in a row and then fuse them into a video.
Here’s the sea shanty The Wellerman, sung by Nathan Evans, Jonny Stewart, and others, and illustrated by CLIP+FFT.
Now, there are several interesting things going on here, once you get past the sheer AI fever dream horror of it. One thing you’ll notice is that I changed some of the lines from the standard lyrics. CLIP+FFT deals with each line independently, so even if we have been talking about a ship and a whale throughout the song, the AI doesn’t know that in “when down on her a right whale bore”, the “her” refers to a ship. I made similar tweaks in one or two places.
There was nothing I could do about the line “One day, when the tonguing is done”. Trying to be more precise about the whaling sense of “tonguing” would, if anything, have made the image more horrifying.
Having none of the “Wellerman is a ship” context, the AI interprets The Wellerman itself as some kind of eldritch oil well drilling supervillain.
I kind of like what happened to “The winds blew hard, her bow dipped down,” with golden locks of hair and bows everywhere. I mean, I like it in a “oh no this has gone terribly yet fascinatingly wrong” sort of way.
The image for “We’ll take our leave and go” is also interesting, since it illustrates “leave” in so many ways. Sometimes there are cars and suitcases, or people shaking hands. Interestingly, I see hints of European Union flags and British flags in many of them, signs that during training CLIP was learning to associate “leave” with Brexit.
The “bully boys” are hilarious, classic glowering expressions and mean-kid haircuts. The AI is not used to the early-1900s meaning of “bully = awesome”
You’ll notice that many of the frames have text, which I find charming, as if the AI is frowning to itself and muttering “tea. tea. Billy. tea.” or “blow. blow.” The less interpretable the phrase is in image form, the more likely the AI is to use text instead.
I also had CLIP+FFT illustrate The Twelve Days of Christmas and this is one of my favorite frames from it: Ten Lords A-Leaping
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Every visual iteration of “the tonguing” is deeply unsettling. I love it.
Today I’m discussing a prescient novel which analyses the subtleties of social order and stability, and the place we each accept within it. John Steinbeck’s The Pearl is a brilliantly insightful work about a pearl diver named Kino, who lived in a poor area of Mexico in 1940. He acquires the most valuable pearl he, or anyone he has ever known, has ever seen. The acquisition of this pearl, rather…
Modern depictions of food are concerned more with artifice and ideology than with genuine potential as food to be eaten. Food in our magazines and on television isn’t ‘real’ food. This is what Barthes concerns himself with in Ornamental Cookery. He explains how food in contemporary culture as been given an artificial reality to repackage it as a dream of smartness and sophistication.
A picture is about what is included in it. There is an argument to be made that the meaning of a picture is also to be found in what is omitted from the frame, but what is included needs to be seen first in order to establish what is missing. In this way, the totality of a picture’s meaning is present in virtue of its contents. This principle applies to our social world too. What we know about…
Italo Calvino, La squadratura, in Semiotiche della pittura. I classici. Le ricerche, Edited by Lucia Corrain, Meltemi, Roma, 2004, pp. 225-236 (pdf here) [from: Italo Calvino, La squadratura, in Giulio Paolini, Idem, «Einaudi Letteratura» 39, Einaudi, Torino, 1975, pp. VII-XV] [«EC» – Rivista dell'Associazione Italiana Studi Semiotici, Palermo]
I often refer to these images from the HSBC ads a few years ago to talk about interpretation of images/symbols in artworks and how our experiences can alter how we read things.
