IMAGINED
IMAGINED-SPACES: (/ɪˈmadʒɪn/) (speɪs/) (noun)
Autodesk Maya, Arnold, Unity, virtual realities, imagined realities, 360 Video, computer graphics, rendering, augmented environments, realtime processing.
“The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way. Some see nature all ridicule and deformity… and some scarce see nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself.”
– William Blake
“Actually, there’s no secret. One simply pulls the cork out of the bottle, waits three minutes, and two thousand or more years of Scottish craftsmanship does the rest.”
- INTERVIEWER: Let’s start with obsession. You seem to have an obsessive way of repeatedly playing out permutations of a certain set of emblems and concerns. Things like the winding down of time, car crashes, birds and flying, drained swimming pools, airports, abandoned buildings, Ronald Reagan . . .
- BALLARD: I think you’re completely right. I would say that I quite consciously rely on my obsessions in all my work, that I deliberately set up an obsessional frame of mind. In a paradoxical way, this leaves one free of the subject of the obsession. It’s like picking up an ashtray and staring so hard at it that one becomes obsessed by its contours, angles, texture, et cetera, and forgets that it is an ashtray—a glass dish for stubbing out cigarettes.
- INTERVIEWER: So you rely on the magnetism of an obsession as a way of proceeding?
- BALLARD: Yes, so the unity of the enterprise is forever there. A whole universe can be bounded in a nutshell. Of course, why one chooses certain topics as the subject for one’s obsessions is a different matter. Why was I obsessed by car crashes? It’s such a peculiar idea.
- INTERVIEWER: Yes, why were you?
- BALLARD: Presumably all obsessions are extreme metaphors waiting to be born. That whole private mythology, in which I believe totally, is a collaboration between one’s conscious mind and those obsessions that, one by one, present themselves as stepping-stones.
from the Paris Review
The first great works of digital literature are already being written
“The problem is that people who like science and technology, and people who like storytelling and the arts have typically been placed in different buildings since about the age of 16. We haven’t been taught how to admire each others’ work, to recognise excellence, or even to know that there is excellence in “the other culture”. There’s a kind of sullen arrogance on both sides, with some people in both camps simply denying that the other knows anything worth listening to. There is a kind of “worthy” arts professional who thinks that knowing nothing about games – like saying “I don’t even own a television!” – is a marker of intellectual superiority.”
GHOST CELL – TRAILER from Antoine Delach (2015)
Ghost cell 3D Paris scan / more : antoinedelach.com/GHOST-CELL
“A la fois film scientifique, documentaire et balade onirique, Ghost Cell est une plongée en relief au cœur des entrailles d’un Paris organique vu comme une cellule au travers d’un microscope virtuel.”
How Does Your Phone Know This Is A Dog?
Last year, we (a couple of people who knew nothing about how voice search works) set out to make a video about the research that’s gone into teaching computers to recognize speech and understand language.
Making the video was eye-opening and brain-opening. It introduced us to concepts we’d never heard of – like machine learning and artificial neural networks – and ever since, we’ve been kind of fascinated by them. Machine learning, in particular, is a very active area of Computer Science research, with far-ranging applications beyond voice search – like machine translation, image recognition and description, and Google Voice transcription.
So… still curious to know more (and having just started this project) we found Google researchers Greg Corrado and Christopher Olahand ambushed them with our machine learning questions.
“Marshall McLuhan, what are you doin’?”
“I’m making explorations. I don’t know where they’re going to take me…. I want to map new terrain rather than chart old landmarks… As an investigator, I have no fixed point of view, no commitment to any theory—my own or anyone else’s. As a matter of fact, I’m completely ready to junk any statement I’ve ever made about any subject if events don’t bear me out, or if I discover it isn’t contributing to an understanding of the problem. The better part of my work on media is actually somewhat like a safe-cracker’s. I don’t know what’s inside; maybe it’s nothing. I just sit down and start to work. I grope, I listen, I test, I accept and discard; I try out different sequences–until the tumblers fall and the doors spring open.”
Against Design
“I recognize the value of building an established discipline, and of crafting a shared set of principles that define game design as a profession. But, I also think that in our efforts to define and legitimize our practice as a professional discipline we sometimes forget the history we inherit, the legacy of games made by communities of players, games made by amateurs, by dilettantes, by mathematicians, mothers, scientists, gym teachers, shepherds, inventors, philosophers, eccentrics and cranks.
And in honor of this tradition I would like to suggest other verbs for us to describe where games come from, alternatives to the overconfident precision of the word “design”. Words like invent, discover, compose, write, find, grow, perform, build, support, identify, copy, re-assemble, excavate and preserve.”
Hand and Machine
“And so maybe the way human beings combine these random snippets of information to create something new, maybe the connections we make and the way we remix the things we know and transmit them to others are what gives us the edge over the machines. Maybe our creativity is the real key to our survival. We can take that information and not just reduce it, we can make something new out of it. And the machines can’t do that. Yet.”
– Julian Simpson (@)
Paul Greer 