Mysterious and strange. Just what we like.
Very aware this is a single spoke in a very large wheel.
You wonder if he even knew where he was going after he wrote that first sentence.
reading
Musemathematics
“Numbers it is. All music when you come to think. Two multiplied by two divided by half is twice one. Vibrations: chords those are. One plus two plus six is seven. Do anything you like with figures juggling. Always find out this equal to that. Symmetry under a cemetery wall. He doesn’t see my mourning. Callous: all for his own gut. Musemathematics. And you think you’re listening to the etherial. But suppose you said it like: Martha, seven times nine minus x is thirtyfive thousand. Fall quite flat. It’s on account of the sounds it is.”
– James Joyce from Ulysses
“In short, did the English pay the fearful price for the system…
notepad-2015-week-37
Wondered
Why does anyone share anything ever. Does it help people? These are all thoughts and findings and I collected them over time and then here they are. What I thought was worth passing on. Perhaps I should be weaving it into some kind of artful enterprise, but for the moment there is only this. A list. I’m work on making more stuff, but there is very little time, it’s not easy. I’m posting “daily” sketches at Instagram, so follow me there if you like.
Haunted
I have to say I have been haunted by these two renderings from real time tech leonardo, Kyle McDonald. When I was little I remember imagining animation as it might be if each frame was as detailed as an oil painting, it didn’t take much practical experience for me to realise that such ideas would lead to certain doom of endless work, no friends and little result.
Bring on neural network analysis, the Inception Network and Google’s Deep Dream. This from the Bethge Lab.
In fine art, especially painting, humans have mastered the skill to create unique visual experiences through composing a complex interplay between the content and style of an image. Thus far the algorithmic basis of this process is unknown and there exists no artificial system with similar capabilities. However, in other key areas of visual perception such as object and face recognition near-human performance was recently demonstrated by a class of biologically inspired vision models called Deep Neural Networks. Here we introduce an artificial system based on a Deep Neural Network that creates artistic images of high perceptual quality. The system uses neural representations to separate and recombine content and style of arbitrary images, providing a neural algorithm for the creation of artistic images. Moreover, in light of the striking similarities between performance-optimised artificial neural networks and biological vision, our work offers a path forward to an algorithmic understanding of how humans create and perceive artistic imagery.
(quote via)
and the algorithm, the dream doings that wre blowing people away a month or so ago there are people around the word making this mad math work on images like this, and as you can read here, it’s not at After Effects plug-in utility level yet (there appears to be many lvels of adjustment and feedback loops), but i’m sure it’s only a matter of time and several levels of genius away.
Most of me is hoping it’ll never be that easy.
Heads up from Prosthetic Knowledge.
Bookmarked
This job is so cool because it’s about imagination, then destruction/The Groundbreaking Silhouette Animations of Lotte Reiniger/ Remove Water Stains From Wood Furniture with Mayonnaise/40 reasons why you should blog about your research/Mijn Begrafenis (My Funeral) by Maarten De Saeger (Bries)/ The Uber Endgame/Interview: The Diary of a Teenage Girl Author Phoebe Gloeckner/ Bringing International Communities Together Via the Medium of Comics – Wallis Eates on Connecting Teenagers Across the Commonwealth through Sequential Art/Debt is Good by Paul Krugman/Early Humans Made Animated Art/Could virtual reality revolutionise crisis-response filmmaking?/ Mutually Assured Content – In 2015, the illusion of audience ownership is becoming harder to sustain/ Spalding Gray’s Catastrophe by Oliver Sacks, ‘This only happened because people organized.’ – Nail salon workers speak out after NYT exposé by Sukjong Hong/Fette Sans Website back online/Jared Muralt – Sketchbook/Collaborative Self-Contained-Self-Portrait in the That Sea of Multiplicity – Traci Matlock/Linn Myers – Drawings/ Spinning Daggers by Benjamin Ducroz via Jim Le Fevre/
Curated
Tumbling daily since March 2008 at The Electronical Rattle Bag.
Read
1Q84 by Haruki Marukami
Autobiography by Morissey
A Picture Of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
Frankenstein by Mary Shelly
The Arrival by Shaun Tan
Persuasion by Jane Austen
Currently reading: Oliver Twist, Post-Capitalism: A Guide To Our Future, Human Diastrophism
Listened
All I know by Soul Sugar featuring Courtney John
Be kind, it’s free.
Frightened Control Freaks
“Whenever I’ve had to write prose I always find writing the description is really frustrating, because I think I could just draw this. And also there’s always so much more content to a drawing than to a prose description. I feel like there’s always so much more to be done with that. Plus when you’re writing prose you’re competing against Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and it’s very difficult to do anything that would be ultimately satisfying in terms of really differentiating yourself. At best I could write a halfway decent novel. That’s all I could ever hope for and that would be quite an accomplishment.”
“It sometimes seems like that’s the overriding trend in comics right now, beautiful drawings and empty stories.
I can’t tell if that’s just the result of a generation of kids who are raised with this different form of receiving media. Is it that or is it just that they’re coming out of the art world more than they used to? I don’t know, but there is something very strange about that. It doesn’t seem to be attracting people who just want to create stories and aren’t that visually oriented. You would sort of think that would be a part of the comics world that was opening up. At least I haven’t really seen that. Or they could just be doing stories I’m not very interested in.”
Format shift news for RSS subscribers
As anyone who follows me on RSS (haha!) will have noticed I have started making more microblog style posts on this feed on a daily basis. I have decided to do this so that some things I post on social media have a home here too. Somewhere between a backup and me having control of my own content. So you can get separate RSS feeds for this site, one to include the long read posts, ones categorised “macro”, and one for short posts titled “micro”. Frequency will on the macro will therefore be, at the very most, 2 or 3 times weekly.
Here they are:
From this site:
Microblog – miniposts, daybook, scrapbook.
Macroblog – News and longer posts,
Both – of the Above
Also:
LinkFeed – Everything I bookmark
Tumblr – (Proto-Scrapbook)
The Crashing of Tides.
There is a interesting confluence that occurs in the brain when it’s been focused on a project so singularly and for such a long period of time, and then that project ends. After a space of quiet all the thoughts you didn’t have for the intervening months suddenly crash in from all angles. It’s a very fruitful and provides great perspective, but can be over very quickly.
I’ll will post something about the job in question when it gets released, but for now I would just say We had the good fortune to work with animator Rosie Ashforth who turned around several of the miracles we performed to get the job done on time.
So I’ve had a couple of days off to recover, and to remember what the outside looks like.
It looks like this:
There’s a lot of catching up to do here as I missed out so much time but that will come. As the country recovers from a pretty dark election result and a new compassion less Britain, and summer struggles to get itself into gear. But there’s no need to mourn.
Currently reading this book:
I’ll feedback on that in due course.
Some of the thought tsunami concerned comics, which is always troubling. I’m re-reading Ivan Brunetti’s Cartooning: Philosophy and Practice:
Useful tools:
Paper
Pen
Life
…all else is vanity.
So we’ll see how that plays out.
The animation world lost the marvellous David Anderson, his film Deadsy was very intrinsic to the way I think about animation in general.
Check it out.
Books are Sharks
“We were talking about The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which was something which resembled an iPad, long before it appeared. And I said when something like that happens, it’s going to be the death of the book. Douglas said, No it won’t be. Books are sharks.
And I must have looked baffled at that because he looked very pleased with himself. And he carried on with his metaphor. He said, Books are sharks … because sharks have been around for a very, very long time. There were sharks before there were dinosaurs. And the reason sharks are still in the oceans is that nothing is better at being a shark than a shark is.
He said, Look at a book. A book is the right size to be a book. They’re solar-powered. If you drop them, they keep on being a book. You can find your place in them in microseconds. They’re really good at being books, he said, and books, no matter what else happens, will always survive. And of course he’s right.”
– Neil Gaiman, giving the Douglas Adams Memorial Lecture 2015
Frank O’Hara reading from Lunch Poems
“He reads them exactly the way you imagine them, or even read them aloud yourself: conversational, matter-of-fact, and incidentally just touched with Boston. He’s who you’d cast to play him.”
reblogging parisreview
Paul Greer 