“Delicacies” is my incoherent, irregular, unpredictable collection of interesting sparks I came across online. Handpicked by a human, no robots, no AI. A form of tripping, wandering, dérivé, with some loosely undefined theme holding them together. Delicacies have no fixed frequency: I hit the publish button when there is enough material. That can be after a week, or after 3 months. No pressure, literally.
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The very best
Kent Bye with his talk on Landscape of XR Ethics (2023). 19 minutes SUPER condensed overview of what is important in XR. Here is also the blog post with full transcript and slides…
Excellent Future Art Ecosystems by Serpentine Galleries. Very well done, simple layout, and great content.
It is almost impossible to imagine a world without worlds, but this is a story (RadioLab Podcast) about just that. Via TJ.
About Trash Future (spacial debris)
Why companies mistake control for culture. By Robert Campbell.
“A company with a positive culture is one where their beliefs are expressed by their people in a million different ways. It’s never rules where everyone expresses them in exactly the same way”.
The LLMentalist Effect: how chat-based Large Language Models replicate the mechanisms of a psychic’s con > By Baldur Bjarnason, from July 2023 but still so good. Via Gary Marcus.
Humans vs Hallucinations. By Gary Marcus
“LLM "hallucinations" arise, regularly, because (a) they literally don't know the difference between truth and falsehood, (b) they don't have reliably reasoning processes to guarantee that their inferences are correct and (c) they are incapable of fact-checking their own work.”
Data & Society
Cory Doctorow about “twiddling” as a theory of the mechanism of decay — the means by which platforms get shittier and shittier until they are a giant pile of shit.
“The extrusion of twiddling technology from digital platforms into the physical world isn’t cyberspace everting so much as it is cyberspace prolapsing.”
Because of You: about datafication and distortion in Generative AI. Artistic film intervention by Eryk Salvaggio. Data extraction compared to (human) cell extraction.
Why we continue to embrace analog technology: slow, effort, work, meaning, and the joy of happy accidents.
Innovation
About the role of participation and diversity in the regenerative journey - with Lizzie Shupak & John V Willshire
Why your strategy needs more chaos with the wonderful Robert Campbell and Martin Weigel (talk from 2019). Robert’s latest post “Logic Kills Wonder…” includes the Cadillac Wing example.
AI, Robots, Algorithms
About Physical AI: introducing Archetype AI
“AI today has been reduced to a chatbot. The biggest problems in the world are physical, not digital.”
About the State of Generative AI, April 2024, by Alberto Romero. Beyond the hype, the revolution continues
A proposal to connect thousands even millions of GPUs through light to create better AI infrastructures.
The 700$ Humane “Pin” with a 24$/month subscription does not meet its expectations.
“it's more or less the experience you'd expect from trying to interact with an AI chatbot while on the go — especially when those lines of communication are broken up with noise, inaccurate speech detection, and a clunky user interface.”
Ben Thompson’s reflections on Google’s ability to compete on cloud and AI
“Google is facing many of the same challenges after its decades long dominance of the open web: all of the products shown yesterday rely on a different business model than advertising, and to properly execute and deliver on them will require a cultural shift to supporting customers instead of tolerating them. What hasn’t changed — because it is the company’s nature, and thus cannot — is the reliance on scale and an overwhelming infrastructure advantage. That, more than anything, is what defines Google, and it was encouraging to see that so explicitly put forward as an advantage.”
The Future of Humanity Institute (FHI), an almost two-decades-old organization focused on researching and mitigating the existential risks posed by artificial intelligence, has shut down. And more troubling “Eugenics on Steroids” article about FHI in The Guardian.
AR, VR, XR, Games
Here is Andreea with a magic talk about VR, Games, and what Varela and Nietsche have to do with this. Highly recommended.
Physical Reality
Listen to the calmness of nature with Clément Bouteille. Via Nowness
Driving at night: a beautiful reflection by Matt Web about becoming diffuse and sensitive. With many links to music and film soundscapes.
“we do a disservice to alternative cognitive states to choose to name “flow,” simply because it relates to productivity, and to leave nameless this mode of becoming diffuse and sensitive, able to sense resonances and new ideas from species memory and from the future, and from there, pluck them, and return home with them.”
Superior Reality
Short video documentary about the Surrealist Manifesto by André Breton. I love how they talk about “Superior” reality, like the realities from your subconscious, aka dreams. The manifesto turns 100 this year.
New New Babylon
A recent talk by Bruce Sterling in Torino about Utopian Realism. Full (long) transcript with all slides. A real… delicacy, like a five-course top-class dinner!
“A basic Turinese problem here is that Torino is progressive, but a heritage tourist industry, which is very attractive to tourists, has no avant-garde. Their stifling interest in your past holds you back. You can’t do “futuristic heritage industry.” Why? Because you can’t move forward into the past.”
Art related
Probably the UK’s best-known contemporary sculptor, Gormley has created a new ‘field’ of 100 life-size cast-iron versions of himself at the historic Houghton Hall in Norfolk. Related blog post here.
I once had the opportunity to meet Berlinde De Bruyckere during an atelier visit in Ghent, and I was deeply impressed and moved. Now she is on show at the 2024 Venice Biennale with “City of Refuge III”
About Lyn Hershman Leeson, one of the first video media artists
Aesthetics
About a storyboard panel drawn by Salvador Dali from Alfred Hitchcock’s 1945 film Spellbound, including the lost dream sequence in which Ingrid Bergman turns into ants. More background here.
“Hitchcock would sometimes claim that storyboarding was his main creative duty, and that he regarded the directing process as mere donkey work, so dull that he barely bothered looking into the viewfinder.”
Inside radical architect-designer Paola Navone’s rooftop Milan home and collector’s instinct. Radical as an attitude and promoting imperfection, how about that?
Music/Sound/Dance
Sounds at the Speed of Sunset by Richard D. Bartlett. Composed & recorded over four days in Comnes Studio in Tuscany, it’s made entirely from sounds from his mouth, transformed by a briefcase of electronic sculpting tools
Petervan Musical Ride - April 2024
About “great” conversations. Sabine Deveilhe accompanied by pianist Mathieu Pordoy. The article in the newspaper described this performance and album as:
“Pianist Mathieu Pordoy is a dream partner: wringing, dancing, taunting and climaxing together – as a listener you have no chance of escaping such a seduction offensive.”
Books/Publication
In his new book — The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness — NYU social psychologist Jonathan Haidt argues that the transition from a play-based childhood to a phone-based childhood has been an epochal disaster for the cognitive and social development of young people.
And here is a review of that book by René Walter
Recap
My regular update on Petervan Studios April 2024. Many of these you have seen here first