Petervan Delicacies #173
June - August 2024
“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
Mickey McManus on why a product and experience designer, who has spent his life exploring the built world of places and things, would start a new chapter of his life deeply focused on biology: How Might AI Accelerate Progress in the Bio World?
16 types of creators. By Venkat. This makes me think of Carl Jung’s 8 creator archetypes
About online swarms and how to steer them. By Rafa Summer of Protocols.
Jamais Cascio applies his BANI Framework to the 2024 US election moment and coping mechanisms for it
Brittle gets countered by Bendable, as in flexibility and resilience, such as alternative sourcing and disaster plans. Anxiety can be met by Acceptance, empathy for what others experience, and an attempt not to use anger and fear to respond to anger and fear. Nonlinearity needs Neuroflexibility, the capacity to improvise, think critically, and reject scripted responses. And we can push back against Incomprehensibility with Inclusion of multiple, diverse perspectives and ideas.
AI, Robots, Algorithms
Benjamin Bratton has some good arguments to look at AI not as a threat but as an avenue for radical weird possibilities. Via Azeem.
James Lovelock calmly reports that Earth life as we know it may be giving way to abiotic forms of life/intelligence, and that as far as he is concerned, that’s just fine. He tells us quite directly that he is happy to sign off from this mortal coil knowing that the era of the human substrate for complex intelligence is giving way to something else — not as transcendence, not as magic, not as leveling up, but simply a phase shift in the very same ongoing process of selection, complexification and aggregation that is “life,” that is us.
GTP-5: Everything you need to know: a long (very long) overview of what’s coming. By Alberto Romero.
Internet Culture
About a new kind of network and network architects: decentralized VPN and zero-trust networks in a background tech epoch. By Venkat who calls it “cozytech”
The Network School. On an island in Singapore. By Balaji, the father of the Network State. Very libertarian.
“The Network School is for those who understand that Bitcoin succeeds the Federal Reserve, that encryption is the only true protection against unreasonable search and seizure, that AI can deliver better opinions than any Delaware magistrate, and that democracy can be rejuvenated with cryptography. It is for those who believe in technology, harmony, internationalism, and capitalism. It’s for those who want Silicon Valley without San Francisco. And for those who want to found, fund, and find not just new companies and currencies — but new cities and new communities.”
Superior Reality
About teaching with an iPAD: wonderful series of iPAD notebooks by Ali Kavaspor
New New Babylon
Geo-engineering for carbon removal, a review of Liam Young’s ‘Planetary Redesign’ (2023), and a role for art, architecture, and speculative design in envisaging, sharing, and articulating awkward possible futures. Long (20 min read) fascinating edit of a review of Liam Young’s show ‘Planetary Redesign’ at the National Gallery of Victoria in 2023 by Dan Hill
“The sky will be transformed into an uncontained cloud of intelligence, the dream of a brain, a brain without a shell: shapeless shapes, impossible colours, the unimaginable imagined … These are the first seismic whispers. Soon it will be everywhere, overheard conversations with no human source. Soon we will all think it. And then it will happen.” Iain Sinclair, Bad News’, London Review of Books, 6 December 1990
Art related
Anthony McCall is showing his light sculptures at Tate Modern from 27 June 2024 till 27 April 2025
Frozen slices of the past, a portal into the universe. Amazing artwork by Louis Petruccelli - Via Josie Gibson
New extensive online archive of Picasso’s work
Aesthetics
Looking forward to your new endeavors, Dries!
Music/Sound/Dance
Striking dance performance Palingenesis
She makes me think of Bowie. Stylish…
Horologic Solum is a case study and exploration into media memory, its configurative logic, materiality, cultural functionality, and the information that gets stored on it, distorted, decayed, and reinterpreted.
Fuerza Bruta Dance Spectacle. Brand new show “AVEN” coming to London in July
The Blaze - Live
Tarek Atoui: interesting sound installations. In SMAK Ghent till 31 December 2024
Books/Publication
About “Minds in Motion”: fascinating book on physical movement in space as the foundation for abstract thought. Thx for the heads-up, Andreea!
Learning in Dreamscapes: how (some) dreams are also about training movement in a safe simulated environment. With links to Jung & co. By Venkat. Somehow, this relates to my upcoming New Babylon performance, where dreams and virtual space merge into some form of storytelling.
Thus, during REM sleep, the brain simulates actions by issuing motor commands that, while not executed, have consequences as if they had been. This study suggests that the sleeping brain, while disengaged from the external world, uses its internal model of the world to simulate interactions with it.
For real nerds
About Visualizing Mathematics with 3D Printing
Only true science nerds get this joke. By Chris Ferries
About the speed of the Trump bullet. By Haje Jan Kamps
Smile
I have put this in the smile section, but the content is rather serious: what makes us human and the threat (or not) of generative AI? BTW, Michael Wagner’s YouTube channel is a trove of knowledge about spatial audio, game design and digital media, especially in Ableton and Logic Pro.