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Remote Sensing
In this session we will be ‘Taking Space Without Moving’, by conducting a remote investigation of a real place. By employing remotely accessible visual and aural representation of a specific place as its narrations, we will ask ‘what is real in remote sensing?’. This activity will lead you to reflect how notions of a ‘sensory sociology of futures yet to exist’ are employed creatively in speculative imagination...

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When MIT Media Lab researcher Joy Buolamwini discovers that facial recognition does not see dark-skinned faces accurately, she embarks on a journey to push for the first-ever U.S. legislation against bias in algorithms that impact us all.

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‘Haunting the Future…’ posits hauntings –intended as both inhabiting and exorcising the future– as a source of insights for artistic practices that encompass speculative imagination, personal creative development and future studies.

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This module is a 6-weeks, student-centred learning engagement with these core questions, as approached through your own practice.

It addresses the potential of speculative imagination in various forms of creative labour, understood as acts of facing-forward ‘worlding’, both individual and collective.

The module is structured through 6 sessions and associated readings in between each session, leading to a presentation and submission of a ‘visual essay’.

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Talking Ghosts
In this session we will work together manipulating some specific visual objects employed in the construction of future urban scenarios  –the 3D People bundles– and develop some specific entry points into the proposed frame of reference.

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This will be an evening of group tutorials, using the breakout room facility on Zoom.
We will discuss and develop your own approaches to the themes of this elective, responding to the previous sessions and helping you build up your own strategies and devices of speculative imagination through group conversations.

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In this final session, each participant will have the chance to present their work as a ‘draft’ stage for the ‘visual essay’ to be submitted as the assessment for this module. At this stage, your presentations can be open-ended and use any format you feel comfortable with.

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What happens to the power of IMAGINATION when UNCERTAINTY becomes the condition of our times? 

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What happens to the power of IMAGINATION when UNCERTAINTY becomes the condition of our times? 

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How do we navigate with awareness and care the fading boundaries between reality and speculation, fact and fiction suggested by our extremely volatile present? Should we rather speak of ‘ficting’ and ‘facting’ (Wark, 2020)?

Is the future a moment in time or a place in history? Is it an attitude, an orientation, or an affect? Or is it a construction of form and style?
(Schavemaker, Folkerts, Lindner, 2015)

How can we heed the ‘poetic faith’ that our creativity demands, whilst positively ‘haunt the future’ in our speculative imagination?

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You will be introduced to the core ideas of our module and its main propositions in a presentation by your lead tutor. You will be prompted by artworks and visual culture objects that directly employ speculative imagination to address ideas of the future in these most uncertain of times. We will also introduce some readings to inform your own position within these ideas and set out the agenda for the following sessions.

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How are we to face the challenge of leaving a fertile cultural legacy to those who will come after the end of our future? How can we help the creation of new worlds out of the ruins of our own?

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Haunting the Future: Speculative imagination and creative work in radically uncertain times

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VISUAL ESSAY DELIVERY DEADLINE: 10am - 16th March

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VISUAL ESSAY DELIVERY DEADLINE: 10am - 16th March

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A Visual Essay based on 10 images produced in response to the specialist course, accompanied by written critical commentary (1500 words).

This method of collection, collaging and accumulation of images is suggested by the work of the historian Abi Warburg ‘Mnemosyne Atlas’ who ‘thought this visual, metaphoric encyclopaedia, with its constellations of symbolic images, would animate the viewer’s memory, imagination, and understanding of what he called “the afterlife of antiquity.”

In the context of this module, our suggestion here is that you think of Warburg’s prompts and your visual essay and as a ‘future facing’ form of accumulation that would animate a possible ‘afterlife’ of a present time that you wish to bring into being –to ‘world’– in your own work. They might suggest tangible developments but can also be understood as ‘time capsules’ sent further to an unspecified time/place/situation.

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Ficting and Facting. McKenzie Wark, RIBOCA2-2nd Riga International Biennial of Contemporary Art 2020 - Mousse Magazine and Publishing

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Miķelis Fišers, In-finity, 2020. Commissioned by the 2nd Riga International Biennial of Contemporary Art, RIBOCA2. Courtesy: the artist and Riga International

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TAKING SPACE WITHOUT MOVING: Thu 16th February 2023, MDX VIS4002 HAUNTING THE FUTURE

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TAKING SPACE WITHOUT MOVING: Thu 16th February 2023, MDX VIS4002 HAUNTING THE FUTURE

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A CHANGE OF DIRECTION An Introduction to Facing Forward- Art & Theory From a Future Perspective

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WEEKLY READING: Ursula K LeGuin, THE ONES WHO WALK AWAY FROM OMELAS, 1972.

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WEEKLY READING: Ursula K LeGuin, THE ONES WHO WALK AWAY FROM OMELAS, 1972.

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Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures (GTDF) is an arts/research collective that uses this website as a workspace for collaborations around different kinds of artistic, pedagogical, cartographic, and relational experiments that aim to identify and de-activate colonial habits of being, and to gesture towards the possibility of decolonial futures.

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Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures (GTDF) 10 points

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WEEKLY READING: Extrapolating Neoliberalism in the Western Frontier: Octavia Butler’s ParablesTheory for the World to Come: Speculative Fiction and Apocalyptic Anthropology, 2019, pp. 61-68

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WEEKLY READING: Extrapolating Neoliberalism in the Western Frontier: Octavia Butler’s ParablesTheory for the World to Come: Speculative Fiction and Apocalyptic Anthropology, 2019, pp. 61-68

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'In this book, I begin to think about the theories for the world to come- what theories there are that will help to build a sustainable, equitable world after collapse. Or, maybe, sets of theories that when put into play in the present will change the possible futures that have come to grip our imaginations'.

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Extrapolating Neoliberalism in the Western Frontier: Octavia Butler's Parables from Theory for the World to Come: Speculative Fiction and Apocalyptic Anthropology on JSTOR

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Extrapolating Neoliberalism in the Western Frontier:, Theory for the World to Come, pp. 61-68

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WEEKLY READING: Alberto Duman, 'Whiteness, Reloaded.Addressing the ghosts in reverse* of the cities yet to exist', 2022

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WEEKLY READING: Alberto Duman, 'Whiteness, Reloaded.Addressing the ghosts in reverse* of the cities yet to exist', 2022

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In recent years, images of ‘futuring’ of the contemporary city –a term borrowed from the language of future management- have been largely shaped by spectral urban figures/agents within urban processes and regeneration atmospheres which I would describe as acts of ‘future colonisation’.

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Whiteness, Reloaded. Addressing the ghosts in reverse* of the cities yet to exist.

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A very interesting article written by Alice Bucknell: Ecological World-Building: From Science Fiction to Virtual Reality 

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A very interesting article written by Alice Bucknell: Ecological World-Building: From Science Fiction to Virtual Reality 

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'Originating with science fiction and fantasy writers, the practice of creating imaginary worlds is one that has gone on to influence many contemporary artists today who are experimenting with advanced technologies to create alternate realities and new visions for the future. Here, Alice Bucknell draws a line from the otherworldly, ecological imaginings of writers like Octavia Butler and Ursula K Le Guin to the “digital gardening” practices of artists like Jakob Kudsk Steensen, Jenna Sutela and Ian Cheng...'

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"An age of living with as opposed to living for oneself; an era where the human and nonhuman are inexorably linked in tentacular practice."

Originating with science fiction and fantasy writers, the practice of creating imaginary worlds is one that has gone on to influence many contemporary artists today who are experimenting with advanced technologies to create alternate realities and new visions for the future. Here, Alice Bucknell draws a line from the otherworldly, ecological imaginings of writers like Octavia Butler and Ursula K Le Guin to the "digital gardening" practices of artists like Jakob Kudsk Steensen, Jenna Sutela and Ian Cheng. Text Alice Bucknell
"There is nothing new under the sun," suggested Octavia Butler, the late African-American science fiction writer, in her unfinished book Parable of the Trickster. "But there are new suns." Trickster was to be the final text in Butler's Parable series: borne out of the 90s, it's a disturbingly prescient vision of the 2020s, set in a crumbling California eaten up by wildfires amid the rise of American fascism. Its protagonist, a young Black woman named Lauren Oya Olamina, conceives of a new religious community - Earthseed - whose destiny is interstellar resettlement. Akin to the speculative practice of terraforming[1], Earthseedlings embark upon a spaceship for the next habitable planet. Yet the ship is christened The Christopher Columbus, suggesting that this cosmic colonialism will just repeat our Earthly mistakes. Slowly, Butler pokes holes in the techno-utopian fantasy of a "Planet B" for humanity, exposing the hubris and fallibility of this anthropocentric understanding of the universe.

Like the late speculative fiction writer and poet Ursula K. Le Guin, Butler's brand of sci-fi ditches the jacked-up macho fantasies that characterize the genre to examine issues closer to home. Unlike the techno-dystopian cities dreamed up by William Gibson and Philip K. Dick, the violent intergalactic warfare envisioned by H.G. Wells and Ray Bradbury, or the "hard science" fiction of Arthur C. Clarke, Le Guin and Butler use the world-building capacities of the speculative and science fictions as a cypher into the complex social, cultural, and ecological conditions of life here on Spaceship Earth[2]. In their work, Butler and Le Guin established a more empathetic kind of world-building, using the genres as a way to think critically about society in a political-ecological context while envisioning alternative futures.

These strategies have found their way into a new kind of art practice today. Utilizing VR and AR technologies, game engine software, and recent developments in artificial intelligence like deep learning, these artists augur digital environments and prototype more-than-human futures centred around collaborative strategies for ecological survival. Working across video, sculpture, live simulation, and interactive installation, Jakob Kudsk Steensen, Ian Cheng, Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, and Jenna Sutela address the catastrophic damage of anthropocentric thinking while giving agency to nonhuman protagonists - from extinct Hawaiian songbirds to Martian bacteria and simulated shibas. The result is the creation and co-habitation of new worlds that work inside a field of expanded interspecies empathy - what theorist Donna Haraway calls the Chthulucene: an age of living with as opposed to living for oneself; an era where the human and nonhuman are inexorably linked in tentacular practice.

In 2016, Kudsk Steensen stumbled upon a Youtube video featuring the mating call of the last Kaua'i 'ō'ō bird that existed on Earth. With half a million views and thousands of comments lamenting the lost animal, the video radiates a profound sense of shared grief but also a weird wonder, as today's scientists talk of resurrecting extinct creatures with AI. Dissecting our complex relationship with these "ghosts of nature which haunt the present and influence the future," in the words of Nils Bubandt and Anna Tsing, the artist reconstructed the bird's island home piece by piece using archival material from the Museum of Natural History in New York, 3D satellite imagery, and his own travels. The result was RE-ANIMATED (2018-19), a VR installation that enabled visitors to encounter the Kaua'i 'ō'ō and its natural ecology through embodied experience.

A similar project that takes particular aim at the impact of the global tourism industry upon local ecologies is Primal Tourism (2016). As a full-scale virtual replica of Bora Bora, the work's fictive island is a cross-temporal mash-up of ancient ecosystems and future-dystopian abandoned resorts. Merging non-human narratives with drone's-eye view footage, fetishistic Dutch colonial diaries, and holiday photographs mined from the depths of Reddit, Primal Tourism is a heady, cacophonous vision of a burnt-out planet caught in a kind of pandemic-era e-tourism. Rejigging the work to incorporate multi-player accessibility for the Artist Worlds event, Primal Tourism joins the ranks of Cao Fei's 2009 in being as much of a social project as an ecological one.

Echoing Kudsk Steensen's interest in the capacity of digital world-building to dilate and reshuffle our experience of time, Ian Cheng's Emissaries (2015-2017) trilogy is a core tenant of this emergent practice. Each episodic virtual ecosystem of Emissaries houses a roster of animal and plant characters that exist indefinitely in the computer-generated simulation. Independent from their creator, the critters wallow in primordial swampscapes and bitter ice-blasted tundras; programmed with goal-oriented motivations akin to video game protagonists, these creatures evolve and take action in their own free will. Curiously, Cheng's brand of techno-ecological storytelling loops with our own: Emissaries unfolds in the transfixing and tedious pace of real time.

Describing his practice as the "unnatural art" of Worlding, Cheng expands upon its political, ecological and existential potential in his 2018 publication, Emissaries Guide to Worlding. Washed in Internet-era RGB cobalt blue and brandishing the manic persuasion of a Dr. Bronner's soap bottle, Cheng's publication outlines the four steps to world-building: choosing a present, storytelling the past, simulating its futures, and nurturing its changes. The boundaries between Worlding in a virtual gamespaces and Worlding AFK[3] collapse, as Cheng equates the nurturing of Worlds to familiar acts of care. Worlding, he argues, happens as much in dredges of the Capitalocene[4] as alternative spaces of magic, from growing a garden to growing a family: "CEOs, gardeners, mothers, and shamans undertake this role so that their greater game may continuously flourish." At once, the game engines of the old world - religion, commerce, and technology - run parallel to the automated worlds of Emissaries, whose "engine of ongoingness" is reminiscent of the early web movement of Digital Gardens.

First posited by Mark Bernstein in his 1998 digital essay, " Hypertext Gardens" and later developed by Mike Caulfield in 2015, Digital Gardens are an Internet-based labyrinth of communal spaces, ideas and experiences. Visitors can travel them in any order, resisting the techno-progressive linear data streams of sites like Facebook and Twitter. As a virtual community landscape that's collectively cared for, digital gardens constantly grow and change, enabling the coexistence of various pages on the same topic. Digital gardens argue for a plurality of voices and nurture a heterogeneous, non-linear environment of mutual accountability, as their gardeners weed out broken links and tend to this shared knowledge network. And perhaps unsurprisingly in an era ripe with structural change, Digital Gardens are once again on the rise.

Kudsk Steensen references digital gardening in his practice as a type of restorative ecology: by bringing extinct species back to life and allowing them to speak for themselves, alongside his digitization of plants and other bio-material into algorithmically-accelerated virtual landscape. Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg and Jenna Sutela take this application one step further, utilizing artificial intelligence and game engines to nurture interplanetary ecologies and lend a voice to more-than-human life on the Red Planet.

In The Wilding of Mars (2019), Ginsberg presents a simulated growth network of cross-planetary wilderness. Seeded with Earthly flora, the Martian garden surges into being as millennia of growth materialize in a matter of hours; sub-Antarctic perennials and a desert cacti sprout from greenifying topsoil across a dozen screens as conditions grow more tolerable from the multiplying plants. Imagining a different kind of terraforming where the colonizing species is not human but plant-based generates new questions on other species' right to space and an infinite array of more-than-human futures as multiple simulations collide inside Ginsberg's virtual world.

As an AI-enabled attempt at interspecies communication, nimiia cétiï (2018) by Jenna Sutela feeds the computer a Martian tongue channeled by a nineteenth century French Mystic, while its neural network simultaneously tracks the micro-movements of a bacteria that could ostensibly live on Mars. The resulting triage is an experimental language form that sounds both human and otherworldly. White text tracing the bacteria's motions appears across the screen like hieroglyphs while a worm's-eye-view of a CGI Martian landscape establishes this video as an empathetic space for listening differently.

The cornerstone of techno-ecological Worlding is agency for non-human species, whether that's a literal vocality (Sutela); actionable free-will (Cheng); or an inhabitable digital environment that imagines alternatives to anthropocentric narratives (Kudsk Steensen and Ginsberg). As with the Digital Gardens of Web 1.0, these simulated landscapes blur the boundaries between cultivated and 'wild' nature. In their hybridized, ever-fluctuating form, they puncture the pristine images of empty deserts and forests that Anna Tsing refers to as the tools colonial imagination - fabricated imaginaries that offer colonizers the justification for their capture.[5]

In Annihilation, the first of three books in the Southern Reach trilogy, New Weird[6] fiction writer Jeff VanderMeer augurs a sentient subterranean tower that's part architectural, part ecological, and fully imbricated in the lives of the explorers that venture into Area X. Cited by Kudsk Steensen as an inspiration for his work, VanderMeer's trippy fiction envisions a world where the human and non-human are quite literally bound up at their core, one cohabiting the other, blurring the boundaries between humans and non-human and extending the ideas of Haraway. Life in the Chthulucene isn't easy, but building a collaborative, cross-species future is the only certain path for continuing life on this planet. The speculative ecologies shaped by these artists give us a glimpse into what these alternative worlds might look like, and the tools to imagine for ourselves what could exist under those new suns.

Notes

[1] With its origins in mid-century American science fiction, Terraforming is the concept of colonizing other planets and transforming them to look like our own habitable Earth environment. After decades of being decried as a starry-eyed fantasy, the concept is back in vogue through outspoken, deep-pocketed proponents such as Elon Musk, who is at the helm of a new privatized space race that has identified Mars as a potential Plan B for post-Earth humankind.

[2] On a similar wavelength to Butler and Le Guin was Buckminster Fuller, an American architect and futurist whose concept of Spaceship Earth, popularized in the mid-60s, served as cognitive reboot of understanding of planet Earth: both in terms of our place upon it (along with all other species and ecologies) and where it was going.

[3] AFK, short for "away from keyboard", is an alternative expression to IRL ("in real life") that collapses the boundary between 'online' and 'offline' selves in a time where such a distinction is rendered obsolete. This concept is outlined by Legacy Russell in her 2020 manifesto Glitch Feminism.

[4] Defined in 2014 by environmental historian and sociologist Jason Moore, the Capitalocene is a type of ecosocialist critique which addresses the climate crisis as an extension of global capitalism, and acknowledges that environmental justice is precluded by the web of power and culture that define our current system of capitalism.

[5] Wark, M. (2020) 'Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing: Friction in the Universal Joint' in Sensoria: Thinkers for the Twenty-First Century. London: Verso, 113-125.

[6] The New Weird is a fiction subgenre that emerged in the 1990s and concentrates its efforts around the ragged edges of horror, science-fiction, fantasy, and speculative fiction. Described by VanderMeer as "a type of secondary-world fiction that subverts the romanticized ideas about place found in traditional fantasy, largely by choosing realistic, complex real-world models as the jumping off point for creation of settings that may combine elements of both science fiction and fantasy", it draws heavily on pulp horror serials of the past including the work of H.P. Lovecraft, and is often ecological in focus.

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Ecological World-Building: From Science Fiction to Virtual Reality

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Alice Bucknell draws a line from the otherworldly, ecological imaginings of writers like Octavia Butler to the "digital gardening" practices of artists like Jakob Kudsk Steensen and Jenna Sutela.

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THIS IS THE 3D PEOPLE COMPANY WE LOOKED AT...

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THIS IS THE 3D PEOPLE COMPANY WE LOOKED AT...

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Look again at how these 'characters as products' are 'bundled'. Reflect on how these associations are made, what criteria are used to create these 'communities of potential characters' from their singularity and onto their 'commonality'...
Think of how these 'bundles/communities' are potential figure that can help us study how people in real life associate (their work, their leisure, their location), but also how these categories reproduce social characteristics such as 'whiteness' by name a non-white bundle of characters, the 'ethnic bundle'...

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3D PEOPLE - 3D People For your visualizations and animations

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Do you create architectural visualizations? And animations, too? Well, that's where we come from. We from 3D PEOPLE know what it takes to make your project easier, your workflow faster and your life more fun! Our goal is to help you improve your results by adding that extra bit of realism to your visuals and simultaneously making your workflow easier.

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'THE INOPERATIVE COMMUNITY' Jean-Luc Nancy 

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'THE INOPERATIVE COMMUNITY' Jean-Luc Nancy 

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In thinking of these 'bundles/communities', I'm drawing here on a pioneering work of Jean-Luc Nancy from 1991: 'The Inoperative Community' which you can download as a pdf here...

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AND SPEAKING ABOUT HUMANS BEING DIGITISED...

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AND SPEAKING ABOUT HUMANS BEING DIGITISED...

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The Congress is a 2013 live-action/animated science fiction drama film written and directed by Ari Folman, based on Stanisław Lem's 1971 Polish science fiction novel The Futurological Congress.

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THE CONGRESS [Official Trailer] Available On iTunes & VOD July 14th • In Select Theaters August 29th

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...The exhibition will also include the largest UK presentation of Achiampong’s Relic Traveller project (2017 – ongoing). This multi-disciplinary work envisages a pan-African alliance of travellers who explore landscapes of the near future, collecting testimonies of those who have been historically oppressed by colonialism, capitalism and globalisation. The installation will incorporate all five Relic films, Relic flags and a new series of life-size Relic Traveller figures (The Relic Travellers’ Alliance: Assembly 1 & 2, 2021).

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Admission

From Free - £11.50

10am - 5pm

British-Ghanaian artist Larry Achiampong works in film, sculpture, installation, sound, collage, music and performance. His work draws on popular culture and his communal and personal heritage.

Included in his first major UK solo show to date is Achiampong's debut feature length film Wayfinder, as well as a large presentation of his Pan African flags, life-sized Relic Traveller figures and Glyth collages. It will also reveal some of his influences from video games to the landscape paintings of JMW Turner.

Pop in to play!

Everyone is welcome to pop in to the Café during the exhibition of Larry Achiampong: Wayfinder and play some of the best video games from the last three decades. There's a game for everyone, from Donkey Kong to The Legend of Zelda. Play against friends and families, or rediscover your favourites. Let the games commence!

Prices

Adult £11.50 | £12.65 with Gift Aid donation
Concessions (Jobseeker, full time student & registered disabled) £8.50 | £9.35
Art Fund Pass £5.75 | £6.33 with Gift Aid donation
MK Gallery Members / Under 26s / Accompanying Carers Free
MK Residents £1 | £1.10 with Gift Aid donation every Tuesday
We would like to encourage all visitors to pre-book their tickets.
To book your MK Resident tickets: Log in to your account, select the MK Residents ticket type at checkout, and your tickets will automatically be discounted if you hold an MK postcode. You will not need to enter any payment details. Milton Keynes Residents are those who pay Milton Keynes council tax.

Exhibition events

16 October Relaxed Exhibition Viewing
25 OctoberVolunteer Recruitment Evening
29 OctoberToddle Exhibition Tour
29 OctoberChild Exhibition Tour (SEND)
4 NovemberMK Gallery Late
12 NovemberBSL Exhibition Tour
20 NovemberRelaxed Exhibition Viewing
3 DecemberAudio Described Exhibition Tour
This exhibition has been commissioned by Turner Contemporary with MK Gallery and BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art.

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Larry Achiampong: Wayfinder - MK Gallery

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From Free - £11.50 10am - 5pm British-Ghanaian artist Larry Achiampong works in film, sculpture, installation, sound, collage, music and performance. His work draws on popular culture and his communal and personal heritage.

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AND ANOTHER INTERESTING READING ABOUT VIRTUAL WORLDS...

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AND ANOTHER INTERESTING READING ABOUT VIRTUAL WORLDS...

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'A virtual world appears to be real, because the virtual camera that documents it creates a picture that resembles an analog photograph, and the history of photographic images has lead us to believe that photographs capture the real. While they seem to be connected to the real through their photographic quality, the fact that they are computer models, and therefore have a mathematical sense of regularity, also gives these worlds a sense of being timeless yet also ephemeral.'

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by Rachel Clarke and Claudia Hart

Virtual worlds have an uncanny quality because they are mathematically perfect and regular, and filled with computer models of objects. These are sometimes architecture, sometimes things, whatever a user decides should fill his or her void.

Virtual worlds are remote in a variety of psychological and perceptual ways. A user has no direct access to it. The virtual world may only be viewed through a virtual "view finder," meaning through a software interface designed to resemble that of a digital camera. So a user cannot lay his or her "hands" on it, meaning, cannot use the software tools created to model this world, without passing through a gateway that is also the interface of a virtual camera.

A virtual world appears to be real, because the virtual camera that documents it creates a picture that resembles an analog photograph, and the history of photographic images has lead us to believe that photographs capture the real. While they seem to be connected to the real through their photographic quality, the fact that they are computer models, and therefore have a mathematical sense of regularity, also gives these worlds a sense of being timeless yet also ephemeral.

This endows virtual worlds with their uncanny quality in a truly Freudian sense: a place that is both alive and dead at the same time. Hence a viewer of a virtual world has the feeling that it exists outside the realm of the biological, and therefore outside the possibility of death and in some timeless, eternal place.

Virtual spaces are perspectival spaces, using five-point perspective and therefore referring to Renaissance paintings that so often represented Heaven and the spiritual realm. A virtual world has therefore inherited this connotation: a place that we imagine "heaven" could be: a meta plane up in the sky. This association has been compounded by the corporate branding by Google™ of the their Internet server database as the "Cloud" and related applications as "Cloud" technology. So virtual spaces evoke meta conceptual planes that exist "inside the computer," where it seems that one might find an intimate, imaginary landscape where users can project their inner desires and fantasies.

Virtual worlds are also synthetically generated worlds that provide a staging ground for a variety of forms: for the performances enacted by digital bodies and for a range of virtual processes and simulations. Some of them are closely tied to our own physical realities, but with disconcerting characteristics that force the viewer to question their credibility and as a result, the viewer's own perceptions, and therefore, the credibility of the world.

The digital models populating a virtual world can either be created by the user, or increasingly, culled from stock libraries available on the Internet. Free computer models have been available online for sharing since the success of Pixar™ animations and the ensuing introduction of 3D animation software for the personal computer in the 1990s. The proliferation of online user-groups, and the networked culture of freeware and shareware, has extended the availability of stock models through the connected libraries of Cloud computing. Default computer models provided by inexpensive software packages and the growing availability of online repositories of objects, characters, textures, and effects for instant download has made possible the importing and juxtaposition of found objects into a user's own creations. Preset models can be easily adapted and manipulated as characters, or used for designing virtual sets. When collaged together in an XYZ Cartesian computer world, the resulting outcome is a contemporary reinterpretation of Marcel Duchamp's idea of the industrial Readymade. Default objects provided by 3D animation software packages, and the stock models downloaded for free on line are, in fact, virtual Readymades.

Google Earth™ was introduced in 2005 for the personal computer. It maps the earth by the superimposition of images obtained from satellite imagery, aerial photography and the GIS 3D globe. The release of Google Earth™ has stimulated public interest in geospatial technologies and applications. By October 2011, 3D images of terrain and buildings have been downloaded onto Google Earth™ more than a billion times.

In 2006, Google created the 3D Warehouse™, a global repository for computer models, created for free by the Google community to populate the 3D version of Earth. The 3D Warehouse™ offers exact models of real-world buildings, building collections, and ready-made landscapes available for download and free use, along with objects and character models. Models created by the community must be approved for verisimilitude by the Google Earth™ team, so 3D Warehouse™ models are accurate representations of real-world objects that add to the construction of a convincing parallel universe on Google Earth™. Google's 3D Warehouse™ is literally a meta-plane in the Google Cloud™ proffering an infinite supply of free models of significant buildings, objects, and even people for the construction of one's personal Virtual World.

Sketchup Pro™ is Google's commercial version of the popular, free software, Sketch-Up™, provided by Google, for hobbyists to use for building models of their own worlds, meant for insertion into the Google product, Earth - the most "meta" of all virtual worlds. Sketch-Up Pro™ unlocks high-resolution versions of the hundreds of thousands of the stock models found in the Google 3D Warehouse™ - an army of virtual Readymades - themselves copies of real-world buildings. When Google's 3D Warehouse™ models are repurposed by Post-photographic filmmakers to create simulated, collaged landscapes, the uncanny sense of a seamless mathematical facsimile is compounded, as spatial ambiguities and contextual incongruities are intentionally made apparent.

As result of all of these real world incidents, virtual worlds have become perverse hyper-geographies, multi-dimensional recursive systems that can multiply, repeat, morph, and infinitely extend themselves to create worlds of self-generating architectures and spaces. The use of virtual Readymades for sets and characters endow these environments with a schematic, mathematical sense, and at the same time give them an eerily realistic familiarity. A filmmakers' decision to personalize this found content by reformulating the 'googlized' Earth, revivified a formerly Utopian idea of a vast untrammeled American landscape, now resynthesized in the form of a uniform, high-tech, corporate map.

- Rachel Clarke and Claudia Hart

2. René Descartes, translated by Paul J. Oscamp, Discourse on Method, Optics, Geometry, and Meteorology, (Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1976)

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by Rachel Clarke and Claudia Hart Virtual worlds have an uncanny quality because they are mathematically perfect and regular, and filled with computer models of objects. These are sometimes architecture, sometimes things, whatever a user decides should fill his or her void. Virtual worlds are remote in a variety of psychological and perceptual ways.

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...AND AN AMAZING READ ON 'THE ARCHEOLOGY OF VIRTUAL WORLDS'...

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...AND AN AMAZING READ ON 'THE ARCHEOLOGY OF VIRTUAL WORLDS'...

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'...virtual worlds have been money-spinners since long before the pandemic...'

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When in the spring of 2020 the first wave of Coronavirus sent several countries into lockdown, millions of gamers plugged into the virtual worlds of video games to find some respite from the poky rooms where they found themselves confined. My personal virtual hideaway was the parodically violent world of GTA Online, where I could not only break the 1.5 meter ruble, but all rules and laws imaginable.

Besides Los Santos, some gamers made landfall on the island of Animal Crossing: New Horizons the popular life simulation video game developed by Nintendo. Others preferred grabbing their pickaxes and started to mine a new reality from the pixelated worlds of . Still, others embraced the cartoonish reality of . Meanwhile, kids created digital abodes on , the child-friendly platform where you can make your own games and play games created by others.

The trend continued after the first months of hard lockdown. In this time of social distancing the virtual worlds of video games remained the spaces where people get together, go to the pub, watch movies, go to concerts, host talk shows, get their primary school diploma, graduate from university - and yes, occasionally crush a group of pedestrians.

Unsurprisingly, virtual worlds have been money-spinners since long before the pandemic. Rockstar has reportedly raked in hundreds of millions of dollars in microtransactions from since its launch in 2013. (bought by Microsoft for $ 2.5 billion in 2014) is not only the best-selling video game of all time (it sold more than 200 million copies) but a transmedia empire ranging from films to merchandise. In 2019 alone, Epic Games' crown jewel brought in a staggering $ 1.8 billion in revenue (mostly via battle passes and cosmetic items). Despite being controversially removed from Apple's app store in 2020, the game still boasts hundreds of millions of active players. Per The Verge , Animal Crossing: New Horizons , one of the key symbols of social life in the time COVID-19, "catapulted Nintendo to stratospheric earnings" selling more than 22 million copies. Finally, Roblox is preparing to go public, aiming for nothing short of a $8 billion evaluation.

Analysts say that this is just the beginning. The virtual worlds of video games are being hailed as the harbingers of the internet of the future, a web on steroids, a sort of mythical place that executives, investors, and journalists call "the metaverse."

In the novel, Stephenson imagines a dystopian world where governments have been replaced by companies, delivery workers keep society running and people take shelter in the metaverse, a kind of massively multiplayer online game populated by avatars. Sounds familiar?

This essay is an overview of how we came to inhabit the virtual worlds of , & Co. and of how we came to think that the metaverse is the internet of the future.

I will start by briefly recapping the history of virtual worlds, from their origins in text-based Multi User Dungeon, to the now forgotten realism of games like and , to the present. We will also lay-over in virtual worlds that have decreased in popularity but are still orbiting, for better or worse (yes, Second Life(yes, , that's you). Beginning in the 70s, I will focus on one virtual world per decade. Obviously, this means that I won't be able to discuss many prominent virtual worlds World of Warcraft fans I'm talking to you) but I hope that the rationale behind my choices will be made sufficiently clear in the course of this text.

In the second section, I will scramble things up a bit, proceeding in a more idiosyncratic way -digging deeper into the concept of the "virtual world," finding links between topics and spaces that at first glance may seem unrelated. Per the Belgian surrealist René Margritte's reflections on his painting Elective Affinities :

One night, I woke up in a room in which a cage with a bird sleeping in it had been placed. A magnificent error caused me to see an egg in the cage, instead of the vanished bird. I then grasped a new and astonishing poetic secret, for the shock which I experienced had been provoked precisely by the affinity of two objects, the cage and the egg, to each other, whereas previously this shock had been caused by my bringing together two objects that were unrelated.[1]

I invite you to call them "Magrittian affinities".

While the idea of the metaverse as the next iteration of the internet envisions a future that echoes old cyberpunk dreams of the 80s, the second section of the essay, I will journey even further back in time, ending up in places like Cockaigne, the medieval land of plenty where life doesn't bite, or the equally abundant reign of Prester John described by Italian writer Umberto Eco in his novel .

In his book , media theorist Siegfried Zielinski admonishes us to "not seek the old in the new, but find something new in the old." What Zielinski is arguing for is the conceptualization of media history not as a series of evolutionary, chronological steps but as intricate layers of developments made up of false starts, unrecognized trailblazers, hidden concepts, and seemingly unrelated antecedents that are woven together to produce history. Deep time of the media [2] This approach will inform my exploration of virtual worlds, too, especially when I will try to connect places that appear light years away from each other, like the medieval land of Cockaigne and 's Los Santos.

A Short history of virtual worlds and their businesses

I will loosen it up in the second half of the essay but for now, we need a somewhat stringent definition of "virtual world." The most-cited academic definition comes from Mark W. Bell's and is as follows: "[A virtual world is] a synchronous, persistent network of people, represented as avatars, facilitated by networked computers." Toward a definition of Virtual World [3]

While this definition has been widely debated in academia over the years (see, for example, the recent paper by Carina Girvan What is a virtual world? Definition and classification[4] ), it's not perfect but as far as this essay is concerned it does the job in allowing me to account for , , and .

According to this definition, the big bang of virtual worlds was in 1978 when Multi-User Dungeon - or was created by Roy Trubshaw and Richard Bartle at the University of Essex, England. , which ran on a colossal DEC PDP-10 mainframe, was a fantasy adventure game in which players roleplayed characters in a Dungeons & Dragon-esque setting. In fact, was inspired by single-player computer games like Colossal Cave Adventure (1975) and which in turn were inspired by Dungeons & Dragons , the pencil and paper role-playing game first published in 1974.

Like Colossal Cave Adventure and , was also text-based, no graphics whatsoever, just words. To appreciate the mix of creativity and unbridled enthusiasm that fuelled the world of text adventures (also known as "interactive fiction"), you should stop reading this essay, go on YouTube, and - a 2010 documentary about these pioneering computer games and the people who developed them. Come back when you're done.

As you have seen in the documentary, co-inventor Richard Bartle explains why he believes that text can be more powerful than 3D graphics, virtual reality, motion sensors or any other bleeding-edge technology in telling an interactive story. "No matter how far you take graphics, eventually the farthest you can get is text," he says in ,

"[Text] is really for people who got strong imagination and the tragedy is that many people have strong imagination, they just never get to play the text because they went for the graphics first," he concludes.

But Bartle's compelling arguments notwithstanding, the enthusiasm for text-based games petered out in the Eighties.

The advent of computer graphics revolutionized video games. New companies emerged, with few of them having been more influential in pushing the boundaries of computer-generated imaginaries across live-action cinema, animation, and video games than George Lucas' LucasFilm. Even Pixar, the production studio that invented game-changing 3D computer graphics techniques and made , the first entirely computer-animated feature-length film, was spun off from Lucasfilm's Computer Division - a group established in 1979 with the aim of exploring computer graphics and developing cutting-edge technology for the film industry. LucasFilm didn't shy away from tinkering with video games either. Founded in 1982, LucasFilm Games - later renamed LucasArts has crafted some of the most iconic titles of all time, like Monkey Island , a series of adventure games that, in a way, inherited the spirit of text-based games like Colossal Cave Adventure and . Furthermore, and this is the reason we're talking about it - LucasFilm Games created , usually credited as the first ever graphical virtual world of all time. The game, which was made available as a beta test in 1986, is a portal to a different era of the internet.

Nowadays, the virtual worlds of , and others. are ubiquitous and one can evoke them just by tapping on an icon on their phone or tablet. On the contrary, when virtual demiurges Chip Morningstar and Randy Farmer launched , going online was an ordeal in its own regard. Those were pre-Web times and to access one needed to use Quantum Link, a Commodore 64-exclusive, modem-based dial-in network that billed by the hour. Losing track of the time while playing could set 's citizens back more than $ 1,000 per month . But what did the virtual world of LucasFilm Games look like? The Oakland-based Museum of Digital Art and Entertainment has been working with the game's creators to in order to let new people experience it and to preserve it as part of our digital heritage (the challenges of preserving computational history - between arcane languages, obsolete software platforms and intricate copyright issues - deserves its own essay), so you can actually enjoy first-hand. If retro-gaming is not your cup of tea, you should at least watch this gem of a promotional video that introduced viewers to the "strange, new world" of , a place "where the keynotes of existence are fantasy and fun."

In , players could pick an avatar (incidentally, was one the very first games to use the word to describe the figure that represents the players in a virtual world; a few years later, the term was further popularized by Stephenson in ) and take part in a parallel society with an alternative economy and even its own newspaper. You could interact with other players (occasionally killing and robbing them à-la ), take part in quests and games and, in general, simply enjoy a second life. ultimately proved to be too expensive to be financially viable and it went offline in 1988, just a couple of years after its beta release. Quantum Link then published a stripped-down version of the game under the name of Club Caribe . It also licensed the title to Japanese electronics maker Fujitsu. When the equally short-lived Fujitsu Habitat was released in Japan, it was already 1990.

The Eighties - the years of Ronald Reagan, the Commodore 64 and penne alla vodka - were over. The new decade was to be characterized by ubiquitous sun-dried tomatoes, the first PlayStation, and the World Wide Web with the last enabling a smorgasbord of new virtual worlds - now in 3D. Graphics aside, the virtual worlds of the Nineties were broadly similar to in that the basic ideas remained the same: creating virtual spaces where people could get together, play games and, en passant, invent a parallel society. Some of these worlds, like and , flaneuring across places that were once teeming with life but that today are often eerily deserted. These video dispatches from the virtual worlds of the 90s are under the sign of hauntology, the concept coined by French philosopher Jacques Derridda to describe how the present is haunted by the ghosts of lost futures. Active Worlds , are still orbiting in the online ether and every now and then YouTubers venture in these semi-abandoned lands Wandering around the virtual ruins of the 90s, a cyberflaneur has the feeling of being immersed in a future that never was, an alternate timeline where social media never happened and and Active Worlds had already made the metaverse a reality 25 years ago. [5]

Alas, the turn of the millennium brought about a spate of business failures and several successful virtual worlds began to decline in popularity. Was the dream of the metaverse destined to burst along with the dot-com bubble? Not really, as just a couple of years into the new millenium, two era-defining virtual worlds were already on the horizon. Obviously, I'm talking of Second Life (2003) and World of Warcraft (2004).

While World of Warcraft was an alternate universe for budding dragon slayers, Second Life became an extension of society by other means. Considering that this essay is mainly about "socializing" rather than "questing" in virtual worlds, I will focus on Second Life. Like in our contemporary worlds, in Second Life players could go to concerts, hang-out with friends and attend political rallies (it also became somewhat notorious for being the place where one could indulge in all kinds of extravagant kinks). The mainstream media sent special correspondents to the far-away land of Second Life and filmmakers shot documentaries entirely within the virtual world (e.g. Douglas Gayeton's Molotov Alva ).

In early 2001, we'd test the prototype of Second Life [...] by battling each other in a hybrid FPS/building game .

Soon after, we expanded scripting, building, and avatars came along and the modern version of Second Life was born, focused on letting people create. We had some pretty fun chats with Epic Games' Tim Sweeney [the company behind ] about blending engine, tools, and game into one experience right as Unreal Engine was exploring the same space from a different direction.

A decade later, Epic Games' Mark Rein let me play a prototype of that blended ideas from various Epic Games, , and into a really different game.

Virtual Worlds as a Land of Plenty

During the pandemic, barflies rebuilt their local pubs on , friends started visiting each other's islands on Animal Crossing , and fans flocked to the concerts of their favorite musicians on .

This was possible because, unlike from social media and video calling applications, the virtual worlds of video games are , meaning that players can move across them and have a feeling of how fellow players are positioned in the space. Since spatiality is an important dimension of social life, it is no surprise that many people preferred hanging out with their friends in these virtual worlds rather than being stuck in the umpteenth Zoom meeting. Incidentally, restoring a sense of spatiality in online interactions is one of the reasons why Jaron Lanier -the founding father of virtual reality, now a scientist at Microsoft Research-came up with the Together mode for Microsoft Teams.

But if we want to dig deeper into the concept of virtual worlds, we need to look at the past, before computer-generated realms, as escape to alternate realms can already be found in very different epochs. For example, people in the Middle Ages - especially peasants exhausted by backbreaking labor in the fields - often dreamed of faraway realms where plenty of food was readily available, nobody had to work and there were no hardships. One of these fabled places was Cockaigne, "the wine flows freely, sex is readily available, all people enjoy eternal youth" and - in what is arguably its most striking feature - "the roofs are made of custard pies." a land where In short, the world of Cockaigne was a hedonic paradise, a sort of profane version of the Garden of Eden. [6] Italian writer Umberto Eco explored many more fantasies that populated the medieval imagination in his novel . Set in the 13th century, the eponymous character (a talented Italian peasant boy) and his ragtag band of friends set out to locate the legendary kingdom of Prester John, a phantasmagorical land populated by wondrous creatures and ruled by an immensely wealthy Christian sovereign.

features several themes that are characteristic of Eco's literary production like the way fictional stories end up creating new realities. Along similar lines, Eco investigates also how medieval utopias helped people forget about the miseries of the world they lived in. As Baudolino himself acknowledges: "I devoted my nights to imagining other worlds[...] There is nothing better than imagining other worlds [...] to forget the painful one we live in."[7]

Let's now leap from the Middle Ages of Cockaigne and the Kingdom of Prester John to the future. It's the year 2045. Climate change and a global energy crisis are bringing the Earth to its knees and people escape this grim condition by fleeing to OASIS (Ontologically Anthropocentric Sensory Immersive Simulation), a virtual world that started as an online gaming platform but evolved into a fully-fledged simulated reality. OASIS brims with energy, colors, and fun -all things that are scarce in the physical world.

These conditions have prompted several journalists and to enthusiastically talk about the coming of the metaverse, hailed as an alternative world that humanity will be able to colonize once the Earth becomes inhabitable, be it because of a pandemic, climate change or any of the other problems that pose an existential risk to Homo Sapiens.

In this sense, the rhetoric about the coming of the metaverse is akin to the beliefs that fueled the legend of Cockaigne and the other chimerical worlds of medieval imagination. We see it in the promotional video of that promised players a world where the keynotes of existence were "fantasy and fun," the same principle is echoed by a recent commercial of Facebook Horizon (Zuckerberg's virtual reality social world) and - generally speaking, it is a tenet of all video games' virtual worlds. This is today's Cockaigne: the dream of transcending the pain, mortality, and other limitations of our physical existence via a virtual escape.

But as Georgia Tech's professor Janet Murray remarked:

In other words, the metaverse can't be a solution to our existential anguish nor the place where we will take shelter once we have screwed up the planet for good.

Of course, this doesn't mean that virtual worlds can't help us change the real world for the better. Not only virtual worlds allow us to stay connected in meaningful ways when a deadly virus is running riot, but they could also be used as tools to imagine better societies. In a world where it is often difficult to imagine alternatives to our current systems of government and economy (of course, the reference here is to Mark Fisher's Capitalist Realism ), virtual worlds have the capacity to implement and test new ideas about social life. In other words, they could become venues where to run 'what if' experiments (e.g. what if we imagined a gameplay not based on the personal accumulation of points). Far from being pipe dreams, 'what if' scenarios can be used to imagine the near future in a concrete way. This approach may not seem incompatible with virtual worlds like , and others that are run by behemotian corporations but if we look at history, we realize that this has not always been the case. The possibility of being political statements is in the DNA of the virtual worlds of video games.

After all, that's the reason why Richard Bartle designed , the first virtual world ever, as a place in which players could succeed according to their abilities and efforts rather than birthrights or social class. "We wanted the things that were in to be reflected in the real world," said Bartle in an interview to Eurogamer ,

I wanted to change the world. and every subsequent MMO design are a political statement [...] There's so much you can do with virtual worlds. But it's not being done. I wanted them to be places of wonder in which people could go to truly be themselves, away from societal pressure or judgment. My idea was that if you could truly find yourself in a virtual world you might be able to then take that back into the real world.

And the Italian peasant boy Baudolino agrees with Bartle: " I devoted my nights to imagining other worlds [...] I hadn't yet realized that, imagining other worlds, you end up changing this one."
Davide Banis works as editor for a digital publishing house. When time allows, he writes for magazines and other media outlets both in English and Italian.

References

[1] Paquet, Marcel, Magritte. Cologne, Germany: Taschen (2006), p. 26

[2] Zielinski, Siegfried. Deep Time of the Media: toward an Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2006.

[3] Bell, Mark W. "Toward a Definition of 'Virtual Worlds.'" Journal of Virtual Worlds Research 1, no. 1 (July 2008): 2-5. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.4101/jvwr.v1i1.283.

[4] Girvan, Carina. "What Is a Virtual World? Definition and Classification." Educational Technology Research and Development 66, no. 5 (2018): 1087-1100. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11423-018-9577-y.

[5] Derrida, Jacques. Spectres of Marx: : The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International. New York City, NY: Routledge, 1994.

[6] Corrie, Marilyn, "Land of make-believe", The Guardian, August 11, 2001, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2001/aug/11/historybooks1.

[7] Eco, Umberto. Baudolino. Milan: Bompiani, 2000.

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When in the spring of 2020 the first wave of Coronavirus sent several countries into lockdown, millions of gamers plugged into the virtual worlds of video games to find some respite from the poky rooms where they found themselves confined.

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ON THE USE OF VIDEO GAMES STRUCTURES TO BUILD NARRATIVES...

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ON THE USE OF VIDEO GAMES STRUCTURES TO BUILD NARRATIVES...

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Finding Fanon 2, made by Larry Achiampong and David Blandy, uses the Grand Theft Auto 5 in-game video editor.

Finding Fanon 2 was commissioned by Brighton Digital Festival 2015, supported by Arts Council England.

The Finding Fanon series is inspired by the lost plays of Frantz Fanon, (1925-1961) a politically radical humanist whose practice dealt with the psychopathology of colonisation and the social and cultural consequences of decolonisation.

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Finding Fanon 2, made by Larry Achiampong and David Blandy, uses the Grand Theft Auto 5 in-game video editor. 

Finding Fanon 2 was commissioned by Brighton Digital Festival 2015, supported by Arts Council England. 

The Finding Fanon series is inspired by the lost plays of Frantz Fanon, (1925-1961) a politically radical humanist whose practice dealt with the psychopathology of colonisation and the social and cultural consequences of decolonisation.

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JON RAFMAN 9-EYES HARVESTS IMAGES FROM GOOGLE STREET VIEWS...

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JON RAFMAN 9-EYES HARVESTS IMAGES FROM GOOGLE STREET VIEWS...

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Nine Eyes of Google Street View, Jon Rafman, 2008 - ongoing home / insta / twitt / insta / fb

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AND AN INTERESTING FOLLOW UP ABOUT ACTORS AND AI: 

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AND AN INTERESTING FOLLOW UP ABOUT ACTORS AND AI: 

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Tom Hanks and Robin Wright, along with additional castmembers, will be de-aged for Robert Zemeckis' upcoming Miramax movie Here, an adaptation of Richard McGuire's graphic novel that is set in a single room and follows its inhabitants over many years. This will be accomplished using a new generative AI-driven tool dubbed Metaphysic Live.

On Tuesday, artificial intelligence company Metaphysic, run by Tom Graham, revealed that it has entered into a strategic partnership with CAA to develop generative AI tools and services for talent, though details of the agreement were not revealed. In a statement, Joanna Popper, chief metaverse officer at CAA, said the agency looks forward to working with Metaphysic, as its tech "combined with their ethics-first approach and thought leadership" could "unlock an incredible opportunity for the entertainment industry and beyond."

Perhaps most recognized as the talent behind @DeepTomCruise or deepfakes featured on America's Got Talent, the tech firm claims its new Metaphysic Live tool can be used to create "high-resolution photorealistic faceswaps and de-aging effects on top of actors' performances live and in real time without the need for further compositing or VFX work."

Plans call for Metaphysic Live to be used "extensively" on Zemeckis' movie to generate face replacements and de-aging. "I've always been attracted to technology that helps me to tell a story. With Here, the film simply wouldn't work without our actors seamlessly transforming into younger versions of themselves. Metaphysic's AI tools do exactly that, in ways that were previously impossible," Zemeckis said in a statement. "Having tested every flavor of face replacement and de-aging technology available today, Metaphysic are clearly the global leaders in feature-quality AI content and the perfect choice for this incredibly challenging, emotional film."

Starring Hanks and Wright, along with Paul Bettany and Kelly Reilly, the film is scheduled for a 2024 release in the U.S. by Sony Pictures Entertainment.

"It is incredible to see Metaphysic's AI-generated content flawlessly integrated into a shot live on set. The actors can even use the technology as a 'youth mirror' - testing out acting choices for their younger selves in real time," stated the movie's production VFX supervisor Kevin Baillie.

To work on the movie, Metaphysic co-founder Chris Ume will serve as AI supervisor and chief innovation officer Jo Plaete will serve as Metaphysic VFX supervisor.

Said Metaphysic CEO and co-founder Graham in a statement: "With the support of CAA and by working on projects like Here, Metaphysic is demonstrating the transformative power of hyperreal AI to shape the future of entertainment and to eventually help people create AI-generated, photorealistic immersive content while they own and control their data."

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Tom Hanks, Robin Wright to Be De-aged in Robert Zemeckis' New Movie Using Metaphysic AI Tool

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Tom Hanks and Robin Wright, along with additional castmembers, will be de-aged for Robert Zemeckis' upcoming Miramax movie Here, an adaptation of Richard McGuire's graphic novel that is set in a single room and follows its inhabitants over many years. This will be accomplished using a new generative AI-driven tool dubbed Metaphysic Live.

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IF YOU WANT TO TRY OUT AN ARCHITECTURAL RENDERING PACKAGE, WHICH IS FREE FOR STUDENTS, LOOK AT LUMION HERE:

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IF YOU WANT TO TRY OUT AN ARCHITECTURAL RENDERING PACKAGE, WHICH IS FREE FOR STUDENTS, LOOK AT LUMION HERE:

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Lumion Pro Student is 3D rendering software created with a purpose - to give architecture students an intuitive, professional tool that turns the process of photorealistic rendering into a quick and stress-free affair.

Plus, Lumion Pro Student is completely free for full-time students at universities, colleges and other higher learning institutions in the United States, The Netherlands, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Denmark, Norway, Finland, Sweden and Singapore.

The student license is valid for one year, and it includes all of the functionality of Lumion 10.5 Pro.

Please note! Unlike previous student versions, the Lumion 10.5 student version requires a Windows 10 operating system, version 1903 or later. It will not run on older versions of Windows. View system requirements.

Are you a teacher or faculty administrator? You can apply for educational licenses for schools and universities by clicking here.

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Lumion Pro Student is 3D rendering software created with a purpose - to give architecture students an intuitive, professional tool that turns the process of photorealistic rendering into a quick and stress-free affair. Plus, Lumion Pro Student is completely free for full-time students at universities, colleges and other higher learning institutions in the United States, The Netherlands, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Denmark, Norway, Finland, Sweden and Singapore.

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A NEW READING ON AI AND HUMAN INTERACTIONS HAS JUST ARRIVED...: Prediction Is the Business by Elvia Wilk & Wai Chee Dimock, 

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A NEW READING ON AI AND HUMAN INTERACTIONS HAS JUST ARRIVED...: Prediction Is the Business by Elvia Wilk & Wai Chee Dimock, 

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'Miracle is a shorthand for … all those moments when, against all odds, people living all of their lives in one genre suddenly slip out and make their way into another.'
Wai Chee Dimock

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Prediction Is the Business | Triple Canopy

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A conversation about AI overcoming the "weakness" of humanity and "nonhuman intelligence" playing the role of Skynet or savior. With artworks by Antonia Kuo.

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THIS IS THE JAMBOARD WE USED TO ENTER THE FUTURES OF ARCHITECTURAL RENDERINGS:

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THIS IS THE JAMBOARD WE USED TO ENTER THE FUTURES OF ARCHITECTURAL RENDERINGS:

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JUST CLICK ON THE IMAGE, go to PAGE 7.
You have editing privileges so you can add your character onto the 'sky garden' yet to exist, gatecrashing the scene with everyone else...

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03-02-2023_VIS4002_HEART OF HALE - Google Jamboard

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Scroll to the video of this work, where a fictional large crowd of demonstrators takes over a city centre...

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"The crowd not only acts upon the human being who is inside it and exposed to it, its agency within him persists when he is alone and isolated, and its effect on him is sometimes strongest in his greatest isolation." [1]

„Die Masse wirkt nicht nur auf den Menschen, der sich in ihr befindet und ihr ausgesetzt ist, sie wirkt auch in ihm nach, wenn er allein und isoliert ist, und in seiner größten Isolierung wirkt sie manchmal am stärksten." [1]

Clemens von Wedemeyer's new films undertake a probing exploration of the phenomenon of human crowds. What happens when they grow exponentially? How can their behavior be predicted, and how can it be controlled? What distinguishes digital hordes from physical ones? And how is the individual human being part of a crowd, or many crowds, even in isolation?

Die neuen Filme Clemens von Wedemeyers vertiefen den Blick auf das Phänomen menschlicher Massen. Was geschieht, wenn sie exponentiell anwachsen? Wie lässt sich ihr Verhalten vorhersagen, wie kontrollieren? Was unterscheidet digitale Horden von physischen? Und wie ist der einzelne Mensch auch in Isolation noch Teil einer, oder vieler, Massen?

The current situation lets us see the themes of Majorities, a recent exhibition of Wedemeyer's work at Galerie für zeitgenössische Kunst Leipzig, and In Gesellschaft ( In Society), a show at Kunstmuseum Luzern that closed in February, in a different light. In collaboration with Clemens von Wedemeyer, KOW releases the films from the Berlin-based artist's most recent cycle in the inaugural presentation of a new series of KOW ISSUES ONLINE.

The centerpiece of Wedemeyer's new film cycle, 70.001, is a reconstruction in the digital realm of the Monday demonstrations that filled the streets of Leipzig in October 1989. But two key differences set the computer simulation of the mass movement apart from the historic events: The crowd is flowing through the digital Leipzig of today. And it doesn't disperse in the evening as people go home. The algorithms don't need a break and, day after day, add new protesters to yesterday's crowd. Soon enough the streets are packed as far as the eye can see with animated clones, turning the demonstration into a viral sea of stereotyped bodies. Is there actually a will that propels them? And if so, what do they want? Is their behavior preprogrammed?

Bis Februar diesen Jahres zeigten die Galerie für zeitgenössische Kunst Leipzig und das Kunstmuseum Luzern Wedemeyers Ausstellungen Mehrheiten bzw. In Gesellschaft, die heute inhaltlich noch einmal in neuem Licht erscheinen. In Zusammenarbeit mit Clemens von Wedemeyer veröffentlicht KOW die Filme aus dem jüngsten Werkzyklus des Berliner Künstlers als Auftakt einer neuen Reihe von KOW ISSUES Online.

Die zentrale Arbeit in Wedemeyer neuem Filmzyklus, 70.001, rekonstruiert im digitalen Raum die Montagsdemonstrationen auf den Leipziger Straßen im Oktober 1989. Doch etwas unterscheidet die Computersimulation der Massenbewegung von den historischen Ereignissen: Die Menge durchströmt das digitale Leipzig von heute. Und sie löst sich am Abend nicht wieder auf, um nach Hause zu gehen. Die Algorithmen brauchen keine Pause und fügen jeden Tag den Demonstrant*innen von Gestern weitere hinzu. Bald sind die Straßen bis zum Horizont überfüllt mit animierten Klonen, wird die Demo zu einem viralen Meer stereotyper Körper. Liegt ihnen eigentlich ein Wille zugrunde? Was wollen sie? Ist ihr Verhalten vorprogrammiert?

Wedemeyer presents his animation in the form of a video wall set up in the gallery space. For viewers who now stream it on their computers at home, it raises another question: Will we one day send our digital avatars out to demonstrate in virtual streets while staying at home ourselves? Will the digital political public of the future organize Monday demonstrations in the data space? And has that future perhaps already arrived?

In Transformation Scenario,a trust-inspiring voice speaking in a soothing tone summarizes the latest science on the behavior of crowds and individuals-from riots to Woodstock. As powerful cinematic footage fills the screen-simulations involving large numbers of extras evoking a menacing power of the multitude that might infect any society-the voice touts a new understanding of the human being: someone who, when caught up in a complex situation, no longer needs to decide for himself or herself what to do. The insights of mass psychology, the voice argues, now make automated control of the individual possible, relieving him or her of all anxiety, doubt, and uncertainty. Guided by artificial intelligence, every one of us can at long last be free and completely himself or herself, the promotional clip promises.

Crowd Control is a simulation software designed for police and military forces and security services that enables the user to control the dynamic of mass protests and rehearse countermeasures. Wedemeyer's film of the same title shows the construction of different model scenarios in which protesters clash with police and the crowd wrests itself free of the state apparatus's iron embrace. Or it doesn't. Depending on who dominates the game.

Die Form von Wedemeyers Animation ist eine Videowall, die im Ausstellungsraum installiert ist. Beim Online-viewing auf dem heimischen Computer schwingt nun zudem die Frage mit, ob man seinen Web-Avatar einst - oder schon heute - von zuhause aus in eine Demonstrationen auf virtuellen Straßen schicken wird. Wird die digitale politische Öffentlichkeit künftig Montagsdemonstrationen im Datenraum organisieren?

In Transformation Scenario präsentiert eine vertrauenswürdige Stimme in beruhigendem Tonfall neueste Erkenntnisse über das Verhalten von Massen und Individuen - von Woodstock bis zu Viren. Vor dem Hintergrund kraftvoller Bilder des Kinos, die eine von Statisten simulierte, bedrohliche Macht der Vielen evozieren, die jede Gesellschaft infizieren kann, wirbt die Stimme für ein neues Bild des Menschen. Eines Menschen, der in komplexen Situationen nicht mehr selbst entscheiden muss, was zu tun ist. Das Wissen aus der Massenpsychologie erlaube heute die automatisierte Steuerung des Einzelnen, und befreie so das Individuum von Zweifeln und Ungewissheiten. Angeleitet von künstlicher Intelligenz kann jeder endlich frei und ganz er selbst sein.

Crowd Control ist ein Simulationsprogramm für Polizei, Militärs und Sicherheitsdienste, mit dem die Dynamik von Massenprotesten gesteuert und Gegenmaßnahmen trainiert werden können. Wedemeyers gleichnamiger Film zeigt den Aufbau unterschiedlicher Modellszenarien, in denen Demonstrierende und Polizei aufeinandertreffen, und die Menge den Weg aus der Umklammerung des Staatsapparates findet. Oder auch nicht. Je nachdem, wer das Spiel beherrscht.

exhibition view Clemens von Wedemeyer, Mehrheiten, GfZK Leipzig, 2019, Photo by Alexandra Ivanciu, curateted Anna Jehle und Franciska Zólyom

exhibition view Clemens von Wedemeyer, Mehrheiten, GfZK Leipzig, 2019, Photo by Alexandra Ivanciu, curateted Anna Jehle und Franciska Zólyom

exhibition view Clemens von Wedemeyer, Mehrheiten, GfZK Leipzig, 2019, Photo by Alexandra Ivanciu, curateted Anna Jehle und Franciska Zólyom

For Faux Terrain, Wedemeyer staged a scene that interweaves the isolation of a lone protagonist with a seemingly absurd concatenation of mass events, ranging from the Yellow Vests protests to Cold War-era security measures and back to the year 1871, when Switzerland granted asylum to 87,000 French soldiers, the birth of its modern identity as a neutral humanitarian nation. In the present, however, such neutrality gives way to chaos: ambling through the deserted white halls of a museum, the lonely young woman is abruptly swept along by a frenzied crowd aimlessly rushing through the disorienting White Cube.

An accident strikes. But things could be much worse. A few people have sustained light injuries for exercise purposes-a hundred servicemembers are on the scene to assist them. In Wedemeyer's Katastrophenübung ( Disaster Response Drill), the health care system lovingly tends to minor scratches, but also, and more importantly, to itself. The drill without a disaster shines a spotlight on the public authorities' need for organization at a time of crisis, when communicative and bureaucratic routines cocoon the individuals in a closed society even as each one of them may actually have only himself or herself to depend on.

Wedemeyer's films prompt us to rethink our own positions in the real, media, and digital spaces of assembly and isolation. The crowd, in the sense of an impulsive collective of affected bodies and stirred emotions, is a constant presence today, both a menace and potential source of solidarity. The regulation and control of those bodies and emotions and their agency will be a pivotal issue in the political debates, and likely also the art, of the near future. Wedemeyer's work is an eye-opening introduction to its complexities.

Text: Alexander Koch

In seiner filmischen Inszenierung Faux Terrain verschränkt Wedemeyer die Isolation einer einzelnen Protagonistin mit einer absurd erscheinenden Kette von Massenereignissen, die von den Protesten der Gelbwesten über Sicherheitsmaßnahmen im Kalten Krieg bis zurück ins Jahr 1871 reichen, als die Schweiz 87.000 französischen Soldaten Asyl gewährte und dabei zu ihrer nationalen Identität als neutraler, humanitärer Staat fand. Doch die Neutralität schlägt in der Gegenwart in Chaos um: die einsame junge Frau wird in den leeren weißen Räumen eines Museums von einer ziellos hastenden Menschenmenge überrannt, die im White Cube keine Orientierung findet.

Ein Unglück geschieht. Aber alles halb so wild. Wenige Menschen wurden probehalber leicht verletzt - eine Hundertschaft an Bediensteten steht ihnen bei. In Wedemeyers Katastrophenübung kümmert sich das Gesundheitswesen liebevoll um kleine Schrammen, vor allem aber um sich selbst. Die Übung ohne Unfall schult den Blick für staatliche Organisationsbedarfe in Krisenzeiten, in denen kommunikative und bürokratische Routinen den Einzelnen umgeben und in eine geschlossene Gesellschaft einbetten, während er, oder sie, tatsächlich vielleicht nur noch sich selbst hat.

Wedemeyers Filme geben Anlass, die eigene Position in den realen, medialen und digitalen Räumen der Versammlung und Vereinzelung neu zu überdenken. Die Masse, verstanden als impulsives Kollektiv ergriffener Körper und Gefühle, erscheint heute so bedrohlich wie solidarisch gegenwärtig. Die Regulierung und Kontrolle ebendieser Körper und Gefühle, und ihrer Handlungsmacht, wird sich in der kommenden Zeit als eines der politischen und wohl auch künstlerischen Kernthemen zeigen, auf das uns Wedemeyer einstimmt.

Text: Alexander Koch

[1] Elias Canetti: Masse und Macht, Hamburger Vorlesungen / Textfassungen 1959-1960. Nachlass Canetti 52, Handschriftenarchiv, Zentralbibliothek Zürich, Seite 13: „Die Masse wirkt nicht nur auf den Menschen, der sich in ihr befindet und ihr ausgesetzt ist, sie wirkt auch in ihm nach, wenn er allein und isoliert ist, und in seiner grössten Isolierung wirkt sie manchmal am stärksten. Das Studium gewisser seelischer Erkrankungen führt hier zu den überraschendsten Resultaten. Der Geist von Schizophrenen und Paranoikern ist von den erstaunlichsten Massen bevölkert, und es ist keineswegs müssig, diese gewissenhaft zu erforschen. Denn gerade in der Paranoia hat man den Nervenpunkt gefunden, wo Masse und Macht sich am engsten berühren."

Credits:

Faux Terrain: Cast: Katrija Lehmann, Liselotte Wechsler, Benjamin Burger, Sabina Aeschlimann, Clarisse Mialet, Garazi Prieto; director and cameraman: Clemens von Wedemeyer; co-director: Eiko Grimberg; assistant director: Lukas Malte Hoffmann; costume design: Sabin Fleck; sound recording: Salome Wüllner; sound editor: Jochen Jezussek; camera assistant: Christan Mathis; editor: Janina Herhoffer co-produced: Kunstmuseum Lucerne

Crowd Control: Programming: V step, Netherlands; co-director: Lukas Malte Hoffmann

Katastrophenübung: Camera: Clemens von Wedemeyer, Clara Wieck; Editing: Jonas Brinker > An exercise carried out by the Arbeiter-Samariter-Bund Deutschland e.V

70.001: CGI: celluloid VfX; VFX supervisor: Holger Hummel; CG supervisor: Simon Richter; CG artists: Paul Janssen, Alex Nietzold, Leon Petersohn; compositing artist: Matthias Wäsch; coordination: Sara Sarmiento; sound design: Niklas Kammertöns, Neuton Berlin; studio assistants: Lukas Malte Hoffmann, Alima de Graaf; production manager: Tina Maria Mersmann > Sponsored by Medienboard Berlin Brandenburg

Transformation Scenario: Voices: Megan Gay, Ian Dickinson, Editor: Janina Herhoffer, Clemens v. Wedemeyer, Studio manager: Lukas Hoffmann, Research: Alima de Graaf , Studio assistant: Kristýna Strejcovská , Dramaturgical advice: Alex Scrimgeour, Janina Herhoffer, Sound recordings: Studio Funk, Berlin, Sound design: Jochen Jezussek, Additional Camera: Anne Misselwitz, Color grading: Unai Rosende at VOLTE SLAGEN, Michel Balagué, Special thanks to: Dr. David Bierbach, Fanni Fetzer, Sandro Gaycken, Bernhard Hafner, Prof. Dirk Helbing, Prof. Jens Krause, Lukas Schmeck, Christian Schulze, Ieva Laube, Olga Sivel, Ioli Tzanetaki, Katerina Gregos, co-produced by the Riga Biennial, Kunstmuseum Luzern with support from Chicago Architecture Biennial

Mehrheiten in der GFZK Leipzig kuratiert von Anna Jehle und Franciska Zólyom
In Gesellschaft im Kunstmuseum Luzern kuratiert von Fanni Fetzer

OUT OF THE DARK II

, Candice Breitz, Chto Delat, Clegg & Guttmann, Alice Creischer, Heinrich Dunst, Estate of Barbara Hammer, The Cabinet of Ramon Haze, Hiwa K, Frédéric Moser & Philippe Schwinger, Oswald Oberhuber, Mario Pfeifer, Dierk Schmidt, Santiago Sierra, Michael E. Smith, Franz Erhard Walther, Clemens von Wedemeyer, Tobias Zielony, CATPC, Anna Ehrenstein, Christoph Schäfer
May 23 - Aug 15, 2020

Stadtschlawinereien

, Alice Creischer, Dierk Schmidt, Michael E. Smith, Brandlhuber+, Larissa Fassler, Adelita Husni-Bey, Peng!, Andrea Pichl, Andreas Siekmann, Bárbara Wagner & Benjamin de Burca, Weekend & Plaste, et al.
Sep 7 - Nov 9, 2019

Out Of The Dark

, Chto Delat, Alice Creischer, Eugenio Dittborn, Heinrich Dunst, Estate of Barbara Hammer, Hiwa K, Renzo Martens, Chris Martin, Frédéric Moser & Philippe Schwinger, Mario Pfeifer, Dierk Schmidt, Tina Schulz, Michael E. Smith, Franz Erhard Walther, Clemens von Wedemeyer, Tobias Zielony, The Cabinet of Ramon Haze
Jun 26 - Jul 31, 2016

A Summer Of Films

, Chto Delat, Alice Creischer, Eugenio Dittborn, Heinrich Dunst, Estate of Barbara Hammer, Renzo Martens, Frédéric Moser & Philippe Schwinger, Mario Pfeifer, Tina Schulz, Michael E. Smith, Franz Erhard Walther, Clemens von Wedemeyer, Tobias Zielony, Screening program
Jun 28 - Jul 26, 2015

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Online exhibition: The Illusion of a Crowd

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"The crowd not only acts upon the human being who is inside it and exposed to it, its agency within him persists when he is alone and isolated, and its effect on him is sometimes strongest in his greatest isolation."

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Cap_able blocks facial recognition software with knitted clothing

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AN INTERESTING WEARABLE TACTICAL BARRIER TO FACE RECOGNITION...!

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AN INTERESTING WEARABLE TACTICAL BARRIER TO FACE RECOGNITION...!

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'Named Manifesto Collection, the clothing features various patterns developed by artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms to shield the wearer's facial identity and instead identify them as animals'

So...it takes an algorithm to fool another one...!?

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Italian fashion start-up Cap_able has launched a collection of knitted clothing that protects the wearer's biometric data without the need to cover their face.

Named Manifesto Collection, the clothing features various patterns developed by artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms to shield the wearer's facial identity and instead identify them as animals.

Cap_able designed the clothing with patterns - known as adversarial patches - to deceive facial recognition software in real-time.

The garments have been tested with YOLO, which is the fastest real-time object detection system, according to Cap_able.

Wearers are either undetectable by the software or are identified as animals whose print is embedded into the adversarial patch.

"People who wear Cap_able's garments are not recognized as such by the software [YOLO], which instead identifies dogs, zebras, or giraffes within the fabric," said the brand.

Cap_able's founders, Rachele Didero and Federica Busani developed the collection after nine months of research and testing various images, algorithms, knitting machines and materials.

Didero created a system to converting digital adversarial patches onto a 3D knitted textile using a single yarn in order to control the knit and ensure it kept the patch's adversarial properties.

"I wanted to obtain a knitted textile because, in knitwear, I can control the material of the single yarn and work on the final texture," Didero told Dezeen.

"To obtain a knitted textile, I had to work on specific computerised knitting machines with a certain gauge and yarns."

The collection includes jumpers, t-shirts, trousers and dresses that are knitted from 100 per cent Egyptian cotton quality by Filmar, a brand that adheres to the Better Cotton Initiative (BCI), according to Cap_able.

According to Didero, the Manifesto Collection aims to raise awareness of the right to biometric data privacy, which is an issue she says that is "often underrepresented despite affecting the majority of citizens around the world".

Didero and Busani believe that facial information should be thought of in the same way as information gained from DNA and fingerprints.

The duo's garments aim to stimulate discussion on protection from non-ethical use of facial recognition cameras, which would have an impact on people's expression and movement in public spaces.

"In a world where data is the new oil, Cap_able addresses the issue of privacy, opening the discussion on the importance of protecting against the misuse of biometric recognition cameras: a problem if neglected, could freeze the rights of the individual including freedom of expression, association and free movement in public spaces," said Didero.

The use of facial recognition software is a growing concern with Owen Hopkins stating that the technology "is a fundamental threat to society" in an opinion piece on Dezeen.

Others that have created products to protect against facial recognition include Brooklyn-based designer Sara Sallam who designed facial jewellery to protect the wearer from surveillance cameras without concealing their features and Polish designer Ewa Nowak who developed a mask that makes the wearer's face undetectable to surveillance cameras.

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Cap_able blocks facial recognition software with knitted clothing

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Italian fashion start-up Cap_able has launched a collection of knitted clothing that protects the wearer's biometric data without the need to cover their face. Named Manifesto Collection, the clothing features various patterns developed by artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms to shield the wearer's facial identity and instead identify them as animals.

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SOMEONE HAS BEEN FOOLING AROUND WITH AI PHOTOGRAPHIC IMAGES...!

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SOMEONE HAS BEEN FOOLING AROUND WITH AI PHOTOGRAPHIC IMAGES...!

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Avery recently came clean and told the world that his “photos” were actually generated by Midjourney, a text prompt-based artificial intelligence image-generation program.

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Jos Avery was surprised when his portraiture account amassed nearly 30,000 followers in just five months. The self-described photographer primarily posted heavily retouched black-and-white portraits accompanied by fictional stories about the subjects to @averyseasonart. But Avery recently came clean and told the world that his "photos" were actually generated by Midjourney, a text prompt-based artificial intelligence image-generation program.

Avery spoke his truth in last week, telling the publication that he originally wanted "to fool people to showcase AI and then write an article about it." He did not immediately respond to Hyperallergic's request for comment.

To develop the portrait images, Avery would submit hundreds of carefully worded prompts for image generation on Midjourney, composite the best iterations, and edit the layered pictures using Adobe LightRoom and Photoshop. On average, it took Avery about 85 generated images (~21 prompts, as one prompt yields four images) to find one that was usable and worth editing.

"It takes an enormous amount of effort to take AI-generated elements and create something that looks like it was taken by a human photographer," he told Ars Technica. "The creative process is still very much in the hands of the artist or photographer, not the computer."

Yet, Avery deliberately identified himself as the "photographer" behind his portraiture, only revealing that his images were generative composites in his Instagram comments section three weeks ago before recently adjusting his account bio to include the term "AI." According to Ars Technica, Avery maintained that he used "a Nikon D810 with 24-70mm lens" to capture his "subjects," further backing himself into a corner as each post received dozens of praising comments until his admission of guilt.

Avery still posts generative portraiture on his Instagram, now hinting atthe process in the captions but disclosing that the images are from AI in the comments section.

Unsurprisingly, this revelation is particularly polarizing as the conversation regarding the blurry ethics of AI use in the art sphere continues to unfold. Despite the partial commenting limitations on Avery's account after the news broke, some Instagram users have decried his craft as "disingenuous," "intentionally misleading," and "a fraud," while others remained impressed with Avery's prompt-engineering and the lifelike results that followed.

In both his interview and his comments section, Avery vehemently defends his "work," noting that the people who have issues with AI's integration into art echo the same concerns as those who were skeptical or dismissive of photography when it was first invented. He also mentions that he started out as an AI skeptic himself.

"I honestly did not like AI much when I started the journey but have fallen in love with the limitless creativity," Avery wrote in response to a critical comment. "I also like that it doesn't create perfect images the exact way I want them. It means I have to work for it, re-generating, editing, drawing, compositing. I enjoy the collaboration."

Spanish photographer Silvia Catalán, who criticized Avery's content, told Hyperallergic that generative images in place of real photography "produce sadness, anger, and despair."

"It seems good to use AI as a resource, for example, photographers have always used resources, but to use it as a photo, to make others believe that you are a photographer, or that you are a better photographer, seems very wrong to me," Catalán continued.

Bavaria-based photographer Dirk Kultus didn't buy Avery's defense about working concurrently with AI to create something new. "Even if AI-generated images are modified, photoshopped or edited - they are still generated by the AI and not created by the user," he said to Hyperallergic.

"I think it also shows how easily the AI itself fools you by giving you the idea and sense of creating something when using it," Kultus explained. "But you don't. You just feed the algorithms which then calculate a result based on pure randomness and probabilities on a given database, created by others. It just modifies and manipulates existing results - texts, images, whatever - and generates a variation or combination. A process almost completely dependent on the algorithms of the AI and you as a user have only a very limited influence on."

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Viral "Photographer" Reveals His Images Were AI-Generated

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Jos Avery was surprised when his portraiture account amassed nearly 30,000 followers in just five months. The self-described photographer primarily posted heavily retouched black-and-white portraits accompanied by fictional stories about the subjects to @averyseasonart. But Avery recently came clean and told the world that his "photos" were actually generated by Midjourney, a text prompt-based artificial intelligence image-generation program.

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ANOTHER GOOD READING: Matteo Pasquinelli, 'FROM ALGORISM TO ALGORITHM: A brief history of calculation from the Middle Ages to the present day'

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ANOTHER GOOD READING: Matteo Pasquinelli, 'FROM ALGORISM TO ALGORITHM: A brief history of calculation from the Middle Ages to the present day'

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From algorism to algorithm: A brief history of calculation from the Middle Ages to the present day

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An interesting take on the sci-fi genre: THE MUNDANE SCIENCE FICTION MANIFESTO, Geoff Ryman, et al., 2013

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