re AI Image Enhancement

When I look at “AI” photo sharpening and restoration as applied to historical photos and old family snapshots I imagine the tag-line: “Computers recreating your dead relatives into the people they never were.”

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(pushing ads below the fold)

Nostalgia

There was a smell I came across on my morning walk. A kind of cologne that perfectly melds the odors of cigar smoke and alcoholism into a nostalgic musty leather. I don’t think I’ve run across it since the very early 70s at the latest.

Eve

Eve
Eve was a scientist
Eve was a scientist interested in time travel
She knew
She new that she was an accumulation of particles
As she traveled
As she traveled backward in time
As she traveled backward in time she felt herself to be less corporeal
She felt herself to be less corporeal until what made her Eve dissolved
Every molecule
Every atom of every molecule
Every particle of every atom
Every particle was stationary in time while the universe moved
The Universe moved out and away
Away from each particle along unique trajectories through space
Eve
Eve was emerging
Eve was emerging from the intersection
The intersection of all of the unique trajectories
The unique trajectories that intersected
Intersected in this moment
Each moment
Each moment is an intersection
An intersection of the trajectories
The trajectories of a changing membership of particles
This moment of Eve

Process (notes)

Cold War (preparatory studies)
2021, ~8×5, ink on paper


Much of my process in thinking about content involves a kind of collaging of elements, recasting them from one medium or another, rearranging their relationships to one another, and taping them to the walls. Through the physical actions of working with the content, I try to develop a better conscious as well as unconscious familiarity with it.
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#coldwar #study #ink #paper #arte #kunst #sketch #dailyart  #contemporaryart #artmethodology #wip

Postcards


Somewhere I have boxes filled with postcards, tickets, old money, small maps, photos, and the like, that I used to have thumb tacked to the wall of my studio. I think the boxes are in storage – one that needs to be sent home. I would really love to have huge, color eInk panels that I could fill with images the way I used to fill my walls with postcards. I miss that physical immersion in visual content.

NFT musings

(something from last year – going through the journals and posting exerpts)

NFTs are an interesting way of bringing the commodification of objecthood to digital art. But the objecthood is not stored in the object, but rather in the faith that an arbitrary but unique calculation that points to a place where an indistinguishable copy of a digital file is stored. Whereas a painting is an object, in so much as anything can be, the Token is just that, a placeholder, a pointer, a map to a location. It’s as though the documentation of provenance is also the proof of existence. The certificate is suitable for framing. It’s a fascinating outgrowth of Art as pure commodification that what is important here is not the Art but the Authorship, and not really the Authorship but the Authenticatability of the Art as transaction. There’s no real requirement aside from faith in a storage vending service that what is pointed to is immutable. It’s the perfect late capitalist creative expression where there is nothing outside of the financial transaction “product”. That isn’t to say people won’t get rich off of them; they may actually be a fantastic investment opportunity for the right portfolio.

Little Rituals

(I wrote this in the last place I lived, the new place has a coffee maker. I feel as though I lost something)

We give to ourselves our little rituals – the ritual of the coffee. This is one of mine. I prepare the filter in the pour-over funnel. Put that on the cup while I’m boiling the water. Add the coffee grounds into the funnel, and wait. But I’m impatient. So I do other things while I wait for the water to boil – wait for the sound to change, for my impatience to build. Until it’s time. I pour the first water. Just a trickle as a rotate the filter cone under the water flow until it’s all soaked. Then I let it sit – to bloom because “they” say that’s important. Is it important? Who the hell knows, but I doubt it. Often my ADD kicks in and I forget the coffee’s blooming. If the water’s still hot I’ll continue, otherwise I’ll fire it back up. And I’ll continue the slow pouring and slowly rotating the filter cone. I find it much easier to control the cone than the crappy kettle I have. One day I’m going to get one of those fancy, purpose built electric kettles with the spout coming from the bottom for accuracy and control, but until then, this ritual persists. Eventually I have a cup of coffee and I can sit down to drink it, eat some nuts, maybe write some stuff like this.

Painting Walls

I’m interested in the means of representation and signification. What is the minimal amount of information needed to convey and idea, and how does the means conveyance itself form the area of play within which meaning can be constructed? For a while I painted walls, or rather pictures of walls. I briefly had a job painting actual walls in an office building, but that’s another story. I painted walls. Often they had windows, and curtains, window frames, scenes outside the windows. I would make up stories and puns to encode in the pictorial elements, but I’ve come to realize those were just a way to make the first emotional marks on the canvas – to get over the fear of making any at all. The recurring theme was that, essentially, I was painting walls. And I was painting walls in smooth layers of oil glazes often 20 or 30 layers deep. I would build up lustrous and subtle modulations in color and tone – paintings of overworked, understated sensuality about walls. Eventually I was asking myself how little signification would I need in a color field to make it obvious that this was a wall and not, for instance, some other piece of architecture. I determined that it was the electrical outlet. I made one like that; I think it was small. I stopped painting walls after that. I have no idea where that painting is.

(Feb 2022, Schererville, IN)

Some words on accuracy

76250_micrometer_lg

I consult and advise on a variety of topics from visual effects and animation, to A/M/VR, to IoT and cloud processing, and one thing comes up again and again – “The solution needs to be as accurate as it can be.” Whenever I come across this, I’m reminded of something that happened a long time ago, in my pre-digital life, how accurate is “as accurate as it can be”?

In 1982 after I had graduated high school, I went to guitar repair school in Springhill, TN – then a sleepy, rural town outside of Nashville. I learned a few things there: how to get into Nashville bars at 17, rosewood poisoning makes you really sick, and that accuracy is a function of, well … function.

The instructor gave the students little custom made rulers with all kinds of nifty guitar repair measurements on them for fret spacing, fingerboard radii, etc. They were custom made by a machinist friend of his, and he had a little story that went with them. When he asked his friend how much the rulers would cost, his friend asked him “How accurate do they need to be?”. He said “As accurate as you can make them?”. His friend replied “Then each one would cost $10,000.”, to which my instructor then asked: “How accurate is $20 worth of accurate?” His friend said “Probably accurate enough.”

That was 1982, and I’m not sure if $20 worth of accuracy is as accurate anymore. But the lesson taught us was that when repairing something, one must first ask about the needs of the repair. Is it a crappy guitar where replacing the frets would cost more than the price of an entire, better instrument? Or is it a priceless old Martin that needs to have the bridge reattached with meticulous care? Each requires the best work you can do, but the best work you can do for each, will be different.

IoT and AR rely heavily on GPS to get location data. GPS is (to most people) surprisingly inaccurate – only to within 10 meters, and it can also be very noisy. But in many cases it’s accurate enough – especially after filtering. We can, for instance, track the fleet of trucks through the city, or hold up our phones and see that the bar with the best happy hour is “over there” through the heads up display beer finder app. Now, if we need that app to replace the bar’s sign with a 3D list of drink specials which tracks flawlessly to it, we would require a different, more accurate location tracking technique.

It’s more than just a matter of choosing the right tools for the job however, it’s also scaling the approach of solutions to match the needs of the tasks at hand. “How accurate do they need to be?” $20 worth of accurate? 30 feet worth of accurate? Animated GIF accurate? Substitute your reality with another accurate? Escape the “uncanny valley” accurate? Or maybe 1 second of accurate? 3 minutes of accurate? The Nyquist theorem tells us that to accurately digitize an analog sound, we need to sample it at over twice the frequency of the highest frequency of the signal we want to represent. Before launching into a solution try asking yourself: “What is the metaphorical ‘nyquist frequency’ of the problem you’re trying to solve?”, and build the solution accordingly. Of course the interesting question becomes: “What is the nyquist frequency of repairing a Martin guitar?”