the limits of the human artspace
Art is no longer going anywhere, it has arrived: we have explored the artspace available to us as fully as the surface of our planet.
is the AI the artist?
If you feed a prompt into an AI image generating system such as Midjourney, who is the artist? Most people seem to want to give the credit to the AI, but, depending on how you go about it, I believe that the Prompter can claim to be the artist
industrialised creativity and valueless abundance
For a while now, the Digital Revolution has been industrialising creative production: with the advent of AI-based systems, it is now industrialising creativity itself.
a bonfire of the vanities?
The Internet could be the ultimate liberation of human creativity: into the hands of anyone with access to it, it puts a printing press and a recording and film studio—all connected to a world-spanning distribution system. By volume of output, by its breadth and quality, it has brought us a New Renaissance. But this revolution casts a shadow
digital versus analog photography
I was talking to a photographer friend about the post production he was carrying out on his “digital negatives”. It had not occurred to me that something similar goes on, with the application of Photoshop to a raw digital image, as with the chemical processing in a dark room of a traditional ‘chemical’ photograph. Thinking about this, I was surprised by how profoundly different these forms of photography are from each other. The image on …
LEGO and the digital mind
In a previous post, I argued that LEGO, when it consisted mostly of simple bricks, was a superior creative tool for a child than more modern LEGO with its complex pieces. I have come to a more nuanced conclusion: that though classical LEGO promotes one kind of creativity, it may do so at the expense of other kinds
when LEGO lost faith
I believe that LEGO is a toy/tool that once allowed children to build models at a sweet spot intermediate between thought and physical reality, and that, by losing faith in that breakthrough, the company has lost its way.
digital makeup
Dramatic performances ask of their audience that they suspend their disbelief. An aspect of this can be that we are asked to believe that actors, mostly unrelated, are actually blood relations. Film and TV close ups make this more of an issue. How long will it be before computer post production allows actors, that are supposed to be blood relatives, to have their faces digitally modified by means of an inbetweening algorithm so that they …
the trouble with skeuomorphs
An argument against skeumorphs
digital texts: a return to aspects of an oral tradition?
Ebooks are the latest stage of a process that began with the invention of writing. The ability to write thoughts and stories down allowed their distribution across space and time: a storyteller no longer needed to be present for his message to be communicated. These advantages are obvious, but there is also a profound disadvantage: that a text is a fossil of the author’s message, and that, disconnected from its living source, it can no …