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Drawings from today’s cathartic character design class. A close friend and art hero of mine left the country with his partner about a year ago in preparation for the worst. I miss him and I’m upset that they had to go. But I’m also happy they are safe, away from this ugliness. He likes to draw donkeys, so today’s model was transformed into a Nick Bottom thrashing in dreams as a tribute to him.

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Prototype for a game in which you need to find the language hidden around in nature. The red dots represent bees flying around a flower. Their flying path, seen from a specific angle, describe a specific Mayan symbol

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Virtual reality Nahuala

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La Nahuala

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My AR work, finally installed in Downtown Worcester, MA. Download the Hoverlay app (no account or login necessary), and open it anywhere near the Worcester Commons. Select my channel (AbeTena 2022), and find the four installations in the four conners of the Commons.

This program is supported in part by a grant from the Worcester Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts. To find out more about how National Endowment for the Arts grants impact individuals and communities, visit www.arts.gov. 

Thanks also to #Hoverlay for providing the Augmented Reality platform to make this work possibl

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Last one!

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Last one!

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3 out of 4 done…

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Testing animation in different enviros

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The term AI implies a sort of intelligence that can process raw sensory data and produce/assign meaning independently. This was the goal of the so-called Good Old Fashion Artificial Intelligence back in the 70 and 80s, but it was proven to be extremely difficult (and some say impossible). What is now being sold s AI is, instead, the result of deeply exploitative labor for many, and surveillance capitalism for all. "Content Moderators" in the global south have been made to manually interpret millions of images and texts, in effect bypassing the hard technical challenge of symbol-grounding (aka turning 0 and 1s into usueufl things). It is not unlike the mining of ore or natural resources, but this time, the deprecated labor of millions is being used to build homunculi that will replace service workers in the North. I find it deeply disturbing that these companies use scifi-based doomsday scenarios as a marketing strategy ("our tool is so powerful it could destroy the earth!"), given that doomsday already happened, and continues, for millions of colonized peoples around the world. This is a labor struggle in all fronts, which the African Content Moderators have made it clear by unionizing like they have.

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Rigging done!

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Still working on this. Now making it interactive :)

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“Through a paranoid rationality, expressed in the machine-like self, we combine an omnipotent phantasy of self-control with fear and aggression directed against the emotional and bodily limitations of mere mortals. Through regression to a phantasy of infantile omnipotence, we deny our dependency upon nature, upon our own nature, upon the “bloody mess” of organic nature. We phantasize about controlling the world, freezing historical forces, if necessary, even destroying them in rage; we thereby contain our anxiety in the name of maintaining rational control” - Kevin Robins and Les Levieow, in “Soldier, Cyborg, Citizen”

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Testing simulation to come up with more interesting shapes