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Announcing:

The Open Observatory is an open studio environment. It is a place where you can expect to learn about AI and emerging technologies within the context of our innate and unique human capacities. 

It is a place for explorers, interested in building new roads and expanding freedom, rather than controlling and constricting our vision. It embraces the natural world as a source of inspiration and awe and explores the two-way integration of objects and technologies—of objects, terrains and human beings.

I hope you’ll join.

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Shoe Interface… Wearable, rubber soled shoes also function as a local Digital ID, for privacy. Historical references used to generate design. Handshake Booklet.

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This was a test. I took one of the static images, I generated using the “Persona method”, (described in the book post), and then my voice sample, and used software which made persona speak from a written sentence. It did a pretty good job.

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This was the first of the two little books, using the “persona” method as described in the previous post. The AI was only prompted to produce what the persona produced, and then viewed through their own eyes. The persona is only a set of parameters, which does create a visual of a person. But it is not designed to look a certain way. The human form is only a reference, a result, a filter. Link to the book

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One of two small books, produced in 2023. I am working on a third with more text. I started to see meaning in the engagement of users and the terrain, through the software that runs autonomous (self-driving) vehicles. I think this is the important interface in our emerging technologies. I will write more on this later. For now, I developed a method to use Generative AI, through language, (Prompt engineering), that produces unique results. It is not using it as intended. I first create a “persona”, and through these eyes, I ask the AI to “see”. It produces more interesting results. As otherwise, the AI only outputs a kluge of what it already knows, which is static and boring. Link to the book

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Some people come into life already formed, and only needing to be honed. These are the most difficult lives it seems. But… there is a very good chance they produce the most meaning. For whom? It is usually revealed in the final days of form. Interesting that a war of a new kind is now brewing, (in the US at least, but also elsewhere). I am grateful that people have survived in tact so far. And I stand in awe of those who persist in their observations, despite the intensity of it all.

I am reminded of how Walter Benjamin struggled during war. And never quite escaped. I have more compassion for him now. Artists and writers, must survive this time. They are needed now. They will be pushed through the tiniest keyhole. And it will be painful. But the ones who survive, will understand what it meant.

Being true

There’s that little momentum that pushes up through you, the momentum that carries you into the orbit of your life. I think we grow up painfully and half expecting that this powerful force will always propel us, that we might either be crushed by it or carried off into the sky and seeing all that expanse before us. And maybe those that are too Promethean will collapse in mid-air. Or it is a latent power that begins to carve out pathways, channels, the subterranean ridges of habit and pattern. Ultimately flow and a sense that our power comes out from under us. Our great power earthed and flowing through us, not electrocuting the sea of souls but affirming it. I was supposed to read deeply and avert the worst of it. That was the miracle, briefly held,  and all too briefly I could see everything before it had been experienced, and the humour of it. I could laugh at my despair before it had ever happened so when I did eventually find myself consumed with grief I could have someone-myself- outside there finding it all unbearably comic, the way you know that there are bounds to your grief and that the sobbing will give way to a new plateau that you had only dreamt and not yet felt. To simply trust our impulses rather than let them subside and fall into their lack. There are things that I understand, and in understanding them I thought that I was protected from them. But we walk our own lines and just because we might see what happens at the far end does not mean that we can outmaneuver it. I know that people like to think that I am foolish, and they don’t see the way I land as if crashed from the outer rim of the sky, they don’t see how I avoid as much as humanly possible bearing the brunt of the landing on anyone else around. And still I only want to carve out a little bit of myself, and admit despite the gulf that seems to have grown between me and life, I would fall back into that world that seems to propel people with all its totemic strength either back inside themselves where they might break or outward in the many miraculous and unsuspecting forms, whether it is the mother or the engineer of cities.

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The clip above is from the Mongolian film, Khadak. A portrait of the overlay of a numeric grid (economy) onto a nomadic people. But in Khadak, the grid is broken. The protagonist and the woman above, lead the shift, undermining the coal industry and all it has taken. Returning them to what was familiar and sustaining--home. But they did not do so because they intended to. He found her buried under coal she was stealing for survival and trade. He only understood his grandfathers silence once the coal mining owners moved him into a hi-rise. But they both listened. They did not discuss it. They felt the change occurring. They only let it open. Originally posted in 2013.

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Antonio Turok, Solar Eclipse, Chiapas, Mexico , 1991

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I realized that the essential book, the one true book, is one that the great writer does not need to invent, in the current sense of the word, since it already exists in every one of us – he has only to translate it. The task and the duty of the writer are those of a translator.

Time Regained, Marcel Proust (via macrolit)

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“I am my own muse, I am the subject I know best. The subject I want to know better.” -Frida Kahlo 

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SHARE! last nights events at Standing Rock. 167 injured. Non-violent Water Protectors shot with water cannons in freezing weather, rubber bullets, compression cannons causing loss of an arm, LRAD, sound cannons, causing deafness and disorientation. The Water Protectors were brave and unstoppable. They would recover and go back to the front lines to take on more, as there was singing, praying and chanting. VERY INSPIRED people.

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A video obtained from the Pentagon through a Freedom of Information Act Request, on their vision of the future of cities. Clearly it is more of a reflection of their current state of mind, lack of empathy, and desired outcome. Especially if you consider what has occurred with Native Americans at Standing Rock, ND. It does not have to be this way.

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An insightful old lecture on mythological structure and Wagner's creation of ring cycles, where a new musical key is used to depict the next phase of the cycle or story.

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It’s disorienting when I try to describe how I think, never mind encoding it back into language. There is a clear disjunct somewhere, where language begins to deconstruct somewhere in my mind and the grammar becomes disjointed, totally losing its synchronicity somewhere. I read recently that dyslexics may have an issue with receiving certain frequencies of information, and no amount of amplitude will resolve this; their minds must find rhythm elsewhere than language; in music, in repetitive motions, in something more fluid than conversation. I am at a disjunct, the language that people speak is well behind the pace of thought, segmented and utilised, encoded through prior internal speech. For me, my language traces through old memory, pacing up and down through time. A clock reads 18:12 and I recall traces of Borodino, the pushing back of Napoleon; the frequency of information fluctuates and then becomes a fixed strain, buzzing and gradually absorbing new traces of information. Old and new flit closer together, the new with greater amplitude and significance, scented and tangible, and the old forming a kind of polyphony, filling in the hollowness and what lies between the spaces. I construct time this way, gradually forcing the old, lesser amplitudes with greater vibration, fixing them in the front of my mind, replacing current vision with the old, the traces now with solid, firm lines and relived through recent sensations. It does make life unusual, but recently I have been disoriented yet further, as I read the Rings of Saturn and I realise the depths, the real depths of these forgotten experiences. I realise something profound, that the massacres, the bloodshed, the near ruin of man, is occurring every day. Man, never equal, moves through time redefining himself, pressing forward by presenting a meaningful exterior, by fixing to ideologies, horizons that he will never reach. Those buildings that were constructed centuries ago, stone built and made for monophonic chants, deep and resonant but only able to carry sound very delicately. One must practice ones craft. Entire generations pass for this meaningful gesture, a practice to make contact and sound out the depths and what might lie beyond language. Utterances made together sound disembodied, chaotic, makeshift, forcing a kind of interiority which materialises monasticism, the reclusive life. And all to cultivate something that goes somewhat further, somewhat beyond; but it is of importance to get the initial sound right. Is the past really gone? Is there little left to be said for memory, for depth of understanding? Or is this the fundamental reason why we keep slipping and falling into shallower times, times epitomised by dislocation, disruption, and forceful change. The world itself silently hums, lost frequencies sound in the depths, in the different materials that speak silently, without intelligibility. And yet, for man who does not know the reason for his own intelligence, for man who cannot subtly pick out the threads of meaning in his fellow man, but run very far from that point… is there not a profound lack of reason in our own system? Disembodied reason. Reason cultivated from the objects that surround us, rather than the impetus that has made these objects. And perhaps one day we shall disinter this, and a flood of meaningful information will appear; we will either learn that everything is meaningful, or that nothing is.

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This animal body, for all its susceptibility and vertigo, remains the primary instrument of all our knowing, as the capricious earth remains our primary cosmos

David Abram, Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology (New York; Vintage Books, 2011)

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a fragile, blurred, vague

this morning’s reading. Sophie Calle. Blind (2011)

all tagged blind all tagged blindness all tagged Istanbul

all tagged vagueness