Interconnected

1.

This is an amazing long essay, well illustrated, about someone who builds an heat sensitive camera. It is peppered with poetic descriptions of what the camera sees.

the air itself glowing

And, looking outside,

the vegetation is not as reflective, so you get the “blackness of space” sky with regular-ish landscapes. It’s almost like being on the airless, derelict Earth - preserved under the void after whatever disaster befell it.

2.

I’m Google by Dina Kelberman.

It is:

an ongoing tumblr blog in which batches of images and videos that I cull from the internet are compiled into a long stream-of-consciousness. The batches move seamlessly from one subject to the next based on similarities in form, composition, color, and theme. This results visually in a colorful grid that slowly changes as the viewer scrolls through it. Images of houses being demolished transition into images of buildings on fire, to forest fires, to billowing smoke, to geysers, to bursting fire hydrants, to fire hoses, to spools of thread.

3.

The Japanese Museum of Rocks That Look Like Faces.

Does what it says on the tin.

4.

Here’s a system using artificial intelligence to generate human faces.

Worth it for:

• the gifs seamlessly morphing between faces and emotions, exploring parameter space
• and, the best bit, the illegal faces. Search for the word illegal to see what the system does when it’s asked to generate faces from inputs outside the regular range. The faces are weird patchworks, a computer-native cubism

See also: WaveNet, which makes realistic speech audio also using A.I. It’s incredibly realistic, but search for babbling and listen to what the system produces in the absence of any text to process. It’s a mess of clicks, hums, and wet mouth noises – horribly human but with an absence of intelligence. Uncanny.