Author: miniverse

I know this is late, bear with me.

My interests are broad but most of them are art forms where “last word” works” have been produced. I love japanese anime and manga, which reached its hey day in 1980s where movies like Papirika  came up with original and experimental ideas and characterful animation. (Papirika was a forerunner for Inception). Other interests, like drawing people, reached their “last word” phase with cave drawings eons ago. I can’t make a dent in those artforms. Instead I must try and live up to the body of work produced.

What are some ways in which new technologies shape culture? What are some ways in which culture shapes technological development?

Present day tech has reached a point where it manufactures homogenous culture on a global scale. Algorithmic decision making combined with innovative marketing can export cultures such as marvel films to billions. When users try to find their own community online the algorithm is working in their favor. Watching and predicting, in the hopes that if it can predict the user’s next move it can keep them engaged. Our culture shapes the direction of new tech. Investment into neural networks and related areas are to create as close to the perfect algorithmic predictor as possible.

We might aspire to make stuff of lasting importance, but when our work is technologically novel, it doesn’t always age well. Discuss.

Replicating rudimentary exploratory works in tech is not going to gain traction as viewers have seen it before. The original artist who produces these works are gaining exposure through the novelty of the work and the story of the creation process. Looking at their work and making similar quality rudimentary work won’t cut it. The effort required to create experimental work when a medium is semi-explored isn’t worth the potential traction. At that point, the obvious exploratory paths for the medium are well explored and the less interesting and more difficult paths are left untouched. The middle phase of a new medium’s introduction feels like a hard to manage slump.

Compton gives good advice to making generators: specific and concrete “artifacts”. Get expertise from someone who makes or knows those artifacts to form a list of characteristics to generate. Create a structure of rules that govern the limits of the generator’s variability and creation guidelines. The usage of Perlin noise and other randomness can be used to introduce parametric change with user input.

It is hard to answer Compton’s question of how to “debug” a generator which isn’t producing the creatures as predicted . To me, it requires technical knowledge of coding and a well made architecture so that it is easy to locate sources of variation in the generator. However, perceptual uniqueness is even harder to identify. This isn’t computer defined and is purely determined by the artist eyeballing the work to see if a human can feel interested in the different productions. For me, a periodic break so I can come back and look at the generated work with a fresh set of eyes helps me determine the perceptual differences in the artifacts produced.