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barsoap

@ barsoap @lemm.ee

Posts
9
Comments
743
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • Excel logic

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  • Would it baffle you to know I might consider this “critique” to be art where the image itself is not? I leave that as an exercise to the reader.

    Not in the slightest. Also, how kind of you.

    Do I just take your word for it that these critics have nothing to say?

    Nah I'm just not into the high-falutin' stuff myself. At least not in the "write an essay to accompany the work" way. Part of the craft of art, for me, is to actually express stuff in the artwork, and not as a combination of artwork+essay. I very much rather leave the thing open to interpretation, see what happens. That's entering a dialogue with whoever the audience may be instead of preaching from the pulpit, it's horizontal, not hierarchical, it does not privilege the perception of the author over that of the audience.

    Their sole motivation is salvaging gen AI’s reputation.

    Yes and no? My actual stance on gen AI is simple: It's pretty much like photography. Tons of slop photographs and AI gens exist because it's so accessible, doesn't mean you cannot create art using it. Like with photography, using gen AI you have to deal with its limitations: You can't control the weather, you can't control how the AI will interpret certain things. It's limitations you have to work within, work around, with photography more physical, with AI you're putting your lens into a very weird conceptual kind of space. In either case, as an artist, you're making lots of choices, turn lots of knobs, to increase your odds but ultimately still rely on chance and throw away tons of shots which aren't quite right. It's quite a different process than drawing which is why I think so much of the critique comes from... painters. That was the case back in the days when photography was new, and it's the same now, modulo people now using graphics tablets of which I have one connected to my PC mind you just make this clear even if I can't draw for shit I'm not half-bad at sculpting. I wouldn't really dream of doing something serious with gen AI that doesn't have at least a depth map as input, there's just not enough control without that kind of thing.

  • Excel logic

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  • I'm not talking about reinterpretation, I'm talking about faithful recreation. Archaeologists do that kind of thing, and it's valuable, why not art historians?

    And judging by your reaction my suggestion indeed is the right kind of transgression to recreate the thing.

    If you want it a bit more pedestrian, just in case you happen to be a museum director: Ask the janitor to go into a hardware store, and buy a urinal they like. Then tell them to write "The real Duchamp" on it, and position it on a pedestal. Attach a standard museum plaque, crediting the work to the janitor.

  • Excel logic

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  • With some time passed, I actually have the high-brow answer you so desire:

    The talking glass, which might only be spotted on a second take as the human mind first glances over the inconsistency, focussed on reading the text, challenges us to emphasise with Excel's own problems deriving meaning from the input it's given. Just as we mislooked, assumed context, so does Excel assume context, and January 17th.

    barsoap is reaching for the stars here to justify something they know is bullshit.

    That's where flowers grow that's why it's beautiful. You may dismiss it, others might quote Bob Ross and call it a happy accident, yet others might jerk off to it, talking about Jung, how the human behind the generation, in their chuckle, might not have been aware of the context of what they were producing, but channelled the collective unconsciousness' understanding of it and then wax on about the chuckle as the self-portrait, archetype, of hunches.

    If you think that's BS then you should read some of the explanations that come with modern academic works of art. As in the stuff you're producing when you study art. I'm fucking holding back here, they seem to be grading by unintelligibility and length of the justification.

    Is that BS? I am quite sympathetic to that notion. But that doesn't challenge its status as art.

  • Excel logic

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  • Being profoundly offensive is the only way to do the work justice. To actually recreate it is not to recreate the original form, but the reaction it caused. The very point of the work includes that any urinal is just as good as any other, so why the pretence that this particular shape, the "R. Mutt" signature, has significance?

    Looking at the replicas is like praying to ashes. I'm talking about passing on the fire.

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  • That's long since been the case, e.g. the Linux Kernel assigns its own CVE numbers, they're a CNA. Which keeps the "root" CVS database completely out of the loop short of saying "this here is your namespace and scope". Canonical is a CNA, Airbus is a CNA, both covering their own products. 453 in total.

    Still important to have a fallback though because not all projects are big enough to do that kind of stuff, and you always want there to be some database you can report something against.

  • China has stopped exporting rare earths to everyone, not just the U.S., cutting off critical materials for tech, autos, aerospace, and defense

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  • If China never wants to export REE again because other countries have built their own refineries sure, they can.

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  • It shouldn't surpris too much given Mike Pondsmith's general record of clairvoyance that NetWatch is a European Corp.

    And, no, "Vos videmus" totally isn't a creepy motto. Based out of London, one could almost think that it's the London CCTV system turned sentient AI.

  • Excel logic

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  • As a connoisseur, maybe you can explain why the oversized glass is talking about itself to me.

    Because the artist -- the human, not the AI, that is -- decided that it should. Maybe just with a chuckle, no deeper meaning, wouldn't be the first time that happens (much to the chagrin of the academic art world).

  • Excel logic

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  • The toilet isn't the interesting thing, the interesting thing is how there's now authorised replicas in museums (the original is lost) signifying the discussion around art perception, not the art itself. Looking at one doesn't give you more insight than reading "and he put a urinal on a pedestal" in a textbook. It's a fucking urinal. The piece having no meaning onto itself was part of the point, it's all in the context. Yet, somehow, the replicas are authorised. A true rebel museum would forego getting an authorised one and buy a random one off the shelf, then proclaim it to be original.

    You can't go into a room carrying a plucked chicken, proclaiming "behold, a human!" without there being Aristotelians around. Well you can but noone would talk about it millennia later.

  • Excel logic

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  • AI does not have the creative capacity to make art.

    I agree!

    And the same applies to cameras. That doesn't mean that photographs can't be art, though.

    It’s not dada. It’s too coherent to be dada, and it’s too shit to be anything else.

    TBH my first instinct was trolling, especially as it's easy to overlook when you're just reading the text, not focussing on anything else. Point is when you'd hang this thing in an exhibition the audience would go all "ahh" and examine the mechanism.

    The academic art world is beset nowadays with blurbs of barely intelligible critical theory to justify themselves, I find a fresh amateur artists saying "oh that's interesting, neat, let's keep it" much more interesting.

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  • Literally nobody is saying or thinking that. What we are saying is that there is absolutely no way that OP’s prompt contained “…and make the optimist BE the glass itself…”.

    So what? It's still a choice to keep this result, and not another. Artists capitalise on chance occurrence all the time.

    The irony is that you’re giving OP way more benefit of the doubt in your reading of what they produced than you’ve given me,

    OP is not here to defend themselves. They're also not digging themselves further into a hole.

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  • Fine. If it's offending your senses too much to be tame surrealism, call it dada. If you think that replacing a person with an object cannot be an artistic choice, you... well, haven't seen much art.

    Note that I'm not arguing for or against AI here. I'm saying that your critique of AI is slop.

  • Excel logic

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  • but that still doesn’t mean you get to post complete nonsensical garbage where a glass of water is talking for no reason

    How dare Dali paint pictures with melting clocks! If the clocks really were hot enough to melt, they would set the tree they're melting on ablaze!!!!11

    I get it. Artists are afraid of their income. But with those kinds of takes, "AI bad because surrealism" I can't take you seriously as an artist so I guess nothing would be lost.

  • Excel logic

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  • Could potentially be a compression artefact but I freely admit I'm playing devil's advocate right now. Do not go down that route we'd end up at function approximation with randomised methods and "well intelligence actually is just compression".

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  • Not using plain RGB black and white isn't a new thing, neither is randomising. Digital artists might rather go with a uniform watercolour-like background to generate some framing instead of an actual full background but, meh. It's not a smoking gun by far.

    The one argument that does make me think this is AI was someone saying "Yeah the new ChatGPT tends to use that exact colour combination and font". Could still be a human artist imitating ChatGPT but preponderance of evidence.

    I can generally spot SD and SDXL generations but on the flipside I know what I'd need to do to obscure the fact that they were used. The main issue with the bulk AI generations I see floating around isn't that they're AI generated, it's that they were generated by people with not even a hint of an artistic eye. Or vision.

    But that doesn't really matter in this case as this work isn't about lines on screen, those are just a mechanism to convey a joke about Excel. Could have worked in textual format, the artistry likes with the idea, not in the drawing, or imitation thereof.

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  • Because the idea behind it is good? You're confusing art and craft. Why should anyone be interested in a urinal on a pedestal? The work is defined not by whether or not you can buy its physical representation in any random hardware store, I thought we had that one figured out.

    Also there's literally zero people who would pay someone a commission to draw this piece. You're not looking at lost work you're looking at additional art. Without AI (if it is AI) it might have still existed but in stick figure form and that would be better because...? The idea has better expression as a chicken scratch? I don't think so.

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  • Left guy has 1 arm.

    Perspective.

    Both guys have an arm that melds into the surface that the glass is sitting on.

    Nah the arms are in front of the railing.

    The “optimist” is the glass.

    So what it's visually balanced. I would shy away from reading surrealist meaning into it but it's not like humans never make that kind of choice.

    The plain fact of the matter is that nowadays it's often simply impossible to tell, and the people who say "they can always tell" probably never even tried to draw hands or they could distinguish twelve-fingered monstrosities from an artist breaking their pencil in frustration and keeping the resulting line because it's closer to passing than anything they ever drew before.

  • Are there any Lemmy/Mbin instances by women for women?

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  • They're also complaining about "women being excluded from women's spaces by agents of the patriarchy posing as women". They're also not necessarily using "TERF" as a label. They're using typical fascist-style "words mean whatever we want them to mean in the moment" type of stuff, hiding clear-cut positions behind pretend nuance, hence why I favour clarity.

  • Are there any Lemmy/Mbin instances by women for women?

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  • Nah I'm demanding clarity. A clear question "Do you mean excluding TERFs or excluding women" and the answer is "I want to be inclusive". It may not be meant as such, and I'm definitely not implying that it was, but that's exactly how a TERF would evade questioning.

    A clear "Fuck TERFs" would have provided plenty of clarity, and been much shorter. Also, it would have said "Fuck TERFs".

  • Are there any Lemmy/Mbin instances by women for women?

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  • Either can describe a bar that throws out Nazis or a Nazi bar, depending on perspective.