Thank you GPT4 for this Squiggle + Blue Sky picture.
Hi. It’s Friday. So I’m tidying up a selection of things I’ve been interested in all week.
I may be wrong, but did these five scientists just build a system that learns like our brains using spatially embedded recurrent neural networks? If so, then holy shit. If I’m wrong, then I enjoyed my hallucinogenic holy shit moment nevertheless.
Read more here: Spatially embedded recurrent neural networks reveal widespread links between structural and functional neuroscience findings.
Some Winter Pots
Every so often I get to go visit an artist and walk away forever changed and somewhat infected by having interacted with them. Visiting Edmund de Waal a couple of decades ago was one of those times. The potter and author is known for his beautiful installations of ceramic pots and his engaging and wonderful books.
I loved this recent video of de Waal’s 2020 exhibition, Some Winter Pots, at the London Gagosian gallery.
And this is a 2015 NY Times review of de Waal’s brilliant book, The White Road.
Speculative Everything
If you happen to visit with me there’s a very good chance you’ll leave with at least two books of mine. One will likely be Speculative Everything by Dunne & Raby. The fantastic book proposing design as a ‘mode of socialcultural inquiry’.
And you’ll also hear me talk about the Design Fiction group, Near Future Laboratory, headed by the visionary Julian Bleeker. I just purchased the 10th Anniversary Edition of the TBD Catalog to go along with the other products of theirs I’ve collected.
Bleeker is a somewhat prolific author on Design Fiction discipline and runs a lively Discord server too.
I feel the work of NFL, Dunne & Raby sits closely with the work of artists like TeamLab out of Tokyo. Where experiments or probes are generated to see how we interact, what we might feel about the interaction and perhaps understand the world a little differently.
Check out What is Design Fiction from the Near Future Lab:
https://nearfuturelaboratory.com/what-is-design-fiction?
Rabbit Hole
Finally, for today, I’ve spent a considerable amount of time in the world of generative AI recently. And it is a rabbit hole. Of infinite depth. @nickfloats is sort of my white rabbit for this journey. I came across the SF based Krea AI and their AI Creative Suite and this demo of their AI software:
I’d also seen somewhere, in my rabbit hole, someone demonstrating a plugin where they showed a Frank Gehry like sketch of a shoe (read:bad sketch) and generative AI produced a novel design for a realistic sneaker. (I’m unable to retrace my steps and find that video now.)
All this makes me think of the role of imagination, or the process of imagination really. From the process Edmund de Waal takes sitting at his wheel to throw a pot, producing what he imagines to children drawing the fantastic, not caring if it can be made, to new tools that sort of provide imagination when we don’t quite have it ourselves. As if to say back to us, “Is this what you imagined?” with each version of the generated AI.
I’m going to reread the excellent 1998 book, Abstracting Craft, the Practiced Digital Hand by Malcom McCullough.