sangsara.net

Month: August 2022

  • Week 35.22

    I met up with Rob again to talk side projects, debate the existence of meaningful work, and see some free art at the National Gallery. The children’s biennale was on and offered the most impressive sight of the entire visit, a massive work called Head/Home by Alfredo and Isabel Aquilizan.

    It’s a sprawling installation pieced together from cardboard houses and elements, many customized and signed by visiting children. There’s also an online component on the above-linked site, where you can pick a space to “move into”. I was immediately struck by its resemblance to the Bidonville NFT project I bought into a few weeks ago; the drab uniformity of the cardboard and the haphazard placement of everything atop everything else recalls the appearance of a slum, but like in Bidonville, it’s presented with childlike wonder instead of judgment.

    In the pursuit of more creative escapes, Rob’s also committed to blogging again, supposedly inspired by this weekly update. He’s put out a banger of a post already. We also started a game of doodle/caption tennis, where he draws something and I write the caption, with neither of us knowing what the other is doing. So far we’re four for four, and the combinations have made a sort of sense! Might start a blog or an account somewhere to put them if this exercise has legs.

    Otherwise it’s been a somewhat physically exhausting week: my injured legs have made getting around more tedious and painful than normal; good sleep has eluded me; I’ve had a higher-than-acceptable number of frustrating “conversations”; my introvert’s social savings account went into overdraft with the number of people I’ve met, talked to, had dinner with; and the weekend has not felt very restful at all.

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    • I played zero video games but managed to read a fair bit more of Seveneves. I may yet finish it this year.
    • We watched Five Days At Memorial, the new Apple TV+ series set in a hospital during Hurricane Katrina, and it’s one of those stories you can’t believe took place in recent history. Not only for the scale of the tragedy and how comparatively little we (me, anyway) remember of it, but the failure of government to prepare for something they should have known about from past experiences? Scratch that. It’s not surprising at all.
    • There’s a bit where someone says, “this is supposed to happen in third-world countries, not here”, and it just made me wanna go “oh, honey. I’ve got news for you…” at the TV.
    • I came up with the name Man-Sized Vase for a band I might like to be in one day. Shortly after that, I saw a man-sized vase on the Raffles Hotel’s grounds.
    • MidJourney briefly enabled a new beta model, for like a day, which made all outputs more realistic. It was reportedly a combination of their engine with the newly open-sourced Stable Diffusion model. Before they closed it down for “improvements”, I managed to make this masterpiece of a golden retriever drooling an entire river in the Amazon rainforest.

  • Week 34.22

    I fell down. It happened walking right in the middle of the sidewalk, where someone had decided to place stone benches, a civic design decision made nowhere else in the entire country that I know of. I’d just been avoiding its siblings in the moment before, most of them brightly painted, but the one that got me was dark gray, and it was 9pm and dim, and I was looking at a giant mural to the side while talking about it with my companions. We’d been out all day to see art, ending up at the ongoing Singapore Night Festival.

    I stubbed my right big toe first, I think. Then my right shin. Then I toppled over the bench, knees first, palms outstretched. Smashed both knees down onto the concrete sidewalk from seating height, and thankfully avoided a broken face with my hands. Everything still hurts now, the day after. Maybe I’ve fractured the toe. It doesn’t want to bend. I think I’ll be okay, but any sympathy is welcome.

    I got up quite quickly and felt the burn, but was alright to keep going. My friends said, “sit down for a minute and catch a breath, you’re over 40 now. Take it easy. It’s too late for parkour.” This is good advice in general.

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    Earlier that day with Rob (he’s back in town again, hence I took some time off), we saw the strange work of Australian artist Patricia Piccinini at the ArtScience Museum: We Are Connected. I suppose you could describe them as grotesque, body horror explorations of biological variety, mostly in the form of human-animal chimeras. Kim found the exhibition for us, saying “It’s weird. I think you’d both like it.” For the record, she would have hated it.

    B&W photos are straight out of the Ricoh GR III’s signature high-contrast mode

    Rob said they reminded him of the work of Ron Mueck, so afterwards we dropped his name into a MidJourney prompt and created something not too far from what we’d seen.

    Later in the evening, we visited another exhibition of AI-generated art, pieces clearly composited from MidJourney outputs — scenes similar to what we’ve also created playing with these tools. What happens to art some day when viewers can engage, challenge, and remix on equal footing with artists? When execution counts for nothing, and only what you’re saying matters (RIP the massive teams of studio interns)? Will you walk into a gallery and see a textual prompt and seed number in a frame? Hmm… gimme a minute!

    Prompt Art #1

    I also put up an AI art explainer as an Instagram story, so if you’ve been wondering what MidJourney is and what this is all about, this may help.

    One of the better things from that afternoon: a crude 3D animation about viruses, played across seven screens, with a shot of a man licking an android’s eyeball.

    This was at the Singapore Art Museum’s temporary outpost at Keppel Distripark. Which is a pretty stark middle-of-nowhere-feeling industrial space, interesting in itself. We saw an old sign that said “climb the stairs to the fifth floor for more artwork”, which turned out to be a cruel exaggeration on a very hot afternoon. There was but one lonely birdhouse-sized installation, a sort of wind-powered music box based on structures we’d already seen on the first floor. But the view sort of made up for it, and watching shipping containers being loaded onto trucks is not bad at all.

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    I finally leveled up my deca.art Decagon to L30. Left with nothing else to shoot for, I bought a basic one and started leveling it up too.

    This week’s been a good reminder that you’ve gotta have fun/meaningful things going on a regular basis, otherwise you’ll be left talking about LEVELING UP AN NFT as the most exciting thing that happened outside of taking an afternoon off and getting injured.

    ===

    Last week I mentioned the MusicHarbour app and started talking to Michael about music recommendation engines. He mentioned Apple Music’s “For You” playlists, and I realized I hadn’t used any of them in weeks, maybe months. Today I tried my New Music Mix and discovered the RZA has put out new stuff both as himself and his Bobby Digital persona. Two album/EPs, actually! Saturday Afternoon Kung Fu Theater with DJ Scratch, and RZA presents: Bobby Digital and the Pit of Snakes. I also wanted to correct my earlier opinion of King Princess’s Hold On Baby: it’s grown on me and I love it now. The same thing happened with her previous single Pain. It sounded absolutely crap the first time I heard it, and then it absolutely slapped. How does she do it?

  • Week 33.22

    It was National Day week. I half-watched the parade on TV, hoping it might stray from the usual formula. Nope, same old military parade. The COVID years were more interesting — in the same way Apple had to make expensive and polished presentation videos to replace their in-person events, we got a mix of prerecorded material and ‘live’ small-scale performances beamed from venues across the country. I liked that much better than watching thousands of people waving flags in the heat.

    We’ve obviously heard the reports of brutal heatwaves everywhere, but it’s probably not any hotter here than it usually is in August (too damned hot). I had to go out most days this week and I figure 10 minutes of walking outdoors is the limit. Any more and the sweatiness would border on socially unacceptable.

    It’s worse on men and fat people, and on that note… we continued on from last week’s birthday-related celebrations with too much eating out again. In a single day: an unagi lunch with my parents at Uya, an omakase-type dinner at an izakaya called Kamoshita that I saw Hunn checking into, and then cocktails at The Tippling Club. Later in the week, Beauty in the Pot, which never leaves you feeling very healthy.

    Inspired by our viewing of Groundhog Day last week, I decided to buy Loopers for the Nintendo Switch. It’s a Japanese “kinetic novel” which promises a similar premise. Kinetic novels are a subgenre of visual novels, but ones where there are no choices to be made; essentially there’s no “gameplay”. You just click through and experience a written story with accompanying illustrations and voiceovers. I expected a long and convoluted time travel narrative but it was over in about three hours. Hard to recommend at $25 USD but not the worst idea if it ever goes on sale. 3/5 stars if you already like this sort of thing, 1/5 for everyone else.

    On TV, we caught up to the second season of Only Murders In The Building (still ongoing), which starts off worryingly weak but begins to get some of its mojo back from episode 3. I spent most of the time wondering why Selena Gomez’s speaking voice sounds strange and strained, and it turns out it’s a question others online have also asked. One suggestion is it’s related to her lupus, but it sounds like an armchair diagnosis from people who get paid for clicks.

    We also watched The Bear, an 8-episode drama about running a restaurant/burnout/addiction/family/team management/craft. Several real life friends recommended it, but surprisingly I never saw a single tweet. The filter bubble needs adjustment. The first few episodes are like if Uncut Gems was set in the food service industry: stressfully fast and overlapping conversations (shouting matches?) and general chaotic energy, but it’s worth it. It’s all worth it.

    I used my AirPods Max for the first time in many months. Turns out having to take them in and out of the floppy carrying case (which turns them on/off) is a major usability obstacle for me. It’s not as carefree and seamless as popping open the case for my AirPods Pro or Beats Fit Pro, so I just never reach for them on a regular day. Probably the best way is to never use the case, lay them ready to go on the desk all the time, and charge frequently.

    Thanks to a scene in The Bear in which Van Morrison’s Saint Dominic’s Preview song plays, I checked out the album of the same name for the first time. It was good but not really what I needed at the time, which led me back to his Astral Weeks album which I heard through twice while commuting.

    I was very excited to accidentally learn that Danger Mouse and Black Thought just released an album together: Cheat Codes. According to YouTube, a couple of songs came out awhile ago, but I had no idea. Despite many discovery features in Spotify and Apple Music, there’s a gap in letting us know about new/upcoming music from artists we might like. Seems like a basic thing but there must be commercial, label-related reasons why this still doesn’t work in customers’ favor.

    In the meantime, there’s the MusicHarbour app which I don’t use enough because of how long it takes to sync new data on start up, but does actually do the job of tracking new releases based on artists you have in your library. It didn’t alert me to Cheat Codes because I didn’t have music by “Black Thought” in my library, only “The Roots”.

    Hah, did you think I’d let a week go by without more AI-generated imagery?!

    I’ve set up an OpenSea collection called Blee+ where I’m minting some of my better experiments so far as 1/1 NFTs, priced in ETH. You can buy one for about 40 bucks in today’s money.

    In addition to MidJourney, I’ve also started using Stable Diffusion and have been very impressed with what it can do. I suppose the model is closer to Dall-E, as it’s better at visualizing literal concepts such as “a poster” or “a page from a graphic novel”, whereas MidJourney would just kind of grok the style but not necessarily the format and conventions of the medium.

    Here are some abstract typographic prints I’ve generated, which are far and away more beautiful to my eye than the generative art attempts to do the same that I’ve seen, e.g. Para Bellum on Art Blocks.

  • Week 32.22

    Hello, it’s Sunday evening and I was hoping to say that I’d started and then spent all day playing Lost Judgment on the PS4. That didn’t happen but I saw two films instead.

    Prey (4/5) was a surprise: the strongest and most memorable Predator franchise film in probably decades. All the other spinoffs and reboots haven’t stuck in memory because they were generic and lacked characters you care about. Prey takes place in a space and time we don’t often see in film, especially not in a genre flick like this, and splashes in some Horizon Zero Dawn and Tomb Raider familiarity by having a young female hunter protagonist master her dangerous environment.

    Comparatively, The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent (3/5) was a letdown in the competence department, essentially taking its joke premise and stretching it out to feature length — and didn’t Jean Claude Van Damme already do something like this? But I enjoyed much of it, to be fair.

    A few days ago, we put on Groundhog Day (500/5) on a whim, thinking we’d just see a little, and ended up watching the whole thing to the end, again. It is such a perfect film, the kind where you’re thankful every variable in the cosmos came together for it to exist.

    Later: We binged all three parts of Netflix’s new documentary on Woodstock ‘99. It’s well made with extensive ground-level footage, and builds satisfyingly from ‘oh boy’ to ‘this is totally fucked’ just by chronologically following events. The scale of mismanagement and delusion from its organizers dwarfs that of the Fyre Festival. I don’t know why I have no mental recollection of this happening. Perhaps I was in the army at that point and didn’t get much news.

    Game-wise, a quiet week. After finishing Life Is Strange: True Colors last Sunday, I only had time for a little Spiritfarer before we went on a brief staycation from the middle of the week. The hotel break was a long-unclaimed gift, maybe from last Christmas, that we decided to use now since it’s something of a long weekend ahead. Although only two days, it put us in the area bordering Arab Street and Little India, which meant a chance to see some sights and eat at a couple of new places.

    I live in this city but it’s taken me all these years to finally visit Atlas, a cocktail bar that is probably on several World’s Best lists, on account of not having that many friends to drink with and its reputation for being a fancy place for people who like to dress well. It was rather good and not unreasonably priced either. The Art Deco interior is remarkably cool (if you played Bioshock, it will trigger unpleasant memories), but didn’t photograph very well on my iPhone given the late afternoon mixed lighting. So what I did was try to generate a similar scene with Midjourney, and then used Pixelmator Photo’s AI-powered “match colors” feature to transplant the vibe over to the real life photo. Not a bad idea, if I do say so myself.

    Before
    Midjourney render
    After

    It also took about two or three years since Nicolas Le Restaurant was first recommended by my brother-in-law for us to finally make a reservation there. My threadbare jeans, flat pockets, and lack of wine knowledge were swiftly recognized and appropriate recommendations were deftly made to accompany the five-course meal, all of it excellent to our unrefined palates, and so I happily pass the recommendation onto you now.

    We also did a quick introduction to pottery “throwing” (?) as an afternoon activity on the second day. It was my second time, and proved that I must have gotten lucky the first time around where I did really well. It seemed much harder this time to control the clay while trying to make a simple high-walled cup. One wrong move and you’re taking home an ashtray. I guess that’s a life metaphor.

    In the unlikely jackpot event of you 1) still reading this AND 2) being into NFTs, then I’d like to direct you to a couple of new Deca galleries I’ve made. Cities is mostly made up of pieces I (sadly) don’t own, but that suggest urban shapes and structures to different degrees of abstraction. GPU Burners is a work-in-progress featuring pieces I do own, that are graphically intensive and best seen on a proper computer. The first artwork on the page is a new acquisition from the Jiometory no Compute series, which I’ve been wanting to get into for awhile now.