Category Archives: art

art: Franz Kline’s best work in years, done by AI

Posted on 2022-07-08 by skierpage

“Painting of a black cat with white markings sitting on a chair” is the best thing Franz Kline has painted in 60 years! Love the coiled energy and the furry tail on the left. This is the best of 9 … Continue reading →

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software: where’s my ARchitect identifier?

Posted on 2022-05-27 by skierpage

One of the oft-touted promises of Google Glass and other Augmented Reality headsets is you’ll look at something and the headset will indicate or say what it is. Meanwhile in the real world, a friend posts great cityscape photographs and … Continue reading →

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music: a return for Spinal Tap!

Posted on 2022-05-20 by skierpage

zOMG there will be a sequel to This is Spinal Tap. After 38 years, it can only be even sadder than the band’s first tour film; the original was another product of 1984, the high point of Western civilization. This … Continue reading →

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art: market is flash stuff on the wall

Posted on 2022-05-08 by skierpage

For $0 I’m glad I went, but https://artmarketsf.com/ was overwhelming to the point of underwhelming. Some nice Wayne Thiebaud prints, someone painting Diebenkorn “Ocean Park”-like landscapes side-on, …? All blur together. (And no Deborah Butterfield horse sculpture from Gallery Paule … Continue reading →

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art: artists respecting artists

Posted on 2022-04-13 by skierpage

Here’s the cover of Paul McCartney’s 2013 album New: I saw it and immediately knew the cover’s designers were riffing on Dan Flavin‘s neon fluorescent tube sculptures. Dan Flavin was “an American minimalist artist famous for creating sculptural objects and … Continue reading →

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TV: let shows run no longer than they need

Posted on 2022-03-15 by skierpage

We started watching Katla, an intriguing Icelandic show about mysterious goings-on near a volcano. But it’s ponderous SLUDGE. A few momentous things happen in a tiny community, but the damn people never meet up to review what’s happening and tell … Continue reading →

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art: fantastic video art hidden in movie

Posted on 2022-03-07 by skierpage

The Electrical Life of Louis Wain is a reasonably good biopic with Benedict Cumberbatch doing his reliably impressive legible acting. You don’t see someone acting, you read his interior state. Near the end there’s an amazing video sequence of lines … Continue reading →

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playing Pong with your mind vs. William Gibson

Posted on 2021-04-12 by skierpage

Ars Technica has an appropriately level-headed article about Elon Musk’s Neuralink company getting a monkey to play Pong with its mind, which reminds people of William Gibson: the old Cyberpunk fan in me dreams of cyberdecks: devices without screens or … Continue reading →

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science: cocaine-fueled Hollywood-quantum matchup?

Posted on 2021-01-09 by skierpage

Don’t you love those Hollywood-excess parties, where Spiros Michalakis (research professor and manager of outreach at Caltech) is doing cocaine with a bunch of industry heavyweights and remarks “I have a lot of grant money from the National Science Foundation … Continue reading →

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computers generating art

Posted on 2020-06-19 by skierpage

First came text GPT-2 and other AI (Artificial Intelligence) Transformer models are impressive. After you hand the AI an enormous corpus of text, you give it some text and it continues, generating character after character that make up recognizable, even … Continue reading →

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