Daily Archives: December 26, 2022

Portraits of the Posthuman: Jon Rafman and AI | Berlin Art Link

Posted: December 26, 2022 at 9:31 pm

by Matteo Calla // Dec. 20, 2022

This article is part of our feature topic ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE.

In a sense, the set-up of Sprth Magers second floor gallery space in Mitte Berlin, in which Jon Rafmans Counterfeit Poast was exhibited this Fall, wasnt so different from the neoclassical rotundas of the Schinkel Pavillon, where the artists work can still be seen until January 22. A wallpapered, octagonal room with large-scale portraits mounted on all sides, it looked like the inside of the Greek tholos, the circular kind of temple made famous at Delphi. The mystical connotations extended to the title of the presentation, Chapel, but in place of images of the gods, however, this chapel featured a new type of secular art: a series of uncanny posthuman figures generated using a text-to-image AI algorithm.

Jon Rafman: (Mutant 1), 2022, inkjet print and acrylic on canvas, 186.7 134.6 cm // Courtesy of the Artist and Sprth Magers, photo by Etienne St. Denis

Among the characters encountered by the viewer was a diffuse brown blob with multiple eyes growing like a tree trunk from the bottom of the canvas, a fairy creature blending into the background of an impressionist forest, and a face composed of what appeared to be colored clay, vaguely reminiscent of Bob Dylan. The temple itself looked like it had been squatted by cyberpunks. The wallpaper depicted what appeared to be hallways full of computer servers, shiny and gleaming against a black backdrop. The ceiling was a pixelated vision of the heavens in yellow, white, and blue; on the floor burned digital hellfire. By exhibiting AI-generated works this way, Rafmans show at Sprth Magers asked crucial questions about how this new technology might transform our shared myths, in the process transforming our individual and collective identities themselves.

The portraits suggest that central to this transformation is the emergence of a new kind of representation that, even at the level of its production, belongs entirely to the intangible realm of the digital. In their content and materiality, these works stage a tension between a pre-modern notion of art as a uniquely human creation, and its existence as the product of an AI algorithm. As Rafman puts it, the allure of the objecthood of the paintings is a romantic longing for a kind of art or experience that is potentially obsolete. This tension between human and machine, concrete form and digital ether, is embedded in the materiality of the paintings, which after being generated by AI, are hand-painted and printed over on an ink-jet printer. It is also represented in the uncanny figures depicted in the paintings themselves. They are portraits of the posthuman reality that, with AI-generated art, has perhaps already arrived.

Jon Rafman: Chapel, 2022, digital print on vinyl, LED, total width: 20.184m, total height: 3.81m // Courtesy of the Artist and Sprth Magers, Photo by Timo Ohler

Like any epoch-defining technology, text-to-image AI has incited a considerable amount of utopian and dystopian punditry, from magazine articles praising its potential to unleash limitless human creativity to news reports claiming it will steal the jobs of working artists. Two claims are often made about the technologys posthuman radicalness. The first is that text-to-image AI removes the skill from the creation of visual art, or at least displaces it. Artistic ability no longer rests in making works themselves, but in coding them: writing a text to produce a particular image. This, in all fairness, is more difficult than it sounds. Rafman suggests that every portrait in Counterfeit Poast involved thousands of discarded attempts. The second claim is that this image itself is not new, or not a novel human creation at least, but an amalgamation of existing images in the dataset.

Practically the same can be said, of course, about photography, a technology that some would claim ushered in the era of modern art itself. The difference is that for photography, the skill doesnt involve coding for an image, but perceiving and framing it in space. Claims to the images lack of novelty arent based on its preexistence in a digital dataset, but as an object in the physical world. These differences make photography and AI-generated images parallel aesthetic innovations. If photographic art stakes an exclusive, totalizing claim to the physical imaginary, then AI-generated art does the same for the immaterial domain of the digital. Technologies like AI image generation open fresh territories where artists can reform previous aesthetic strategies to meet these new technological possibilities, notes Rafman. In doing so, a new culture is created, standards of aesthetic judgment and production are revised, and I hope questions about the broader historical implications of these developments are raised.

Jon Rafman: Counterfeit Poast, 2022, 4K stereo video, 23:39 min, film still // Courtesy of the Artist and Sprth Magers

AI promises to extend the scope of our already-extensive digital experience. Rafmans recent work uses AI technology to explore how this digital experience defines both our individual identity and, as shared experience, our sense of community. Counterfeit Poasts titular video installation assumes the form of a series of short films, in which voice actors narrate individualized stories of identity and alienation in a world transformed by these technologies. The narratives are inspired by postings on message boards such as Reddit, and visualized to uncanny effect using text-to-image AI. Many of the stories concern people who are convinced that they are their avatars: a boy who believes himself to be a walrus, a Texan man who is convinced he is actually a gay Somali pirate. For these individuals, the kind of imaginary identity they might assume in their digital liveson Facebook and 4chan, GTA 5 and Second Lifehas supplanted their physical selves.

Jon Rafman: Counterfeit Poast, 2022, 4K stereo video, 23:39 min, film still // Courtesy of the Artist and Sprth Magers

Punctured Sky (2021), a short film that still can be seen as part of his solo show and Grimoires at the Schinkel Pavillon, also examines how our collective memory, as that which binds us together as a society, is changed by digital technologies. Punctured Sky is digitally-animated cinema noir about two young men searching for a video game they remember playing as children, a game that seems to have disappeared from the face of the earth. The story is similar to one of the shorts in Counterfeit Poast, in which a woman shares her absolute conviction that she has seen The Traveling Salesman, an obscure film starring Kevin Costner as a salesman attacked by a roving band of Satanists in a post-apocalyptic America, despite the fact that no one else seems to remember it. In both of these stories, belief in the obscure cultural object is existential, the difference between the alienation of madness and participation in society. Such is the risk in a world where cultural objects and narratives proliferate in increasingly fragmented online communities, their existence erased in the flash of a hard drive. In furthering the digitization of culture, AI will undoubtedly further its precarity and fragmentation. Whether it has the potential to reorient culture in other ways remains to be seen, and is one of the questions looming before artists such as Rafman today.

Jon Rafman: Punctured Sky, 2021, 4K video, sound, 21 min, video still // Courtesy the Artist and Spruth Magers

If history is any indication, AI doesnt mark the end of art, as alarmists might have us believe, but it does mark a profound shift. As before with photography, it is in all likelihood a keystone in a crucial moment of cultural transformation, perhaps even of societys transformation itself. Rafmans work points to potential aesthetics, narratives and identities that this emergent change might produce. The only thing clear at this point is that we are still at the nascent stage of artificial intelligence, perhaps comparable to the early daguerreotypes of the 1800s. The apex of its development is still to come.

John Rafman: and Grimoires Exhibition: Sept. 15 2022-Jan. 22, 2023schinkelpavillon.deOberwallstrae 32, 10117 Berlin, click here for map

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Portraits of the Posthuman: Jon Rafman and AI | Berlin Art Link

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Situation Update, Nov 1, 2022 – The transhumanism demonic AI takeover …

Posted: at 9:26 pm

0:00 Elections

20:55 Breaking Big Story

44:00 Todd Callender

- The transhumanism push is an agenda to annihilate humanity

- Vax injections are just one of many vectors for attempted extermination

- We have passed the false flag window for globalists to try to stop the election

- Next window is AFTER the election; they will try to cause world war before January

- Liz Truss iPhone HACKED by Russian-linked hackers

- Truss text to Blinken CONFIRMS collusion to destroy Nord Stream

- Dems demand AMNESTY for murderous covid propagandists

- Same dems refuse to APOLOGIZE for ruining people's lives with lockdowns, vaccines

- Mass uprisings now under way across Europe: France, Belgium, Hungary, Germany

- Interview with Todd Callender about the "Borgification" of humanity

For more updates, visit: http://www.brighteon.com/channel/hrreport

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NASA Explores a Winter Wonderland on Mars

Posted: at 9:21 pm

Cube-shaped snow, icy landscapes, and frost are all part of the Red Planets coldest season.

When winter comes to Mars, the surface is transformed into a truly otherworldly holiday scene. Snow, ice, and frost accompany the seasons sub-zero temperatures. Some of the coldest of these occur at the planets poles, where it gets as low as minus 190 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 123 degrees Celsius).

Cold as it is, dont expect snow drifts worthy of the Rocky Mountains. No region of Mars gets more than a few feet of snow, most of which falls over extremely flat areas. And the Red Planets elliptical orbit means it takes many more months for winter to come around: a single Mars year is around two Earth years.

Still, the planet offers unique winter phenomena that scientists have been able to study, thanks to NASAs robotic Mars explorers. Here are a few of the things theyve discovered:

Two Kinds of Snow

Martian snow comes in two varieties: water ice and carbon dioxide, or dry ice. Because Martian air is so thin and the temperatures so cold, water-ice snow sublimates, or becomes a gas, before it even touches the ground. Dry-ice snow actually does reach the ground.

Enough falls that you could snowshoe across it, said Sylvain Piqueux, a Mars scientist at NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California whose research includes a variety of winter phenomena. If you were looking for skiing, though, youd have to go into a crater or cliffside, where snow could build up on a sloped surface.

How We Know It Snows

Snow occurs only at the coldest extremes of Mars: at the poles, under cloud cover, and at night. Cameras on orbiting spacecraft cant see through those clouds, and surface missions cant survive in the extreme cold. As a result, no images of falling snow have ever been captured. But scientists know it happens, thanks to a few special science instruments.

NASAs Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter can peer through cloud cover using its Mars Climate Sounder instrument, which detects light in wavelengths imperceptible to the human eye. That ability has allowed scientists to detect carbon dioxide snow falling to the ground. And in 2008, NASA sent the Phoenix lander within 1,000 miles (about 1,600 kilometers) of Mars north pole, where it used a laser instrument to detect water-ice snow falling to the surface.

Cubic Snowflakes

Because of how water molecules bond together when they freeze, snowflakes on Earth have six sides. The same principle applies to all crystals: The way in which atoms arrange themselves determines a crystals shape. In the case of carbon dioxide, molecules in dry ice always bond in forms of four when frozen.

Because carbon dioxide ice has a symmetry of four, we know dry-ice snowflakes would be cube-shaped, Piqueux said. Thanks to the Mars Climate Sounder, we can tell these snowflakes would be smaller than the width of a human hair.

Jack Frost Nipping at Your Rover

Water and carbon dioxide can each form frost on Mars, and both types of frost appear far more widely across the planet than snow does. The Viking landers saw water frost when they studied Mars in the 1970s, while NASAs Odyssey orbiter has observed frost forming and sublimating away in the morning Sun.

Winters Wondrous End

Perhaps the most fabulous discovery comes at the end of winter, when all the ice that built up begins to thaw and sublimate into the atmosphere. As it does so, this ice takes on bizarre and beautiful shapes that have reminded scientists of spiders, Dalmatian spots, fried eggs, and Swiss cheese.

This thawing also causes geysers to erupt: Translucent ice allows sunlight to heat up gas underneath it, and that gas eventually bursts out, sending fans of dust onto the surface. Scientists have actually begun to study these fans as a way to learn more about which way Martian winds are blowing.

News Media Contacts

Andrew GoodJet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.818-393-2433andrew.c.good@jpl.nasa.gov

Karen Fox / Alana JohnsonNASA Headquarters, Washington301-286-6284 / 202-358-1501karen.c.fox@nasa.gov / alana.r.johnson@nasa.gov

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After 4 years on Mars, NASA’s InSight lander sends one last selfie and …

Posted: at 9:21 pm

NASA's InSight lander has reached the end of its extended four-year mission. NASA announced Monday the lander's battery had finally been exhausted, succumbing to the power-sapping effects of dust buildups on its solar arrays.

"We've thought of InSight as our friend and colleague on Mars for the past four years, so it's hard to say goodbye," Bruce Banerdt, the principal investigator, said in a statement. "But it has earned its richly deserved retirement."

Flight controllers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, had been monitoring asteady decline in powerdue to a thick coating of martian dust and decided earlier to declare an official end to the mission if the spacecraft failed to respond after back-to-back calls from Earth.

That has now happened, and while NASA will continue to listen for a signal, it's not considered likely. The last time InSight phoned home was on December 15.

"InSight has more than lived up to its name," said JPL Director Laurie Leshin. "As a scientist who's spent a career studying Mars, it's been a thrill to see what the lander has achieved. ... Yes, it's sad to say goodbye, but InSight's legacy will live on."

InSight recently sent back one last selfie, shared by NASA via Twitter on Monday.

"My power's really low, so this may be the last image I can send," the message said. "Don't worry about me though: my time here has been both productive and serene. If I can keep talking to my mission team, I will but I'll be signing off here soon. Thanks for staying with me."

The $1 billion InSight mission was launched from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California on May 5, 2018. The spacecraft landed on a broad plain known as Elysium Palitia the following November for a planned two-year mission.

InSight was equipped with two primary instruments: the Seismic Experiment Interior Structure (SEIS) seismometer, provided by the French space agency, CNES; and the Heat Flow and Physical Properties Probe (HP3) provided by the German Aerospace Agency, DLR.

The heat probe, nicknamed "the mole," was designed to hammer its way 16 feet below the martian surface, using sensors to measure slight differences in temperature. The goal was to collect data on the soil's thermal conductivity, allowing researchers to extrapolate temperatures all the way to the core 2,000 miles below.

But the soil at the landing site proved two clumpy for the instrument to cope with and despite repeated attempts, it was unable to penetrate more than a few inches.

The seismometer, however, worked flawlessly, detecting some 1,319 marsquakes during its four years of operation, including shock waves from meteoroid impacts.

"With InSight, seismology was the focus of a mission beyond Earth for the first time since the Apollo missions, when astronauts brought seismometers to the moon," said principal investigator Philippe Lognonn of Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris. "We broke new ground, and our science team can be proud of all that we've learned along the way."

NASA still has two active rovers on Mars: Curiosity, which landed in 2012, and Perseverance, which arrived in February along with amini helicopter named Ingenuity.

Bill Harwood has been covering the U.S. space program full-time since 1984, first as Cape Canaveral bureau chief for United Press International and now as a consultant for CBS News. He covered 129 space shuttle missions, every interplanetary flight since Voyager 2's flyby of Neptune and scores of commercial and military launches. Based at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, Harwood is a devoted amateur astronomer and co-author of "Comm Check: The Final Flight of Shuttle Columbia."

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Newsroom Discovery, Inc.

Posted: at 9:20 pm

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New York [April 6, 2022] HGTV has picked up an eight-episode order of its popular design docu-series, The Nate & Jeremiah Home Project, starring married designers and dads of two, Nate Berkus and Jeremiah Brent. The series, which attracted 13.4

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Nostradamus’ New Year 2023 Predictions: From Cannibalism On Earth And World War 3; Heres Some Shocking Claims Made By The French Astrologer – SpotboyE

Posted: at 9:20 pm

Nostradamus' New Year 2023 Predictions: From Cannibalism On Earth And World War 3; Heres Some Shocking Claims Made By The French Astrologer  SpotboyE

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Nostradamus' New Year 2023 Predictions: From Cannibalism On Earth And World War 3; Heres Some Shocking Claims Made By The French Astrologer - SpotboyE

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