This is a collection of research on the Old Kent Road Mosque and MANUK (Muslim Association of Nigeria UK) as a reaction to the demolition/renovation of the mosque. The image above is a fragment of the virtual space and archive from this research. Link: https://site-integrity.com/artwork/virtual-assembly/
original text description of image: “Shahed Saleem and I commissioned a series of LiDAR scans of Old Kent Road Mosque representing the historical layering and adaptations of the interior of the building. The scans were made by Guy Sinclair from Fab Lab at The University of Westminster. The scans will enter the V&A collection as permanent digital artefacts to create an archived record of sometimes ephemeral and undocumented religious buildings as socially constructed places of worship.” [copied from https://site-integrity.com/artwork/virtual-assembly/ on 14/03/2023]
for an on-chain spiritism session to revive ghosts burst in the dot-com bubble.
• • •
Twenty-one dotcom era companies have been summoned for revival. Each company includes an ENS domain, a new logo-NFT designed by Guile Twardowski—the artist behind Cryptokitties—and a suite of hidden text-to-image logo-NFTs by Cosmographia that Guile drew inspiration from.
Minting any NFT allows you to claim a subdomain on the company’s new ENS domain. Owner of the Twardowski logo-NFTs earns the title of CEO on each company’s profile page.
No candles are needed for this web3 séance of web1 spirits!
Teslaism: Economics After the End of the End of the Future (2022) – teaser 2
Teslaism is a 3rd person racing musical game featuring Elon Musk and his self-driving car/lover and life coach, as they drive towards a shareholder meeting in a post-gamified Berlin landscape.
The work takes the newly built Gigafactory in Berlin as a prism to describe the emergence of Teslaism (succeeding Post-fordism) as a novel system of production and consumption predicated on advanced storytelling, financial worldbuilding, and imagineering “the look of the future.”
The Teslaist CEO is a collage artist. Weaving together one tweet, one dance move, one meme after another, he creates a set of perpetually postponed and too-fabulous-to-be-fake narratives to make time make power.
If post-industrial Detroit was soundtracked to techno’s futures, the age of Teslaism seeks its own common sonic imaginaries: forms of resistance inhabiting our exceedingly financialized cities.
The original draft of Teslaism was commissioned for Tresor 31: Techno, Berlin, and the Great Freedom, an exhibition reflecting on three decades of musical evolution, social change and city development from Berlin to Detroit, told through the lens of Techno’s history (July-Aug 2022.)
Soundtrack: Conic sections – XOR Gate (brainchild of Gerald Donald, one half of Drexciya and Dopplereffekt) Helena Hauff – Humanoid Fruit (Unreleased) GRV Tr 4 – TV Victor
All tracks are courtesy of Tresor Records and the artists
copied from Etherpad Version 1587 Saved December 7, 2022
Authors: SN, destroyer + 3 unnamed authors ( )
It’s Friday, the 4th of November 2022. It is raining and I am staying inside, on a couch made from pallets with some mattress on top. It is quiet here in Ussana. On top of a hill, in the house of an agriturismo site where I’ve been staying for the past two months in Sardegna. I’mcurrently watching Omniscient (2020) on Netflix. Omniscient is a Brazilian science fiction series created by Pedro Aguilera, revolving around a city with an all-knowing security system of drones. This is a summary of E1 “I committed a crime”.
We follow Nina Peixoto (played by Carla Salle), a tech trainee at Omniscient. This episode starts with her waking up, greeting her dad and brother and rushing to her first praise. The praise is like a performance interview, about which Nina is slightly nervous. She nails it and is excited to share the good news with her father, who retired as a maintenance employee from the same company. She tries to reach him on her phone. No response. Only to find him lying dead at home, killed. No security drone did alert the system of any crime committed. Why did the system fail? Nina finds herself in a moral conflict. This evident crime should not have gone unnoticed! Condolences are offered, but she cannot grieve. The firm’s reputation is on the line.
Economic standing is more important than solving what went wrong. She needs to keep quiet about her suspicions of the system’s error, but enraged by the lack of support she gets from the company, she commits a crime herself; she breaks an artwork in the office hall. Immidetly, she is reported by her drone. She asks Judite (Sandra Corveloni), from the city’s council, for help. Nina and Judite briefly leave their city, and Omniscient’s privatised security technologies, to talk without the need to watch their words. Here, Nina comes up with a plan to investigate her father’s demise. The next day she commits her second crime without being caught in the moment by, and in, Omniscient.
Omniscient E2 “A good person who’s done a horrible thing”. She has the fingerprint, but she cannot go through with it. Her brother Daniel Peixoto (Guilherme Prates) goes outside, against better judgement. Nina discovers a cowardly act from her father’s past. Is she not the coward he seemingly once was? She goes through with it. Oh, and the CEO of Omniscient leaves the city to beat up a random homeless person. How typical.
Omniscient E3 “This is our Pandora’s Box”. The method devises the means? What is that saying about ‘everything is allowed to win the game’? Demanding bureaucracy (bureaucracy) never works. Fail. Trick the system. Betrail of friendship. Sex tapes. The moral compasses seem to be destabilised. The socks I’m wearing today state that “We cum in peace and so should you”.
Omniscient E4 “Who wants to dive in first?”. Nina joins Vinicius’ spiritual liberation group. In front of everyone, her guilt and fears are involuntarily laid bare through mediation and meditation.
Omniscient E5 “Open this door!”. or I will suffocate. guilt trippin’ because she didn’t see another way. I am not suitable to do any psychological assessment. The protagonist and other characters are a bit flat. I tune out.
Omniscient E6 “Don’t forget that I’ll keep my eyes on you”. Predictable ending.
Computer-generated imagery. A neural network, text-to-image, machine learning. Stable Diffusion is the latest model to accumulate loads of publicity after DALL-E, Midjourney and Russian-based FaceApp. It’s cool, it’s cool, it looks absolutely beautiful. It is not about ‘Art’. Or the validity thereof. Now, I am not writing about technology and stuff vs human creativity, or maybe I am, because stunning art within seconds vs, well, ownership over the image is, to this day, a dubious cause. The inquiry on the influence of AI-generated art diverting attention away from human artists is one for later too, maybe.
About computer technology and tech companies; I usually think it is more than fair when people are sceptical about how their data is being used by any company. But while Lensa/Prisma employs a questionable Privacy Policy for its users, the thing that sparks my intrest goes deeper.
I am not writing about NSFW content either because what is the internet other than pictures of cats? “We believe erotic art needs a place to flourish and be cultivated in a space without judgement or censorship. — Unstable Diffusion”, quotes Jim Clyde Monge in a Medium article a couple of months ago. The r/unstablediffusion subreddit has been banned, presumably because of the type of content. Do you agree with them? But, I am not writing about Mage. r/StableDiffusion, however, is actually very enlightening on their view of current events!
I am not writing about the (social) effects of skin editing or removal of ‘facial imperfections’ either. Nor am I writing about software subscriptions. Not now. Maybe later.
I want to point out the ‘helping them to train their AI’ clause in the self-portrait generator application. I quote The Standard (why?) in saying, “No, your friends haven’t paid artist to draw them.” The company has not paid artist to draw either. Many accuse the company of stealing artwork from digital creators. With Stable Diffusion and/or Lensa, it is not that straightforward. I am tempted to agree with artist and illustrator meg rae’s Twitter thread, I wonder what data the model is trained on. How did they acquire what? Where does it all come from? Do they make money from resources that they ‘stole’? What data did Stable Diffusion scrape from where, how and by whom, and does it matter? I like the trend of knowing where your food comes from, knowledge about where what you consume originates, and stuff like that, but I am an advocate for open-source and free internet too. For me, it is rather a question of ethics. An ethical responsibility should be employed in using tech, using anything. “AI by the people, for the people”, Stability.ai states.
However, on the internet we live like we want to, represent, reproduce and share what we want; “r/StableDiffusion •Posted by
u/GaggiX 10 hours ago. Another day, another tweet trying to spread disinformation about generative model.”
Now, it is about trademarks and copyrights. BitTorrent is not distributing or creating a derivative work but the original. But what if you hum a melody of a famous copyrighted song on a YouTube video? Are we, humans or computer models, ever even able to reproduce something not similar to real-world data? Is it like level 2 praguepride wrote ·40 min. ago: “It’s fear of advancing technology. Any smart artist is going to realize that they are going to have to adjust their workspace/career to integrate massive amounts of AI generated art into that space”?
Before I go too deep into this rabbit hole, I will go back to my drawing board. Let’s all pick up a pencil and some paper. Something to touch upon later.. Another day, another blog post.
swaenynina.com 