Just found Dax Norman’s god damn awesome art on tumblr and this stuff is freakin awesome. He is on Giphy as well, which happens to be where I make my stupid music show gifs.
Neal Stephenson Interview on the Atlantic
Author Neal Stephenson did a recent interview on The Atlantic that is interesting.
Wong: About a year ago, in an interview with the Financial Times, you called the outputs of generative AI “hollow and uninteresting.” Why was that, and has your assessment changed?
Stephenson: I suspect that what I had in mind when I was making those remarks was the current state of image-generating technology. There were a few things about that rubbing me the wrong way, the biggest being that they are benefiting from the uncredited work of thousands of real human artists. I’m going to exaggerate slightly, but it seems like one of the first applications of any new technology is making things even shittier for artists. That’s certainly happened with music. These image-generation systems just seemed like that was mechanized and weaponized on an inconceivable scale.
…
Wong: Do you think we’re seeing some of that naivete today in people looking at how generative AI can be used?
Stephenson: For sure. It’s based on an understandable misconception as to what these things are doing. A chatbot is not an oracle; it’s a statistics engine that creates sentences that sound accurate. Right now my sense is that it’s like we’ve just invented transistors. We’ve got a couple of consumer products that people are starting to adopt, like the transistor radio, but we don’t yet know how the transistor will transform society. We’re in the transistor-radio stage of AI.
Painter Amy Bennett
Interview with painter Amy Bennett on Juxtapoz. Enjoy this work. It’s a mix between Gregory Crewdson and also has elements of macro / tilt shift photos some how. More paintings at Richard Heller Gallery.
“About a quarter of the paintings in Open Season were begun before the pandemic. I made a substantial model inspired by attending a 4H fair, and noting with curiosity that it seemed to attract both extreme ends of the political spectrum. I wanted to challenge myself to make images outside of the domestic realm. Painting crowds in the open air seemed like a counterbalance to the isolated interiors I had been immersed in. But it wasn’t long into lockdown that the theme felt too disconnected from our alarming new reality. We could finally see what a paradise we’d lost. In the very limited studio time I had then, with two kids suddenly needing to attend school at home, I returned to scenes in the home of marriage and family, that in hindsight, reflected a lot of grief, anxiety, and exhaustion.”
VIA Metafilter.
4000 of my closest friends- Cat and Girl
Web comic artist Cat And Girl comic on finding her name in the theft list from AI companies scraping her art. Kinda hits ya right in the feels don’t it?
Houdini Doodle- 6-12-23
Might try a new take on doing Houdini Doodles so I can get some daily practice in. The thought is to go to my “Clean Sets” moodboard on Behance and just try to recreate something from there. Today’s is based off Jania Brand Identity. Tea pot artwork provided by Jason Leisge. Hopefully, I stop overthinking and just bang something out in 20 minutes as practice.
Oli Kellett-Cross Road Blues
New Personal Project: Deliberate Acts of Stillness
Can you find the wolves?
“SCORSESE: I’m old. I read stuff. I see things. I want to tell stories, and there’s no more time. Kurosawa, when he got his Oscar, when George [Lucas] and Steven [Spielberg] gave it to him, he said, “I’m only now beginning to see the possibility of what cinema could be, and it’s too late.” He was 83. At the time, I said, “What does he mean?” Now I know what he means.”
Testing new photo technique
Trying out some different techniques with a ND filter. Starting to wrap my head around it a little better.
Psychedelic Looping Animations by Colin Macfadyen
Some really awesome looping animations by Colin Macfadyen that I found at BOOOOOM the other day.
The Trap Set interviews Questlove
Man, what a great interview here. They cover meditation, visualization and all sorts of good stuff. I don’t think they talk about actual drumming once?
301: Questlove
DALL-E experiments
Over the weekend I received my invite to play around with DALL-E the AI art engine and it’s been pretty trippy messing with it. Here are some of my prompts and the results. I could see it being very useful in doing Look Dev and concepting for sure. Use it as a tool to rough out ideas and then work on the actual piece in CG.
This is one of the abstracts I polished up and scaled up to 6k using GigaPIxel AI. SO much AI…
Houdini Doodle: Beer O'Clock
Was enjoying playing around with glass the other day so I started messing with some beer glasses and a sandblasted looking texture on it. The pattern does interesting things as you zoom in and out and it becomes more abstract.
Photos by Oleg Oprisco
Cool photo illustrations by Oleg Oprisco for your eyeball enjoyment.
Nvidia Canvas Doodle.
New version of Nvidia’s Canvas app has come out which adds some nice features and doubles the resolution of the output as well. It’s doing some interesting stuff with AI. Then, just to use even more AI, I rezzed it up with Topaz GigaPIxel AI. This tech is getting pretty surreal.
Oceanside Oregon
Here are some iPhone snaps from a recent trip to Oceanside Oregon we went on. All from the iPhone SE, but I am getting tempted to upgrade to the pro13 possibly.
CG vs Photography
Interesting discussion here between the fine folks at Entegma.
Unreal 5 still life doodle
Been doodling in Unreal 5 a bit and here is a quick little thing. I really need to get a better understanding of the cameras, post processing and sequencer….
Create and Destroy: Ed Templeton
Video with Ed Templeton talking about his art and other stuffs. Always nice to see the skaters from back in the day still being creative.
Yachats Oregon
Just got back from a little trip to Yachats on the Oregon coast and here are a few snaps from our walks. Great place.