#kunst

»Swedish Machines« – The new book by Simon Stålenhag is now available on Kickstarter

Stålenhag’s most personal work yet, Swedish Machines explores masculinity, friendship, and sexuality in a queer science fiction tale about two young men stuck in the past – and in each other’s orbit. Their story spans decades, as fleeting moments become defining memories, and they set out to explore a mysterious forbidden zone together.

I got all of his other books and naturally just backed it immediately.

Wir haben in der vergangenen Woche die Ausstellung „The Mystery of Banksy – A Genius Mind“ in Köln besucht, die gerade nochmal bis Ende Mai verlängert wurde.

Es war (freitags) ein bisschen zu voll und offen­sichtlich interessieren sich jetzt auch unsere Eltern für Streetart. Außerdem war der nach geballter Kapitalismus­kritik am Ende der Ausstellung positionierte und irritierend gut besuchte Shop etwas befremdlich. Ansonsten war es aber auf jeden Fall toll, so viele Banksy-Werke endlich mal in echt zu sehen.

Danke an meine Frau für die gelungene Geburtstags­überraschung!

The Infinite Conversation – An AI generated, never-ending discussion between Werner Herzog and Slavoj Žižek

When you open this website, you are taken to a random point in the dialogue. Every day a new segment of the conversation is added. New segments can be generated at a faster speed than what it takes to listen to them. In theory, this conversation could continue until the end of time.

Spannendes Projekt von Giacomo Miceli, das aufzeigt wie leicht es heute ist, authentisch klingende Texte und Stimmen künstlich erzeugen zu lassen. (via Waxy)

Rembrandts »Nachtwache« als Ultra-High-Resolution-Foto

This is the largest and most detailed photo ever taken of a work of art. It is 717 gigapixels, or 717,000,000,000 pixels, in size.

The distance between two pixels is 5 micrometres (0.005 millimetre), which means that one pixel is smaller than a human red blood cell.

The team used a 100-megapixel Hasselblad H6D 400 MS-camera to make 8439 individual photos measuring 5.5cm x 4.1cm. Artificial intelligence was used to stitch these smaller photographs together to form the final large image, with a total file size of 5.6 terabytes.

The Billion Dollar Torrent

Geoffrey Huntley hat mit The NFT Bay einen Pirate-Bay-Klon an den Start gebracht, der tatsächlich aber nur eine Torrent-Datei, das “Billion Dollar Torrent” bereitstellt, die alle als NFT gehandelten Bilddateien enthält und damit satte 17,76 TB groß ist, weil in der Blockchain stecken sie ja nicht.

Die Torrent-Beschreibung fällt entsprechend hart aus, vergleicht das alles (zu recht) mit der Tulpenmanie und lässt auch den ökologischen Wahnsinn nicht unerwähnt1:

Did you know that a NFT is just a hyperlink to an image thats usually hosted on Google Drive or another web2.0 webhost?

People are dropping millions on instructions on how to download images. That’s why you can right click save-as because they are standard images. The image is not stored in the blockchain contract.

As web2.0 webhosts are known to go offline (404 errors) this handy torrent contains all of the NFT’s so that future generations can study this generations tulip mania and collectively go…

„WTF? We destroyed our planet for THIS?!“

Warum die Bilder nicht selbst in der Blockchain gespeichert werden, erklärt der verlinkte, von “Arweave News” veröffentlichte Artikel:

The answer comes down to price. It costs over $1,000,000 to store a gigabyte of data on Ethereum, and while the master grid of punks (Anmerkung von mir: eine 828 KB kleine PNG-Datei) would cost just under $1,000 to store, it’s still not viable from the outset unless a creator is certain they’re going to profit.

Und mit eben diesem Arweave gibt es – Überraschung! – natürlich eine Blockchain-basierte Lösung für permanenten Speicher (sie nennen das “permaweb”). Für viele NFTs ist das aber auch schon zu spät. Immerhin: Der versteigerte WWW-Source-Code, den wir zuletzt hier hatten, liegt in der Tat schon dort.

  1. Andererseits nimmt er dann doch Crypto-Spenden für sein Projekt/seine Arbeit entgegen. Nun gut. []

„i dont know what an NFT is and im too afraid to ask“

Great answer to the question above by Tumblr user queersamus (be warned, there’s nsfw content in his blog):

imagine if you went up to the mona lisa and you were like “i’d like to own this” and someone nearby went “give me 65 million dollars and i’ll burn down an unspecified amount of the amazon rainforest in order to give you this receipt of purchase” so you paid them and they went “here’s your receipt, thank you for your purchase” and went to an unmarked supply closet in the back of the museum and posted a handmade label inside it behind the brooms that said “mona lisa currently owned by jacobgalapagos” so if anyone wants to know who owns it they’d have to find this specific closet in this specific hallway and look behind the correct brooms. and you went “can i take the mona lisa home now?” and they went “oh god no are you stupid? you only bought the receipt that says you own it, you didn’t actually buy the mona lisa itself, you can’t take the real mona lisa you idiot. you CAN take this though.” and gave you the replica print in a cardboard tube that’s sold in the gift shop. also the person selling you the receipt of purchase has at no point in time ever owned the mona lisa.

unfortunately, if this doesn’t really make sense or seem like any logical person would be happy about this exchange, then you’ve understood it perfectly.

I’m happy for any indie artist, who is getting paid thanks to NFTs, but this and the way most crypto currencies are working right know is pure, ecological madness. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. Bitcoin should be banned and outlawed. (via @tibor)

Eyecam – Human Eye Webcam

 
(YouTube Direktlink)

Sensing devices are everywhere, up to the point where we become unaware of their presence. Eyecam is a critical design prototype exploring the potential futures of sensing devices. Eyecam is a webcam shaped like a human eye. It can see, blink, look around and observe you.

Eyecam is a research project by Marc Teyssier. With contribution of Marion Koelle, Paul Strohmeier, Bruno Fruchard and Jürgen Steimle. This research was conducted during my stay at Saarland University Human-Computer Interaction Lab.