Angry walking, trees, algorithmic kisses, and hyperart
Welcome to the 63rd edition of this newsletter!
With each email I'm sharing material that has inspired me recently. I'm hoping it will inspire you, too. If you want to support my work, you can sign up for my Patreon. This will get you access to exclusive material every week.
If Patreon is not your thing but you enjoy what I'm doing, feel free to send me a little something via Paypal, and I'll re-invest it into the Japanese green tea that fuels much of my creative work.
I don't know whether you noticed but two emails ago, it said something like "61th edition" in the header up there.
After I was a couch, well: desk potato for too many years, someone who worked from home before the Covid pandemic made everybody do it, at the end of 2021 I decided that I might as well end that state and begin a new, more active one. Given that the pandemic was (and still is) ongoing, going to the gym was out of the question (I also find those locations spiritually disheartening in much too many ways to list them here). So I decided that I would go on walks.
Now, the reality is that I don't mind walking per se. If it's combined with some larger purpose -- going somewhere or walking around to take pictures, I don't mind walking. But walking for the sake of walking... I'll just be blunt: I hate it. There is a whole culture of people who love walking and who'll go on and on how good it is for you. Good for them. Walking, I read, boosts your thinking and creativity. The thing is, though, that I don't have trouble thinking. I usually have too many ideas most of the time, meaning that creativity for me often comes down to choosing what to do -- instead of hoping for inspiration to strike.
Initially, I'd just walk my loops stewing with ill-conceived anger over the sheer tedium. I then started listening to music, which made it a little bit better. But this felt like listening to music for no other reason than not being angry about walking. Not much of an improvement. A little while ago, I decided I would listen to podcasts instead. I'm just going to be honest and admit that (you might have an idea where this will be going) I don't actually like listening to podcasts. They're always so slow and broad.
Regardless, having finished all available episodes of a about Japanese literature, I'm now listening to a History of Japan podcast. So far, I've made it into the Heian period, which started after the court relocated to what's now Kyoto. I'm really, really bad at remembering names, so the whole thing is more than a little bit confusing (it's like someone who's really into those violent fantasy movies that are so popular now trying to tell you the plot). Names aside, though, I've learned a bunch of interesting stuff about, say, the development of Buddhism in Japan or the different types of populations there.
Given it's fall, the past two weeks have been rather pleasant, though. Temperatures have fallen enough that walking, especially when it's done briskly (my typical speed is around 5.7 km/h, but that's partly because I'm tall and cover a lot of space), isn't too unpleasant. And now the leaves are changing colours, which here in New England is a brilliant spectacle. Like a "leaf peeper" (that's what we locals call the tourists who come to look at the foliage in the fall) I'll stop occasionally to take a picture. I also started using the very same route, which involves loops in a nearby park. This has made me very familiar with the park and its trees. In fact, just in order to help me with my photography (which is a form of paying attention), I've tried to look more carefully at what I encounter. Trees really are amazing when you start to pay attention to them.
You might recall that I wrote about using Dall.E to re-create my book Vaterland. Unlike a lot of people, I'm deeply skeptical about artificial intelligence (AI). So I was really pleased to come across an article by Eryk Salvaggio that outlines what you can learn about algorithms and their source images by looking at the pictures they serve you. The article is a wee bit technical, but I think it's still nicely readable. It's filled with incredible insight:
Machines don't have an unconscious, but they inscribe and communicate the unconscious assumptions that are reflected and embedded into human-assembled datasets.
And:
We see false attribution to generative outputs as free of human biases. That’s pure mystification. They are bias engines. Every image should be read as a map of those biases, and they are made more legible through the use of this approach.
In principle, there is nothing new to these statements. We've already seen the very same conclusions about other types of algorithms. The difference here is that up until now, algorithms were used to decide which pictures we're allowed to see and which pictures -- and, by extension, which people -- will be censored (you might remember that I wrote about this in the context of Instagram). But now we're at the next level. Now, we're seeing images created by algorithms.
Now, the biases and censorship are baked directly into the pictures.
"Thomasson or Hyperart Thomasson (Japanese: Tomason トマソン or Chōgeijutsu Tomason 超芸術トマソン) is a type of conceptual art named by the Japanese artist Akasegawa Genpei in the 1980s." - Wikipedia
I love everything about this: Hyperart is "an object which, just like a piece of art, has no purpose in society, but also, just like a piece of art is preserved with care, to the point where it appears to be on display. However, these objects do not appear to have a creator, making them even more art-like than regular art." Start looking around, and you might find some where you live. There's an English-language book that's sold out but will be re-issued next year.
With that, I'm going to conclude for today. Feel free to write something back. I like hearing from you.
Thank you for reading!
-- Jörg