Happy New Year!
Welcome to the 72nd 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. I'll use the funds to pay for the fee the service provider of this Mailing List charges me every month. If there's money left, I'll invest it into the Japanese green tea that fuels much of my creative work.
It's a new year. I hope that wherever you might be, you had a good start into 2023. I hope that the year will unfold with a lot of health, success, and happiness for you.
I can't help but feel that the latter -- happiness -- appears to have been in somewhat short supply these past few years, especially since the beginning of the pandemic. So maybe explicitly wishing for more of it will make a difference.
Before I get to all the material that I have assembled since my last email, a little advertising (sorry!). I'm teaching a couple of workshops this month, and there still are spots available. The workshops start next weekend. Now would be a good time to be in touch if you want to join one (if you haven't done so already).
If you click on the picture that will take you straight to the description of the workshops, with all relevant details included. Alternatively, click right here.
You might have heard of all those "AI" machines that you can use to generate images. I wrote about one of my experiments in an earlier email. Obviously, for those algorithms to work, they need to operate on previously existing source material. Where are those pictures coming from?
Well... This actually is a rather shitty story with a number of shitty details. I don't necessarily want to get into all of them because I'm just into hour 16 of the new year. I don't feel like dealing with the really shitty stuff before hour... 100 maybe. Or 1,000 (which would be some time in February).
Regardless, Stable Diffusion just announced that if you're an artist you can op out of them using your pictures:
Stability.AI will work with Spawning, an organization founded by artist couple Mat Dryhurst and Holly Herndon, who have built a website called HaveIBeenTrained that allows artists to search for their works in the data set that was used to train Stable Diffusion. Artists will be able to select which works they want to exclude from the training data.
Aren't they nice? I looked into this. From what I gather, you have to create an account (which I did), and then you can search for your pictures on a one-picture-at-a-time basis (ditto). Obviously, if you have hundreds of pictures online (because, say, you're active on Flickr or are an artist with a career of a few years), you'll be busy for a while. Also obviously, nobody is going to pay you for the time you'll be spending on protecting your own work.
How or why the onus should be on you, the artist, to tell that company not to steal your pictures escapes me. If you live in the US, you might want to write to the people representing you in Congress to tell them they need to look into this.
The following is a really sad story. But it struck me because the much maligned selfie is playing an important role in it:
Oh Ji-min, 25, was among the 158 people who died in a crowd crush during Halloween festivities in Seoul’s Itaewon nightlife district on October 29.
Her parents have the unthinkable task of piecing together her last moments from selfies and photos taken on her mobile phone.
Japanese artist Mari Katayama has been on my radar for a while. Born with tibial hemimelia, a rare condition that causes deformities of limbs, she has been making work around her body for a while. Even though Katayama is widely seen as a photographer, her work includes a lot more. For example, she will hand sew the various items of clothing etc. that she photographers herself with. And exhibitions of her work will then not only include the photographs but also those very items.
A recent interview with Katayama provides a very good starting point to learn more about her:
[I]n my life, I have actual experience that society is made for the “correct body.” For example, when you try to use the elevator at a station to get to the ground level, you have to walk a great deal. The “correct body” is thus the body that society presupposes. [...] On the other hand, I wondered if it was a problem that I could solve by conforming myself to “that side.” Around that time, in 2011, I started the “High Heel Project,” in which I wore high heels with prosthetic legs and sang. This project led to the idea of communicating to society without ending with “that side and this side are different.” Through these activities and works, or through pregnancy and childbirth, the burden of “my body not being able to be the right body” has been lifted a little in some ways. My body is this way, so how can I live with it? I have come to think in this way, and I have become freer.
The other day, I discovered the debut album by Ultimate Thunder. I was immediately mesmerized, in part because it reminds me so much of some of the better later materials of The Fall -- except here, the singer isn't full of snarky malice.
I then started looking into them because I was wondering about the singer's idiosyncratic delivery and found a couple of articles. Malcolm Jack writes:
All of Ultimate Thunder’s members have learning disabilities, except for founder Heselwood – who acts as mentor and guide, as well as playing guitar. Several members are almost non-verbal. Frontman Watson isn’t one of them – it would be problematic if he was – but that doesn’t guarantee that he’ll actually sing during shows.
And Helen Pidd notes that
they are less interested in being interviewed than jamming in their rehearsal space. Improvisation is their speciality. Someone tinkles a few notes on the piano or makes up a guitar riff, Anderson’s ferocious drums kick in, Watson begins to recite whatever is on his mind and they are off.
Give them a listen! You won't regret it.
As far as I can tell, this concludes the material I assembled for you. I'm sure that the moment I send this email off, I'll find something I forgot to include. But it will then be for the next email.
Oh wait, before I sign off, here's my latest cat selfie that I'm especially happy with. Even though I'm in it, it makes me laugh every time I look at it. Maybe you'll enjoy it, too.
As always thank you for reading!
-- Jörg