shiftdel

Destroying the @InternetArchive's @WayBackMachine would be the equivalent of the burning of the Library of Alexandria - one of the worst losses of knowledge in history. Media giants are now threatening to do this. We can't let this happen. Pass it on.

In the age of weaponized artificial intelligence and the antichrist, where war crimes are an everyday occurrence, and a global economic crisis is staring us right in the face... We are witnessing the birth of a historic art movement that has literally nothing interesting to say.

@realKIRAC Here you go: @padreguilherme/video/7575585585872588065" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">tiktok.com/@padreguilherm…

Franciscan friar Paolo Benanti, a Vatican advisor on AI, has written an article fantasising about burning Peter Thiel alive to protect democracy. You see, he is happy. Finally he feels his theology is useful. From our cheerful and untouched bubble, we assess his attack, and agree that the Church is wasting its time, so long as it neglects what is within its reach: art spectacle and imagination. In other words, Rome should return to the business of Counter-Reformation. Watch it here. No Paywall: patreon.com/posts/salon-fr…

Refik Anadol’s work frequently employs terms like “fluid dynamics,” “latent space,” and “algorithmic brushstrokes,” which give the viewer a false sense of intellectual depth. But the reality is this: these terms often serve to mask the artist’s aesthetic choices behind a façade of scientific authority. When the artist says, “I am visualizing bird sounds recorded in a forest,” the viewer is led to believe that the resulting image is a natural and objective representation of those sounds. However, as discussed earlier, the direction of the flow or the choice of color is entirely arbitrary. In a scientific experiment, input A should consistently produce output B, or at least the relationship should be demonstrable. Here, however, input A (bird sound) can be transformed into color C or motion D depending on the artist’s mood that morning. This is not an experiment; it is simply decoration. Phrases like “artificial intelligence is dreaming” or “data sculpture” mystify technical processes. Calling a pixel-generation process based on statistical probabilities “dreaming” is nothing more than presenting a basic mathematical regression as something magical. This causes the work to derive its power not from its own aesthetics, but from the “coolness” of science and technology. If we were to replace the bird sounds with the sound of a vacuum cleaner using the same “mapping” settings, we would still obtain a “mesmerizing” visual. In other words, the beauty of the image does not come from the essence of the data, but entirely from the artist’s graphics engine. In this context, extracting data from bird sounds is not a technical necessity, but rather a storytelling device—a marketing element of the project. Wrapping data in a scientific veneer reinforces the illusion that the work is “meaningful.” But once this illusion dissolves, what remains is merely a high-resolution “screensaver.” Real science uses data to understand reality; this kind of “art,” by contrast, uses data merely as spectacle. Instead of saying, “I shaped this data according to my own will and created something beautiful,” the artist claims: “Through scientific algorithms, I revealed the hidden architecture of the data.” This rhetoric is nothing more than putting on a mask of scientific authority to influence the viewer. This form of pseudo-scientific framing is monetized; data is dramatized, the viewer is drawn into a sense of technological awe, and reality is obscured through spectacle.

@leventnacakci This is a good comment that was long due. There are conceptually sound screensavers that legitimatetly claim to belong to the tradition of fine art though. Just because you haven't seen them, it does not mean they don't exist.

@danielsethlewis @John_Hempton Just compare the speeches of the US presidents of the last 30 years with those of the current one.Then do the same comparison among the leaders of the rest of the Western democracies.It will be pretty obvious what has changed,even without paying attention to the content.

Question: Why is it always presumed that America is the one that has changed — rather than our once-steadfast allies? Why is there no introspection? Europe, the UK, Canada, Australia — these countries have moved radically: politically, demographically, economically, militarily, energy security and more. The spotlight is always on the U.S. President. Fine. Meanwhile, I can't tell you what Australia even stands for anymore — and wow, Canada and the UK are totally unrecognizable.

An obvious comment on US Foreign Policy: US foreign policy is self-defeating. a. spend a year beating up on allies, threatening to take land (Greenland) from a NATO ally b. wage a trade war against your allies. Sure the tariffs were illegal - but the beggar-thy-neighbour policy did not engender friends c. start a war of choice in the Middle East. This may or may not have been justified (I lean towards justified) and it may or may not have been wise and winnable (I really do not have an opinion) d. ask your allies for help and e. get upset when they do not oblige - whilst forgetting about a and b above. The geopolitical realignment is astonishing. All my life Australia has had one foreign policy - which is to internationalise the corpses in all American wars. If America asks us to go to war we go. And we go fast. This time the Australian Government (to general approval) has refused to send a ship to the Gulf. (They have not been formally asked - but they made clear a rejection was coming.) After a) and b) above aligning yourself with America is becoming political poison in a democracy. I think this is VERY bad. The world has been well served by the American alliances that won the cold war and mostly kept a functional global order. Those alliances have been sacrificed to Trump's egotistical whims. The world is a less safe place now. And it is less safe not just for America's (former?) allies but also for America.

@sean_tatol (The guy was indeed an asshole btw., as was Gesualdo for instance, but luckily, they are both dead.)

@sean_tatol Rookie mistake. Pro tip: Instead of "The origin of the Work of Art" read "Das Gerede"(Idle talk) from Being and Time and apply it to art. It will work.

i’m not a big fan of this heidegger guy

@CeraGibson Cinema was the leading art form of the 20th century, just like the literary novel, the ballet and the opera were of the late 19th. It is nowhere as dominant as it was in the 1960s. I think it will stay with us though, as a niche art form like painting or analogue photography.

I actually don’t understand why people are furious at Timothée Chalamet. He has a point, even if he wasn’t eloquent. He's concerned about the future of film if people stop going to the theater. He doesn’t want to work in an industry that is considered antiquated. I love Opera AND ballet, but I’m constantly seeing my local companies looking for funding. The fact is that in the broader culture, people don’t value Opera and Ballet as they once did. “No one cares about it” isn’t accurate, but I also don’t think he meant it how it’s being taken.

@VoltEuropa This name is utterly cringe. Do better!

United States of Europe, now: actionnetwork.org/petitions/unit…

@NXT4EU It would also help to recognize the difference between (fine) art and propaganda, but neither the political left, nor the right is able to make that distinction atm.

@NXT4EU Cool. But please, for the love of God, ditch the ancient Greek and Roman aesthetics! It's just cringe, backwardish, boring and has not much to do with the reality of the present. (Even if you want to use ancient ideas, you need to express them in a contemporary form.)

European Federalism cannot be defined by extremism. Should we, alongside the people who have left Ave, build a true centrist Pan-European political organisation? If you are interested, let it be known in reactions. NXT remains the platform for Pro-European advocacy.

@allenanalysis Vocationally trained labor will also be dirt cheap if every breathing human being chooses to go on that path. There is no unlimited demand for plumbers, electricians, carpenters, or oil rig workers either while the supply side can be multiplied in a couple of years.

The CEO of Palantir just said the quiet part out loud. Alex Karp — whose company builds surveillance and defense technology for the U.S. government — just openly stated that AI will deliberately shift economic power away from highly educated, often female, Democratic-leaning workers and toward vocationally trained, working-class, often male voters. He then admitted these technologies are — his word — “dangerous” and “suicidal,” and that the only justification for deploying them is the military argument: if we don’t, our adversaries will. So let’s be clear about what was just said on the record: A defense contractor CEO told you AI is being built to restructure the American class system, that it will destroy the economic power of an entire political demographic, and that the only way to sell it to the public is to wrap it in national security.

@aufheben_njoyer @K_AminThaabet Read the op. again. Don't give up champ, you can do it!

@Data_Surfer @K_AminThaabet Are you telling me Israel would have the capacity to bomb and starve Gaza for years? Yes we can see that. Or is your argument that in order for Israel to be genocidal they'd have to kill someone in a camp instead of with a bomb?

Genocide charges against Israel are utterly baseless but as another data point: witnessing the full power of the IDF vs. Iran - isn't it rather clear that if they had the objective of mass-killing Palestinian civilians in Gaza they could have done so in an afternoon? Use reason.

@aufheben_njoyer @K_AminThaabet See op. (again: You can just read things.)

@Data_Surfer @K_AminThaabet Israel has the means to do what?

@aufheben_njoyer @K_AminThaabet Because he literally did not have the infrastructure to do that while doing wartime logistics.Eichmann wrote furious letters complaining the lack of cargo train capacity and the death camps were overloaded as well.(You can just read things btw.) Israel does have the means though.

@K_AminThaabet This is the logic of the common neonazi. "If Hitler really wanted to kill all the jews why are there Holocaust survivors"

@matdryhurst The whole point of UBI,social democracy,etc. is that we won't need the financial elites in order to produce culture in the end.People won't get rich from making art either,but they will get by if they decided to do so.Of course it also means some downscaling and decentralization.

maintaining that consensus of art as an autonomous category was contingent on elite circles funding and proliferating that idea The robber barons established it in the US, and state patronage still fights to keep that alive in Europe But new elites simply reject the premise

My thesis on the plight of art is basically to argue that the shift to the creator economy (collapsing everyone into creators) exposed that the premise of autonomous art as invented in the 18th century was always fragile and contingent, and may now be over

@HauptstadtFella @moosdorfmdb @BfV_Bund

Hey, @moosdorfmdb du hast da aus Versehen was gelöscht, was für ein #AfDVerbotsverfahren noch wichtig sein könnte. Ich hab das dafür mal für dich gesichert, nicht dass du dich später nicht mehr erinnern kannst.

@qalbsomal What is Ramadan?

Non Muslims think Ramadan is a hard time for us. They don't know that this is actually our favourite time of the year.

@DannyDrinksWine 2001 was the peak of cinema. Tarkovsky never made anything close to it (or to most of Kubrick's movies in general). I'm not surprised that he didn't get the original idea of it, however, I'm pretty sure it's not because of the distracting amount of details.

Andrei Tarkovsky on the problems he had with Sci-fi movies— especially Stanley Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey' (1968) & how he intended to make 'Solaris' (1972): "Interviewer: The majority of directors of science-fiction movies think it necessary to impress the viewer's imagination with the concrete details of everyday life on other worlds or the details of a spacecraft's construction, which often crowd out the central idea of the film. I think Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey' (1968) is guilty of that. Tarkovsky: For some reason, in all the Science-fiction films I've seen, the filmmakers force the viewer to examine the details of the material structure of the future. More than that, sometimes, like Kubrick, they call their own films premonitions. It's unbelievable! Let alone that '2001: A Space Odyssey' (1968) is phony on many points even for specialists. For a true work of art, the fake must be eliminated. I would like to shoot 'Solaris' in a way that the viewer would be unaware of any exoticism. Of course, I'm referring to the exoticism of technology. For example, if one shoots a scene of passengers boarding a trolley, which, let's say, we'd never seen before or known anything about, then we'd get something like Kubrick's moon-landing scene. On the other hand, if one were to shoot a moon landing like a common trolley stop in a modern film, then everything would be as it should. That means to create psychologically, not an exotic but a real, everyday environment that would be conveyed to the viewer through the perception of the film's characters. That's why a detailed "examination" of the techno logical processes of the future transforms the emotional foundation of a film, as a work of art, into a lifeless schema with only pretensions to truth. Design is design. Painting is painting. And a film is a film. One should "separate the firmament from the waters" and not engage in making comic books. When cinema moves out from under the power of money, namely, the costs of production, when there will be a method for the author of a work of art to record reality as with a pen and paper, paints and canvas, chisel and marble, "X" and the filmmaker, then we'll see. Then cinema will be the foremost art and its muse the queen of all the others." (Andrei Tarkovsky's interview with Naum Abramov, 1970) [P.S: On this day, 54 years ago, 'Solaris' (1972) premiered in Moscow, Soviet Union.]