Diffusing the Everyday & Latent Animation

This week has been hectic, so there is no newsletter proper, but I wanted to share a workshop and let you know about an upcoming workshop, and some other things.

Chiefly, Critical Topics: AI Images is now complete, and the entire series of video presentations and full syllabus is online. You can find it by clicking the button below.

Next week I hope to post a summary of the final lecture (the full video is on the website already) and some notes on teaching the class.

I’m also excited to share that my article, “Seeing Like a Dataset: Notes on AI Photography” has been published in Interactions of the ACM, a peer-reviewed journal published by the Association for Computing Machinery in their issue on “Undoing Data Practices.”

The article reflects on the way photograohing for GANs as part of an artistic process opens up insights into how these models “see” or make order out of the world. It’s paywalled in the usual way these articles are, but the issue is well worth it if you can find it in your academic library!

Diffusing the Everyday: Soyun Park

Here’s a recording from our second open online workshop with AIxDesign and SubLab’s <Story&Code> program. It starts with an artist talk by the media artist Soyun Park, whose work is an excellent encapsulation of AI’s myth of “dreaming,” in the most thoughtful, playful, and emotionally engaging sense.

After the first hour, there is a workshop where Soyun leads us through making a very short video and then transforming that video with Stable Diffusion. You need a Hugging Face and a Google Collab account to complete the workshop, but the tools are free to use. I hope you enjoy it!

Latent Animation: Fabian Mosele

If you want to sign up for the next workshop, you can! It will be with the artist Fabian Mosele, and will focus on telling a story with a consistent animation style across frames. Fabian has achieved one of the only AI films I have seen where the animation style looks like animation, Reflection of a Reflection of a Reflection, and it’s really quite fun.

Fabian will share how to pull of this incredible feat in our upcoming online workshop on May 23 (8-11am in New York). If you’re keen to join us, you can sign up here.

Coming Up

If you are in Seoul, you can attend Adrenalin Prompt starting May 11, a zine-crafting festival at art expo about prompt-generated images and texts at the Forkingroom Space. I’ll be giving a talk on May 15! Details in Korean below:

Others on the talk series include some excellent artists and thinkers including Anna Ridler and Nina Begus, and I am excited to catch more of the Korean artists who are participating.

That’s it this week - it has been busy! If you want to find me you can find me on Twitter, Mastodon, Instagram (where this newsletter really is at its best) and Blue Sky (eryk.bsky.social). Cheers!