What happens when we become so enmeshed with digital interfaces that they're no longer something we start and stop using, but more a persistent presence that we live with?
What happens when this happens at the level of our bodies and changes how free we feel to move physically?
Latest post is a write-up of a talk given at Future Folk symposium earlier this month, considering those questions through experiences with embodied interactive art.
my creative genius wife has, after six epic years, just published her PhD here: https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/4132001/4132196
Erratic and Erotic Voice-led Composition is a practice-based PhD about being with intensities felt in the body, artistically integrating them into sonic expression, voice as a somatic tool, ADHD selfhood, and so much more.
Congrats Adriana Minu :D
My first newsletter in a little while: On the Perils of Gainful Employment
https://timmb.com/perils-of-gainful-employment/
"I was a little burnt out as a self-employed artist. Not by making art, or engineering, or living on little money, but the relentless marketing and self-promotion needed to get any project moving. Applications. Social media posts. I have a lot to give to this world, but convincing people to care about my work is not it. As representations of work become more important, they start taking over the process. It becomes less a journey into the soul of the collective unconscious, and more of a rain dance for a rain god who has more customers than he has raindrops. I like dancing, but not like that."
I’m wary of people with no time for conspiracy theories. Confronting the shakey foundations of your own grasp on reality is a better way to build immunity to falsehood than any appeal to authority. A conspiracy theory is a tautological view of the world, which survives and self-replicates by offering blunt tools to dismiss inconsistency. Similar tools help us uphold our sense of reality, like the dismissal of people and ideas with categorical sweeps (uneducated, misinformed, heretical, unscientific, MSM, fulled by hate, metropolitan, ignorant, problematic, mind virus, conspiracy theory, senile). It may be fair, sometimes, but it’s worth remembering that this is the same mechanism by which false and ineffective views of reality survive.
A lot of hot takes on AI, art, technology and society right now, which rub up against ideas that are fundamental for me.
Taken a break to figure out how to put this into words, and ended up making some eternal animations along the way, which I now kind of love and will have to take somewhere.
>>> It's hard to make art with AI, but it's not impossible
Including:
- But is it *your* art?
- Human expression is a dance between mind and matter
- Machines that help humans stay human
- Art is safe but artists are not
https://timmb.com/its-hard-to-make-art-with-ai-but-its-not-impossible/
On the significance of a caret
Oh, as a topic wanderer myself (I don’t like the word “generalist”), I love and endorse this comic.
(via @simondlr’s newsletter).
Things you write when coding that sound funny when the context is removed
A little music video I made for my friend Zac Gvi's band The Nonidentical: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ToHP6van1Wk
What does Interactive Art have to teach us about AI? Three questions to ask of new technology:
https://timmb.com/what-does-interactive-art-have-to-teach-us-about-ai/
And related: I'm doing an AMA with Music Hackspace on AI and artistic identity Thursday at 6pm UK time:
https://musichackspace.org/event/ai-and-artistic-identity-a-talk-with-digital-interaction-artist-tim-murray-browne/
Venkatesh Rao on how building peace online is not won by waging war. https://studio.ribbonfarm.com/p/war-rooms-and-peace-rooms
> Making peace is much harder and far less glamorous than making war, and mostly involves building up compounding positive potential flywheels rather than countering war-making forces directly. To snowclone the line about markets, in the short term, peace-making is a voting machine, but in the long term it is a weighing machine. It rests not on trying to build bridges or getting warring parties to set aside hostilities and negotiate, but on building up big and compounding reserves of peace-power assets. Peace is not the absence of war, but the presence of flywheels of generativity. It is war, not peace, that is negatively defined —by an absence of such flywheels.
Cloning fingerprints using smartphone microphone when people swipe on device. https://www.ndss-symposium.org/wp-content/uploads/2024-618-paper.pdf - remember to use unpredictable fingerprints and change your fingerprints regularly
Joy and ethics in making AI art, or how I found the universe in my data self.
I'm talking on 25 January at the Scottish Universities Insight Institute #glasgow (and ONLINE) on what I learned (and felt) in 4 years of making art with my own personal data, from sonifying dance & body control of AI to filmic adventures.
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/joy-and-ethics-in-making-ai-art-tickets-798762509167
Happy new year!
On beginnings, endings and musical cadences...
https://timmb.com/cadences-resolutions-and-the-pleasure-of-uncertainty
Sorry, forgot the alt text:
1. A crowd of people straining to see a framed print on the wall (yes this was staged obvs!)
2. A woman standing in front of a gallery wall with 5 framed prints hanging
3. A vertical TV in a window area with a Kinect depth camera next to it. This is an interactive installation that lets you use your body to control the AI model I used to make the prints.
4. A digital render of one of the exhibited images, 'woods'. It is reminiscent of a woods with white sky appearing between green tree trunks, but nothing looks quite real and on close inspection there are repeating visual motifs that the model keeps on using.
Last chance to see my #glasgow exhibition. The slightly mystical results of 3 years of research into non-appropriative AI, using only myself as data. And of leaning into the glitches to find a collaboration between my life and this weird medium.
South Block Project Space, Osborne Street, Glasgow 9am-5pm, free.
Lol, evidently still learning the basics. This was a reply to https://post.lurk.org/@entreprecariat/111619048596468604
How about Ex?
A Short Ride Through Hyperspace (DIFFEOMORPHISM), my new AI-rendered voyage immersive AV installation with free herbal tea, is opening at Frequency Festival in Lincoln on Thursday!
I will make a trailer becaues the still images don't quite do it justice.
A little more about it in https://timmb.com/announcing-a-short-ride-through-hyperspace/
World premiere 8.30pm tonight at Filmoteca de Galicia, part of the international selection for INTERSECCIÓN.
