• they/he

fka thomas4th


dante
@dante

I love this piece on ML art, specifically the ways that it interrogates what the hell we are talking about when we talk about shit like "Théâtre D’opéra Spatial", that midjourney picture that won an art contest.

I’ll begin by noting that when I first glanced at Allen’s “Théâtre D’opéra Spatial,” I was taken in by the image, which struck me as evocative and intriguing. But as I came back to the image and sat with it for a while, I found that my efforts to engage it at depth were thwarted. This happened when I began to inspect the image more closely. As I did so, my experience of the image began to devolve rather than deepen. When taken whole and at a glance, the image invited closer consideration, but it did not ultimately sustain or reward such attention.

This is not only because the image appeared to fail in some technical sense—hands, for example, seem to give these models trouble—it is that these errors, aberrations, or incongruities are, in a literal sense, insignificant—they signify nothing. They may startle or surprise, which is something, but they do not then go on to capitalize on that initial surprise to lead me on to some deeper insight or aesthetic experience.

emphasis mine.


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