photoriot

I wonder what the nurse would say of these abstract murals shot by friends (currently most recent on my Linkedin posts) - maybe since they confront you, she'd see them as something.

Speaking of anodyne, maybe one meaning of nothing on the nurse's part is that the photos don't confront the reader; rather (what she misses) you have to go into them, as with Dubliners but with less head hurting since they are after all natural.

Here's a Linkedin announcement about the Golden Angle feature: Phobrain 3.1: The Golden Angle in multidimensional image space And here for comparison is a series I put together using keyword matches over half an hour or so - much higher yield, but lots of work to keyword. Creation

The nurse knew what she was talking about, at least! I will argue that it's impossible to take a photo of nothing intentionally - at best you can set up a mockup by having a random shutter fire somehow. But the photographer in the pics in question is always taking a picture of something - a shape or color - that is nothing but decoration. Transposing this to music takes me completely aback. I've survived as a street musician, and participated in other musical activities, much of it involving singing or playing in unison. The group aspect makes it a lot harder to distinguish something as nothing, and other senses of 'nothing' start to come in, like elevator music, also an anodyne background. Which come to think of it captures the nurse's perception of the pics hanging in the ward. The stories do not manifest their meaning to the reader, but call up the reader who is necessary to construe their meaning. The genetic model of growth which governs the transition from story to story seems to propose the work of reading and understanding as a formation of such a collective reader, invoked, over and above, and even in opposition to, the more limited manifestations of understanding of the individual characters themselves. The work invokes, out of the scattered indefiniteness of vision of Dubliners, though without wishing to give a name or visible form to it, that collective consciousness ... [emphasis added] Take out Dubliners, and it reads like a description of Phobrain. Thanks, Julie! My hope is that someday with a significant portion of all photos taken going into it, it would really take on a collective consciousness that could relate to each individual personally.

The photo is something, the subject is nothing. Ceci n'est-pas une photo.

I'm talking about Platonic ideal properties, which transcend the instances yet have no existence on their own. Yet they allow things to be named and grouped and thus to become things. The circles are concrete joints for the big concrete fixtures the one is leaning against. Glad you like them!

She also seemed to be making something of a cultural comment, since she was from Ethiopia. I surmised that a poor background led to a focus on the practical, but that's just me interpreting from my Caribbean background.

At the time, she seemed to be saying that not only did the subjects of the photos not hold interest for her, but that they were of no consequence informationally. In another perhaps related sense, nothing refers to abstraction - forms and colors in their own right.

It might be worth remembering the perspective of the nurse, for whom the photos' first concern were beauty and decoration rather than news, family, or commerce. In the beginning there was nothing, and God said, let there be light so we can see it.

Whatever is nothing stays nothing when photographed . . . in other words, whatever is nothing, even when photographed, stays nothing. That's what I meant, i.e. unless the object in the world suddenly is treated differently, it retains whatever element of nothingness it had. From Supriyo's perspective, it's like I'm saying the photo fixes the frame of reference in which the subject is nothing, though I can admit that in a valid shared dynamical frame of reference its image becomes something because of its place in our attention. For philosophical preference, I focus on the physical interactions the subject has with the world ongoing, leaving out vibey action at a distance by people in the dark being aware of the shadow I shot last week.

I maintain that nothing remains nothing, even when an image of it becomes something.

Photos of nothing can be something, and I hope something very valuable, in my case at least.

Is there a boundary between pure nothing and fabricated nothing? Is fabrication a sort of finding?

I incorporated the starting pair into a set illustrating a song, very abstract in a way, but since it includes some friends' photos it doesn't belong on pnet. It would be interesting to see links to other words+pictures abstractions. Creation, by Robin Williamson The messenger with sharpened heels Flew backwards into whose galloping arms...

For pictures of nothing, the main word that hits me is 'uniqueness', because such photos have to work harder for not having any content. Looking at the photos people have posted, I feel like moments of life are being celebrated for their own sake (though a slide scanner with no slide takes more than a moment in my experience :). We have ways of getting the truth (@Phobrain.com).

A nurse saw my photos and said, they are like the photos on the ward - they are all of nothing! I believe she meant nothing of personal or collective importance, just decoration. Let's raise an empty glass of toast to something, then erase it with a photo (or two) of nothing. Speaking of nothing, I just made Phobrain.com introduce micro delays to simulate awareness of the user experience, and it feels like I accomplished something!

Andy Goldsworthy in this case.

Looks like the slide show feature is gone from pnet, leaving Phobrain to carry the torch. Hopefully I can make a go of it. :-) I made a page with four pairs of 32K-D, mine and collaborators Raf&Skot, here. Four Duets, named after TS Eliot's Four Quartets to get the juices flowing.

Thanks Julie! I wonder if the old slide show view still exists. I really liked that.

I put 12 of the latest 500+ pairs curated into a pnet Gallery, which I don't know how to link to, but copy/paste gives a nice font at least: temporary golden angle pairs If that whets anyone's appetite, there are 13030 of these pairs that show in default mode (click on a pic) at Phobrain.com, following associative themes.

I made the algorithm much more tenacious, so fallback to random should be rare now. Most of the 32K D > 120 degrees are interesting to me, but not as many are making it over the curation threshold as I first thought. Here's a pair that I like, but might not subject anyone but a fine art fiend to (i.e. not usable for creating a general-purpose AI).

Nothing remarkable at 90 degrees or 40-60, but finally at 121+ degrees it feels like I've got another winner. There are fewer pairs in this region, so maybe 3 out of 10 times it falls back on a random pair - to see what happened, one can click in the unmarked area next to the options to display a message.

I added an 'S' option to screenshot the pair to a file you name in Downloads. It works on Chrome and FireFox; Safari doesn't work for no obvious reason.

That was interesting, but now I switched 32x32x32 to 90 degrees+-1 to see what naked uncorrelation can do.

I trimmed back my initial curations, so in the end it may be closer to the 15% my other options have averaged out to over time. Maybe the rate is dependent on the nature of the photo collection, and none of this matters.. except some options seem to work while others don't. Now I'm amping up dimensionality as far as she'll take it, Captain, giving up on the Golden Angle to explore a shoulder in the angle distribution graph of RGB 32x32x32 (32,768D), around 98 degrees. (Instead of Golden Angle, I'll call it Body Temperature.) The first few results are inspiring, but take minutes to come in as database index building creeps to conclusion. Below is about the 10th pair generated. Watch for the 32K option to appear when it is ready on the site.