photoriot

<blockquote> <p>> Tim, are you totally against randomness in art?<br> Only when the randomness is created from an artificial process.</p> </blockquote> <p>Would rolling dice be an artificial process?<br> I make the argument that if you accept randomness of any kind, you have to accept any human artifice, which could include using randomness intentionally. </p><div></div>

<p>Color leads to interesting places. </p><div></div>

<p>I abstract a story from this pair - does someone with no shoulders feel chagrined that his idea of a tie is on the hanger? or that the association is being made? - but does that act on my part as viewer render the pair abstract, when the intention was arrived at through structuring a personality based on color theory? As I curatorially fight off the nanobots that are tempting me with pairs, I deal with the phantoms they arouse as best I can, identifying with a replicant in Blade Runner,</p> <blockquote> <p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tears_in_rain_monologue">I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.</a></p> </blockquote> <p>Replace death with skipping over interesting corner cases I could have posted here, and you may shed a small tear. :-)</p><div></div>

<blockquote> <p>Your meta slide show needs to be made in another program that doesn't require Adobe Flash, so I'm going to pass on it, sorry.</p> </blockquote> <p>Sorry about that, it's the slideshow format photo.net provides. I think it's worth getting Flash for, if that's what it takes, not just for my pics. I might be recycling another folder within a week, so get it while you can (<a href="/photodb/member-photos?user_id=130876">portfolio</a>) if the context of the discussion matters to you. (Flash isn't needed to see pairs chosen personally for you on my site, but you have to click for each pair rather than sitting back and having them mesmerize like photo.net's slideshow does. Both are good.)</p>

<p>Fred, thanks for the Salgado links - inspiring humanistically as well as photographically. </p> <p>Anders, thanks for reading much more deeply than I did, but the caveats don't exclude the possibility that the marks are an abstract representation of Neanderthal minds we may only dimly imagine. Sufficient for a side point that there might be uncertainty about what abstraction is and was. I try to be more scientifically exact when describing my own work, as you have noticed. :-)</p>

<p>Two disparate fences forming a sort of right angle coming toward the viewer seems abstract to me. Together they make a shape that doesn't exist otherwise, and the shared theme is a dimension too. Given our different definitions of abstract, I wonder what the hit rate would be for you with my current pairs page. Some meet your standards, but since our definitions are different (although our goals of examining the process of perception are similar), one must always expect you could have a level of dissatisfaction that would require a more user-adaptive site, which might happen.</p><div></div>

<p>The chance combination of spots makes it abstract for me, with two separate elements (costumes) having the same geometrical pattern for different reasons. I bend the 2-picture theme to illustrate that I found this pair with even less intention than the pairs I am generating and selecting from, yet it should make Tim happy because the process was natural, if I understand correctly.</p><div></div>

<p>This abstract <a href="http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-28967746">Neanderthal art</a> dates at 40,000 years. </p>

<p>The picture of Turner tied to the mast of a boat navigating a storm comes to mind. I guess the extant roots of abstraction could be in cave art.</p>

<p>E.g. I chose a time and route to walk, and found this abstract costume diptych without any other choice but my finding the combo interesting. I am trying to design routes that traverse more pathways than city streets.</p><div></div>

<p>So we can't stop talking about algorithms. It's good to know *someone* is thinking about me at least! While I am not generating pairs, I am curating them, and deciding how they are generated. Uncurated pairs would be what you see on my website. My decisions about generating pairs go way beyond the logic of say, Merce Cunningham in dance, or other artists who use randomness.</p> <p>Tim, are you totally against randomness in art? If it's acceptable, would a curated random generation process be any more acceptable than curated generation that has a few hundred layers of personality built into it? If you are against any randomness, do you think that people who use it to explore are morally wrong? I'm curious why you can't just discuss images in their own right. E.g. if I am out for a walk and take a random snapshot, is it wrong because I only selected the route and didn't envision the photo first? Analogy from pics to pairs, my generator is taking me for a walk I decide on, though I don't know what I'll see.</p> <p>I might mention that some of my best recent work has been in part due to thinking about Tim's objections. I believe they will continue unless he has an improbable conversion experience to the notion that we might be ultimately mechanistic.</p>

<p><a href="https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/lake-erie-beauty?utm_term=.pkydAV2oQ#.adO6EB0dw">Dave Sandford's dizzying photos of extreme waves</a> sometimes wrench me from the reality portrayed. Does anyone have an example of abstraction in extreme situations? The safety of the sidelines of a demolition site is as far as I've gone personally.</p>

<blockquote> <p>in terms of composition,abstract forms, lines, contrasts etc.</p> </blockquote> <p>Anders, I agree. That is about the same list of abstract properties I have in mind when I think about abstraction. That's why the 'umami' pair is odd to me, because the abstraction lies for me in a smoky look that is evoked by different sources of similar colors, which isn't obviously in the list. Does it fall under 'abstract' for you?<br> Including the example I linked, so when I delete the folder it won't go away. </p><div></div>

<p>It's odd that you keep prolonging the discussion in view of how you don't feel about the subject. </p>

<p>Are you lacking feelings yourself, Tim?</p>

<p>I just posted another folder, <a href="/photo/18321371">phobrains gone wild: spring break at the OK corral</a>, a celebration of a life event starting soonish. Before you click, the link is to a pair that has a quality that I find hard enough to define that I call it abstract, but it seems there should be a more specific word, like umami. The folder in general leans even more heavily on color matching, and after some downtime, I have plans to make it use multiple algorithms, in a permutation of what the single-page version does.</p> <p>I culled a bunch of pairs from the two oldest folders (<a href="/photodb/folder?folder_id=1093981">glued pairs</a> and <a href="/photodb/folder?folder_id=1094511">glued pairs: series</a>) to make room, so slideshows there make different juxtapositions now. Now that I've reached my limit, there will be regular turnover of photos.</p> <p>Due to toggling single pics back and forth with the previous ones by clicking next to them, on the color option especially, where each pair is opposite the previous pair in RGB 3D histogram space (for a few days at least), criss-cross comparisons can sometimes be interesting. (Clicking to the left of the '-' inverts both sides, and holding it down for a second reverts both to most recent.) The pair of flags is an example.</p>

<p>I've <a href="/photodb/slideshow?folder_id=1094798">added another folder</a>, with more color matches this time, based on ~300 pairs seen so far in an hour of my second pass through the pairs page. It was pretty grim work at times, but I managed to snag a belly dancer and a frog for Tim, at least. Again the meta-slideshow is arranged by human hands to blow. your mind. and pump you up.</p> <blockquote> <p>Life where? And why is it in spite of what I know?</p> </blockquote> <p>Somewhere 'in' the screen. Because we all know that silicon isn't alive in the sense that we are. I.e. like the woman taking a placebo on purpose to get the placebo effect, you should experience the same effect as you do from something you really believe is alive. One step beyond suspension of disbelief, if you will. </p> <p> </p><div></div>

<p>Tim, I don't see the placebo effect as metaphysical. It's a cause-and-effect button I want to push. It's an interesting question whether it goes to the nature of our existence. I'm not banking on phobrain changing the experience of death, for example. A royalty-free stock collection would be great if I had time to find and master the open-source Google tagging AI. As it is, keywords are a huge manual labor that I'm not going to do for anyone's photos I don't have a relationship with and like enough. </p> <p>Anders, on your wall, I think more about flags than the process of perceiving the wall, unlike your previous collage. The non-white parts are too dark to see enough detail to process, so I fall back on the symbolic. I like the details in the white part though. I agree with the rule of thumb for borders Tim proposes.</p>

<blockquote> <p>There's a deep connection to the power of emotions involved with helping that woman by taking placebos an algorithm will never emulate.</p> </blockquote> <p>Actually, the placebo effect is exactly how I intend to emulate presence: by meeting enough of your expectations that you believe there is life there, in spite of anything you know.</p> <p>On my algorithm getting boring, you are actually just seeing my selections from many pairs of my photos (leaving out the ones with other photographers too), so it would be interesting to see if another person's selections from the same number of pairs generated in their own personal session would get boring as fast. (Not to mention someone using it on their own photos :-)..</p> <p>Anders, I am totally on board with your approach, since we are both picking apart the process of perception. And I agree that when an algorithm is worked out, it is time to move on creatively, either to something new or by building on the algorithm, like with turning a photo classifier into a generator and other utterly creative stuff going on in that field. But I hope the algorithm will still go on to feed many souls, as a new shipping optimization algorithm will allow more mouths to be fed without the engineer who designed it needing to be around.</p> <p> </p><div></div>

<p>I wonder if this log entry would count as brush strokes, with the downstream process being analogous to paint flowing from brush to canvas. Numbers are picture counts for the keyword. (In that we don't necessarily expect to be aware of the editing done to a photo, brush strokes are a tenuous requirement - hiding artifice is the highest artifice in some quarters.)<br /> <br /> --- Thu Dec 8 23:39:51 PST 2016</p> <p>Before</p> <p>114 corner</p> <p>--- Fri Dec 9 00:04:07 PST 2016</p> <p>After</p> <p>1 roof_corner<br /> 2 corner_points<br /> 21 corner_point<br /> 35 street_corner<br /> 52 corner</p>

<blockquote> <p>But we may not be as free in our ( creative ) choices as we nevertheless sense we are.</p> </blockquote> <p>Sometimes I wonder if our consciousness gets out of sync with what we perceive: did I intuit that X was going to come around the corner, or did a part of my brain see this happening before it reached my consciousness?</p> <blockquote> <p>See enough of them and a pattern begins to emerge that becomes tiresome to look at.</p> </blockquote> <p>Isn't that true with photos by most humans too? It is for me, anyway. Post some more for variety!</p> <p>In case anyone has been pining to see the matching keywords, you can now click next to the green + on my pairs page and see them displayed for the current pair as long as the mouse is down, as in the wobbly pic.</p> <p>Moreover you can toggle back and forth with the previous pic on either side by clicking in the grey area next to it, and clicking in the grey area next to the red minus toggles both photos to their current opposites. Holding that area down for a second will cause a reset to the latest pair, which is what new matches are always based on.</p> <p>All this lets you puzzle out the choice of the software a step further.</p><div></div>

<p>Trippy Diptych II is somewhat like my 'terminal jump' in being variations on a theme, compared to TD1, which melds two into something new like The Shadow, above. Maybe someone has written a thesis on the ways two photos can interact. In a way, I find that scarier than mechanistic intelligence.</p>

<p>This one. Interesting enough to chew on for a few seconds as part of the general fare, though not a favorite for a gallery.</p><div></div>

<p>"neural nets trained to recognize images can be run in reverse, to generate them." I think that's how ostagram.ru operates. <br /> <br /> Anders, I agree with the mechanistic vs. artificial intelligence distinction, and mechanistic is how I think we ourselves are, projecting from what we understand of the world so far. I wonder where would the line would be if we could design a biomechanical device that seemed to have intelligence, if that would be mechanistic in the sense of a silicon computer. In any case, I bet the farm that something could come of the pursuit in silicon.<br /> <br /> TD2 - Tiny bubbles.. Tim, wouldn't it be interesting to feed those pics to ostagram.ru? :-) I haven't figured any pics I want to try, and not sure what signup info they want.<br /> <br /> On one level, I just want to see interesting shapes resulting from combos, the subject can be secondary, like this one.. oops, see next post.</p>

<p>Tim, in a way, it sounds like you are a painter criticizing the camera for not having feelings, merely recording the scene as it's told using some sort of algorithm to pick exposure (guessing most people aren't doing this manually these days). I'd love to hear your reaction to ostagram.ru, which gives me some of the same feelings you have, though I try to embrace it in spite of that sort of resistance, since the times they are a-changing. (PS - still waiting for Trippy Diptych 2!)</p> <p>I'm right now adding 'click in the grey area next to the next-keyword-match icon' to show what keywords match, which may give a warmer feeling.</p> <p>Although in the end I want my site to really have feelings, for now I view it as a tool to explore my own feelings, especially as I begin to see how I project agency on it that it doesn't have. It's like getting on a bike and riding around in Plato's metaphor of the cave, rather than sitting there and waiting for my mind to make the associations on its own.</p><div></div>