An Artist Can Die From a Broken Heart is an ongoing project by Panos Sklavenitis that finds tweets containing the word ‘elephant’, replaces the keyword with the word ‘artist’, and publishes them as large typographic statements on a tumblr.
Other People Also Bought by Jonas Lund & Sebastian Schmieg, 2013 is an ongoing list of Amazon recommendations starting from the first ever product sold on Amazon and followed by products that ‘people also bought’. I won’t reveal more as the art/shopping site with all its carefully crafted nuances is best experienced for yourself. Its addictive, you find yourself wanting to endlessly slide down the human+machine sorted reconfiguration of infinite Amazon.
The project reminds me of two of my favourite projects - Dina Kelberman’s I’m Google that also has the scrolling page/ chinese whispers search effect, and Darius Kazemi’s Random Shopper which also plays around with Amazon recommendation economics.
Google now algorithmically ‘soften’ skin - an automated function applied without prior consent to all uploaded images using Google+. They say:
“watch what happens when we apply skin softening… Just gently and beautifully enhanced, we think you are going to love it when we apply it across your photographs”.
The strange keynote pitch (hr:min 1.43) for this service is reminiscent of product marketing for cosmetics. Perhaps we are witnessing the birth of a new digital cosmetic industry where skin products are applied to socially shared photographs, driven by a new e-consumerist pressure to improve online appearances. My guess is that a teeth whitening algorithm will soon follow.
“In a world of free information, the economy will start to shrink as automation rises radically. This is because in an ultra-automated economy, there won’t be much to trade other than information.”
Computer scientist and writer Jaron Lanier writing for the BBC.
jomc:
This classic project was the starting point for Toronto-based artist Dafydd Hughes’ Every Face in the Americans, which saw him ‘feed’ Frank’s collection of photographs to iPhoto’s facial recognition algorithm to recontextualize the work as the basis of a web archive and a print on demand book. (via Taking the ‘street’ out of street photography – Every Face in the Americans)
Google executive Eric Schimdt discusses Google concerns which include ongoing improvements to search algorithms to use artificial intelligence to deliver ‘truth’ rather than distorted results caused by ‘Google-Bombing’ and misleading marketing. In response other talkers suggest that perhaps the algorithms are worryingly given power to establish truths. That conversation happens around minute 30.
Venus of Google - Matthew Plummer-Fernandez
“The Venus of Google was ‘found’ via a Google search-by-image, googling a photograph taken of an object I had been handed over in a game of exquisite corpse. The Google search returned visually similar results, one of these being an image of a woman modelling a body-wrap garment. I then used a similar algorithmic image-comparison technique to drive the automated design of a 3D printable object. The ‘Hill-Climbing’ algorithm starts with a plain box shape and tries thousands of random transformations and comparisons between the shape and the image, eventually mutating towards a form resembling the found image in both shape and colour.”
Venus of Google, 2013
From the Long Tail Multiplier Series/ Algorithm
27.2 x 14.9 x 8.0 cm
z-corp powder 3D Print
Cat, Human by Korean art duo Shinnseungback Kimyonghun uses a human face-detection algorithm to find cats that look like humans, and a cat face-detection algorithm to find humans that look like cats. The images are scraped from Flickr and processed through openCV and KITTYDAR.
A real-time map of recent changes to Wikipedia articles.
