>The role of art in the age of digitality, what are its possibilities, are there new possibilities?

Video games were the most prominent of emerging forms of digital art. Interactive storytelling has become widely expanded thanks to them. Plus we have VR becoming more available.

>The impact of the digitality and computation on the environment.

Never really seen this question discussed until recently with NTFs and Bitcoin. But this should in actuality make us ask broader questions about how technology itself affects the environment. Too much electricity being used, might I ask.

>What aesthetics are set up thanks to media and technology?

My mind immediately jumps to stuff like vaporwave, weirdly enough. In the 90s, PCs were released in droves and many young kids grew up using them. The reason why vaporwave became a popular thing was due to nostalgia. As someone who used a Win. 95 or 98 when I was very young, the technological aspect mixed with 95 imagery was appealing to look at.

>Design and design practices, be it software or other

As the internet became a part of the establishment and smartphones/tablets expanded access to it, web design became neutered and simplistic in order to become marketable and appealing to your average mom or sister. There’s certainly a way to make minimalism appealing, but at the same time I look back on older websites and I appreciate the basic HTML compared to now.

>>53537

>Video games were the most prominent of emerging forms of digital art. Interactive storytelling has become widely expanded thanks to them. Plus we have VR becoming more available.

Yeah I thought about interactivity and art, so the potential that is rolled out in computer games and VR could be stimulating for an art context might have already happened tbh, that perhaps not only focuses on entertainment, though I don't want to say all games are only entertainment, I think it was here that we discussed that there exists are vital niche in game design these days.

>Never really seen this question discussed until recently with NTFs and Bitcoin. But this should in actuality make us ask broader questions about how technology itself affects the environment. Too much electricity being used, might I ask.

The question of power consumption indeed is a main one. I read that the industry within the last decades already made possible less consumptive computers, without that development we might not have been able to get this far as we are know because the energy consumption would be too much. Cooling is a important for that and there have been expreiments with underwater server farms. Which brings us to the energy consumption of data centers.

>As someone who used a Win. 95 or 98 when I was very young, the technological aspect mixed with 95 imagery was appealing to look at.

I recently listened to windows sounds and some are engrained in my brain. Put a smile on my face. Digital glitches might be a new form of aesthetics as well.
I think for me its also the technicity itself that has something aesthetic about it. Can't articulate it more precises though.

>There’s certainly a way to make minimalism appealing,

Yeah it makes navigating easier, but at the same time hides away a lot of possibilities. Besides the user friendly aspect, there also is a user guiding as aim in design. Navgiation and resting/dwelling time on an app regulated by a certain design like the endless feed.

>>53549
I think that the problem with NFTs is it's essentially trying to bottle the artist which everything art related tries to do but by making it so ephemeral into an absurdity that now we see exactly the role and function of art under Capitalism fully realized which is merely a financial instrument for the storage and transfer of capital, which NFTs can do quite well, as can buttcoin or any other crypto thus enabling the wealthy international elite to carry on with greater ease than ever before. This is because you cannot physically reproduce a painting, but you can just screenshot an "authentic" digital art piece. It's kinda the problem with digital art in general which is that people want to have and to hold that art, and to hang it up around their house. I cannot imagine anyone but the biggest twats among the wealthy hanging up a $2.5 million NFT as their desktop wallpaper.

I think it's actually quite nice for the average artist though, in that it can at least in theory democratize things to where they can take a scan of their drawing and put it up but I feel like we've been down this road before and somehow it'll just centralize things further to where the people that produce nothing get a far greater share and control over art in the end. I also think it's abhorrent that they're using Ethereum. Like what the fuck, it's such an unbelievably shitty crypto. People have lost hundreds of thousands of dollars on its gas fees. I personally lost $16 on a failed transaction with ETH. It's the stupidest fucking crypto out there and I think actually relying on it for NFTs could become their downfall. Otherwise, Dutch Tulips.

I think some people are buying lots of it just because the initial wave are the crypto millionaires and that it won't spread much beyond them. Like I said, people generally want art to have and to hold but the thing with computer games as art is it's at least an actually interactive experience which is precisely why so many people have looked the other way as all these companies stopped shipping out manuals and strategy guides and wallpapers, a fact which still annoys the fuck out of me to this very day. Like I mean I have never, ever bought any "digital art book" for 90 fucking dollars nor shall I ever. Either you ship me my wallpaper for my bedroom or fuck off. The same thing goes for mp3s and whatever else. If I can download it and you're not sending me hardcopy I'm not paying all that extra, which likewise is probably one reason people tolerated the all digital switch at all which was at least it used to be cheaper back then, but now it is even more expensive buying digital only software than it was buying battlechests with the manuals.

So, there is always that. You're always going to have people like me who get pissy about no physical aspect to something. Like when all this shit is over if I still have enough money left floating around I'm probably going to try and make a trip to the bookstore. Why? Because I refuse to use a Kindle, I refuse to give a shitty corporation ownership over my book, and because I demand something unalterable in my hand. An NFT may at least in theory bypass two of those things, but still.

Imho the only true thing which an NFT has got going for it is if somebody just focuses in creating really mindblowing gifs. This is partly because it'd be a lot more pain in the ass painstakingly making copies as opposed to screenshoting, and also because I do happen to think gif like things show a lot of artistic promise.

However that being stated it's going to be as few and far between as in vidya itself, which you will notice has largely just become a banal money making enterprise geared towards predictable mediocre returns rather than try something truly inspired and daring. This is all a real great shame because vidya has got the most mindblowing potential for not just art but also education and training since the invention of the printing press and written language before that, but like with everything it's usually squandered on complete garbage. We could be seeing and truly experiencing the hyperspace scene from Space Odyssey but instead we get Rick and Morty fart jokes and some shitty "VN" going all "kawasaki thinks you-a cutu 'w' senpai" or whatever trash speaking of which I'd really like to point out how profoundly irksome that title is to me because "visual novel" is exactly how I'd describe Planescape but I discovered it means shitty anime comic books in steam shovelware form.

So in summation, lotta promise, extremely limited execution in its potential regarding vidya, even worse potential in NFT because basically it's only great potential is if it can somehow make actual artists enough money that they can dedicate themselves to it as a living as opposed to wasting their lives making corporate advertisements, or the internet being flooded with shitpost gifs making way for more art.

I will say one final thing in favor of an NFT though, which is namely that shoppers are not in fact rational actors contrary to what any muh markets fag tries to tell you, and that includes people really paying for the feeling of something which that includes wanting to buy some thousands of dollars jpeg just because it's the one "authentic" one in the same sense as you'd want to buy an authentic Michelangelo and not give a shit about reproductions. I have actually caught that tendency in myself when shopping for vidya and which is exactly why I tend to dislike simply the feeling of pirating games because it makes it feel like suddenly the vidya is cheap and shitty and not as "real" in a sense. I know it's a profoundly illogical and retarded thing, but there you go. It's part of why I paid probably thousands of dollars over the years alongside refusing to rip people off and then become a blackhole in my now absent demand subtracting just a few more shekels from games I like getting made and the people who make what I like getting paid while shit companies with shit games make their money anyway. So I suppose that latter case could come into play too, to where it gets frowned upon to just download copies of some artistic work somebody likes rather than paying the artist. Whether this translates elsewhere is a different question though as it's definitely a Western and in particular American mentality about labor and markets and "I pay my own way" insistence on giving money which is completely absent from and mysterious to such peoples as Russians.

While I can confirm that Prey is good the 2006 one of the same name also is if you like shooters in fact iirc it's the unsung gem that pioneered a lot of the stuff Dead Space would eventually use like walking on walls/zero g iirc however one thing that just keeps throwing me off is all of their faces look just slightly off, almost like it is entirely composed of la creaturas attempting to pass as human. Whether this is deliberate or not idk though I think it's on accident that bizarrely ends up working for the game itself. Just looking at them it's like some South American mutts who are trying to wear human faces and you keep getting this eerie feeling like something is just not right with their faces but you can't put your finger on what it is. This really works to the game's favor the more I think of it.

Haven't had as much time for games though and now I must do wörk bullshit. This has made me realize how much of a waste it is to play games and also how much I wish I had time to play games too, although quite frankly I think if I'd retired from a windfall I'd just start concerning myself with other things anyway like I don't know mergers and acquisitions or something)))

I've been getting used to that first person/third person playstyle again at this point though, which normally I don't do. I wish I had more time for city sims but well you can't just sit down and play one without realizing 12 hours went by and now wörk is in two hours. I think my new objective should be to finalize a bunch of projects and weekly/monthly/other tasks so that I can sit down and play vidya in full. I even picked up a buttload of different new incenses just so that I can sit around and play games while programming my mind to associate each game with each unique scent. I'm on Dragon's Blood right now for playing Prey. White Musk reminds me of Pathfinder Kingmaker, and Sai Baba of Beautiful Desolation although I've been experimenting with trying to program either one game to two smells or two smells to one game, partly because I always ran out of incense.

This may seem incredibly autistic but when you do this and light a pre-determined incense it'll break you out of an apathetic mood when you're like "but do I really want to play a game? Eh what should I play. Maybe this, but, ...eh" Works surprisingly well and it's especially noice because you can then associate that particular game with something that was going on in your life. Like I now associate The Division with tree smells that in turn reminds me quite deeply of what it was like to be in the pandemic during the winter wave.

Fuck. Wörk will suck. I just know it. But I must pretend that it won't. I'm going to have one final cigarette before such shit so I can dissociate for 8 hours and then plop my ass home in bed later which sucks because I know I won't be in the mood for Prey or any video games. I do think I'm going to finish it quite easily this time however. It feels like it'll be pretty much a breeze and has got this really weird unique feel to it both mechanically, artistically, and narratively like a cross between the new Deus Ex games HR and MD, and Bioshock games, plus a hint of Alien Isolation.

>>53533

>What would your creative process look like if you had one?

For me, it's pretty basic. Start with a general idea of "draw this", then pick up a pencil. Draw a lot of quick lines, erase them and draw slightly better lines. Repeat until a composition emerges, and the details come into focus. Stop when I'm sure I can't do better, or when I'm swallowed by despair. Sometimes drawings just suck and can't be fixed. It's a lot of trial and error, informed by things that have worked in the past, along with studying what other cartoonists have done. But doing is the important part. Creativity is a habit, a practiced skill.

>animated series, film, comic, book, visual novel, and whatnot.

I've had less success in this area. The longer ideas, the narratives etc. I think in small bites, quick intertactions. But I fill notebooks with literally everything. Things I see, conversations I hear, endless 'what if?' questions, or possible settings. This is the 'idea net' which Orson Scott Card described in his book 'How to Write Science Fiction & Fantasy'. Everything is a potential story, and writers collect the pieces while most people ignore them. Good book, would recommend.

Anyway, the point is most ideas are worthless, but I never know which will lead somewhere so I write them all down. The last comic I posted in the Drawing Thread, The Duel, started with a couple of sentences I wrote down in a doctor's waiting room. That concept wasn't much, and I'm still not sure how I feel about the finished product. But it exists. It's a thing now, not just an idea. To cross that gap, I put time into developing it, scribbling down thumbnail sketches, asking 'what happens next?'. Time is the main factor. Focusing on one idea over a long period of time until it takes form, until something solid emerges from the initial potential. The problem is knowing when to quit. Which ideas should I pursue, and which should I ignore? I'll admit I'm terrible at deciding that.

If you're disappointed in your ideas, keep working on them. You'll get better ideas and then be disappointed in those, too. It's a long process. You improve, but are never satisfied. Your taste exceeds your skill:

Ira Glass on Storytelling
https://vimeo.com/24715531

>>52912

>pages where you can copy a text and then get it presented to you

Don't really like this because that way you can't really go back if you missed something, I don't like the lack of control.

>How does it even work?

What worked for me so far is quickly scanning one line after another with my eyes, but this only works properly if the lines are short enough so your eyes don't have to move too much.
I mostly read with an ereader and it works pretty well there, you can adjust the font size (and through that also line length) to your liking. With a proper book I suppose whether it works depends on the line length. On the web, e.g. here on EC, it often doesn't work at all because the lines are stretched across the whole screen so your eyes need to move a lot to read them.

Also, it probably requires practice, after a while of reading that way I felt rather tired, but that might have also been due to it already being late.

>>52931

>Then again I am also the ernst who, maybe it was also you, mentioned that thing about visualizations and seemed surprised I could project and rotate 3D images in my head.

Yeah, funnily enough it was me.

>>52688

>Would be a big milestone for me if I manage to at least finish it.

I failed, of course.

From my attempts so far, I feel like my lack of imagination (or, maybe rather visalization) is holding me back from just "creating" some character or place in my head and then going from there to describe what I'm visualizing. Next time, I'll try to write a story based more closely on something that has actually happened to me, hopefully my actual memories are vivid enough.

Read a really great book on writing that recently came out called A Swim in a Pond in the Rain by George Saunders. Most of the resources on writing I came upon so far are by hack authors, so I was happy to pick this up. I only read a couple of short stories by him before but being one of the few authors namedropped by Pelevin should be endorsement enough.
He analyzes seven short stories by great Russian writers (Chekhov, Tolstoy, Turgenev & Gogol) in great detail but also in a witty and accessible tone (possibly even too goofy at times). Besides analyzing the meaning & what makes them great, he illustrates many principles of writing & also gives more general writing advice.
Most of the "writing advice" is nothing new, but he's also aware of that and discusses it thoughtfully. I really enjoyed all the stories & his commentary. Would be interesting to do something like his analyses on more recent literature, but I suppose that is left as an exercise to the reader.

Spurned by my recent preoccupation with aphantasia, I read The Art of Memory by Frances A Yates. It's a somewhat academic but still fairly readable history of how memory was cultivated from antiquity until the Renaissance. The classic approach by the Greek & Roman rhetoricians actually was to visualize what one wants to remember in a certain order as objects in memory "places" (usually based on real buildings with various rooms).
In the Middle Ages this gets transformed into mainly being used by religious scholars & priests to remember theological teachings like vices & virtues. Afterwards it gets more difficult to trace the tradition, but through some intermediaries like Camillo & Lull it culminates in Giordano Bruno's rather occult & esoteric teachings. He builds up different systems of complex images drawn from mythology & religion to basically encode all aspects of the world.
The author then also draws somewhat spurious connections between this art of memory and Shakespeare's Globe Theatre (since theatres were used by some of these "memory artists" as memory places) & also from Bruno's all-encompassing system to modern Science (through Leibniz). Really fascinating stuff overall, but there's also quite a bit of chaff for the casual reader.

Read the introduction to pic related, the first two chapters also sounds very interesting but I will skip it atm. Hopefully I remember this book.

Cowen starts from the point where logistics as military concern becomes a field of business management after WW2, yet both are still linked together or overlap, civil and military logistics are not neatly seperated today. Logistics shape markets, actors and movements on global levels (which I think also means that it scales differently depending on what is adressed, so it penetrates both micro and macro levels of a globalized system).

>logistics as a business science has come to drive geo-economic logics and authority, where geo-economics emphasizes the recalibration of international space by globalized market logics, transnational actors (corporate, nonprofit, and state), and a network geography of capital, goods, and human flow [@cowen2014, 8]

The second take away for me from the introduction (there is more much ofc) is the concept of supply chain security and which is linked to what as been stated above. So supply chains today are treated as critical for systemic (social and economic) stability, systems that are concerned as "vital systems". This means that

>>Today, the supply chain is understood to be both vital and vulnerable and so in urgent need of protection. [@cowen2014, 9]

The case of protection is crucial, as it drives certain operations or interventions of states and private enterprises that have contracts with states etc. What kind of operations? Well, as logistics is rendered critical it means that threats or obstacles to the flow off things (be it humans or stuff) has to be regulated accordingly, which also implies violence and action that can be called imperial, so basically the imperialism isnt really over. Intervention in foreign countries, international policies and agreements that have consequences for human lifes.

Book can be found on libgen, the introduction is less than 20p long but is kinda eye opening in its birds eye view over contemporary logistics. Maybe I knew to little before but its also very fascinating if you are interested in systems. I immediately had to think of time criticality that is within logistics but does get mentioned here really, ofc not, she also notes there is so much more to the topics.

Bonnie 'Prince' Billy-"Blueberry Jam"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJf2iY2Kbx0

Damn, this is a good song.
Also, scrolling down to the comment section, I found the answer to my question: Yes, the blueberries were infused with THC.

>On January 13, 2018, an emergency alert lit up phones throughout Hawaii, warning of a ballistic missile approaching the island. “SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER,” it read. “THIS IS NOT A DRILL.” Among the recipients were Will and Elsa Hansen Oldham, who had recently arrived at Hawaii Volcanoes National Park as artists-in-residence and who were suddenly preparing to spend their last moments together.

>Calmly, the couple ate some THC-infused blueberries that they had been gifted by a friend—why let them go to waste?—and Will began writing a whimsical new song to calm his nerves. “When life is tough and very scary,” it went, “My wife and I/We chomp a blueberry.” By the end of the song he distilled its message to just three words: “We’ll be fine.”

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bonnie-prince-billy-i-made-a-place/

You've probably heard the Johnny Cash cover of "I See A Darkness". Cash does it better, but Bonnie "Prince" Billy's original is worth a listen:

Bonnie "Prince" Billy - I See A Darkness
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4iV4NwSbscg

And the Cash version, because why not?

Johnny Cash - I See A Darkness
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWnUItw1ElU

>>53514
I think that it's entirely conceivable that individual consciousness and the arising of life is just the emergent property of a universe that is defacto operating as a kind of giant brain. Also this image is incorrect it isn't the galaxy but rather different star clusters. The way matter attracts makes it sure look super spooky though when you consider how absolutely massive a localization of matter has to be to pull entire galactic clusters into thin strands.

As an aside, one of the much more spooky and freakish things I've thought of is what if it's just that false vacuum really is a thing in which case we'd actually have large bubbles of effectively collapsed reality who contain within them other, newer universes, which operate exactly the same as our present universe's big bang merely being the result of collapsing a field https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_vacuum
The interesting thing is that the universe actually could be deleting itself and we'd never know it until exactly the moment this expanding ball of different physics traveling at the speed of light, also known as the speed of causality, finally reached us, or if any attempts at super advanced starfaring ships using exotic matter to create wormholes causes this.

I do think however it is profoundly and incredibly stupid for man to invent himself a machine, and attempt to model it as a basic machine upon his own brain, and then get so deluded and retarded as to mistake himself and his reality of being properties of his own machine. Now, we are not in a giant computer simulation in that sense. I'd posit it more likely if a simulation theory were correct that it'd be closer to a super entity merely dreaming of us and this world, or our existence and arising consciousness being a side effect, but to call it a computer is stupid beyond belief. A computer is merely an extra shitty attempt at facsimile of our own brains and our extra limited understandings of how our own brains operate.

>What happened to those chain texts

Clearly they largely stopped happening in the way it was an earlier meme but I still sometimes get chain mails from relatives. I've seen people try to do it on imageboards which is extra cancerous that anyone replied to them, and a pretty good quantifiable gauge of how shitty and destroyed an IB is based on the rate at which people reply to a "reply to this post or your mom will die" shitposts get bumps and replies and reposts.

>"DREAM from the metrix"
> budda
>a 'illucion" life.
>perceptual.The

This is geocities tier.

>>53343
We are talking about the different metaphysical "levels" of truth. Here.
At the highest level, I see "tokens" proposed by Parmenides. They're like ideas, except more fundamental. They're the building blocks of ideas. Very primitive and fundamental. I could do a math analogy and say that a Parmenides' token is something like "Pi", an "idea" that is so fundamental, it is a lynchpin for the existence of other ideas. But really, it might go deeper than that. Like, pieces of immutable, indivisible information, from which all other information derives its properties.

You are talking about truth in a closer association with the notion of "fact". This definition of "truth" is circumstantial in that it can or can not be truth depending on the existence of an external object. (A contradition to the truth). Not "fundamental" enough for my tastes.

Me, I'm trying to introduce a notion of truth that's not entirely metaphysical, and can exist in a practical context, yet mimics the property of being entirely self-contained and immutable. "Truth" as in something that does not change its nature depending on what is introduced into the system. It does not interact with anything (for interaction requires mutability on part of the interacted), it does not change, can not be further decomposed. That is my notion of truth that is one level of abstraction (or "divinity" if you will) than platonic ideals, and yet can be formulated and utilized in a lower level, "mundane" context.

>things can always get better, but things can always get worse, too. like, when you're on position (-9000) on the real number line you can move to position 0 and continue to eventually reach 9000 or you can go to (-∞), (-∞)-1 and so on.

No, I don't think introducing the negative numbers is necessary here. I don't think there's an infinite depth to "acting like an animal", if you define that as "acing in a way that maximizes individual fitness regardless of anything". There's only one "perfect" point at which a function can be perfectly optimal for its environment, and we can just call that "0". Optimization is not a +- scale, it is a point you are trying to reach. Just like in computer programming or engineering in general, there's exactly one, fragile, most optimal state you want to be in, rather than having an infinite space to optimize towards.

>i think this statement might not be trivial to prove :)

I can't prove it, but I'll just fall le good old entropy and Marxist analysis of economy/science. Things naturally trend towards min/maxing. minimizing effort for maximizing profit/benefit. Because every other strategy is less efficient at self-perpetuating.
I can even provide examples. In that, life forms that merely maximize self-perpetuation are far more likely to survive through many scenarios, including mass extinction scenarios, than complicated organisms. If some freak space ray hits the earth and scorches the planet and destroys the ecosystem, it won't be the advanced humans surviving, it will be the primitive bacterial. And that's not a good thing.
I think our job as the only self-directed species is to consciously decide our path of development, rather than becoming subservient to entropy, like how capitalists love to do (duh its natural, it's just the law, muh social darwinism). We must become the masters of our fates and DEFY natural law, rather than try to utilize it.