The Antilog: 2018

Friday, September 28, 2018

ANTILOG_28Sep18a

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ANTILOG_28Sep18a

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07:38 2018-09-28

- Lately, I've been working on my "Refcards-System" in Python;
- I've been trying to build a Graphical User Interface ("GUI") and it has proven quite difficult in Python;
- That is to say, Python has really no easy way to build UIs;
- I've tested various frameworks and all require code that looks like sphagetti;
- There doesn't seem to be a simple way to build a UI/GUI in Python;

- I tested Tkinter and appJar, and the latter gave me much better results; I also tested other frameworks, or at least looked at them, but none was as simple as appJar;

- It looks like I'm going to have to build my Frontend(s) using some other language like JavaScript or something like that, something that gives me much more freedom in my construction process;

- Tkinter is versatile, but it's so primitive, it has zero sex appeal;

- I've also been studying art history, looking at the work of Walter Benjamin and others;

- History remains one of my biggest obsessions, I never seem to tire of historical studies;

- I've been trying to understand how Art Markets work; I'm working on a research project precisely to look at the evolution/emergence of the modern "art market"; I have lined up my sources;

- I'm still making digital compositions using neural style transfer;

- The concept here was of what I call the Antique-Moderne, which to me is a style; It has to do with the obsolescence of contemporary cultural artifacts like telephones and old FM radios;

- Here I have made a classic, the vanishing point of the train tracks, rendered in an Impressionistic style via neural style transfer;

- As always, I'm also constantly working with the infamous Lena test image, to test different image processing functions and so on and so forth;

- I've also been obsessed lately with Franz Kafka's parable, The City Coat of Arms;

- It's a retelling, by Kafka, of the Biblical story of The Tower of Babel;

- I made my own version of the Babel Tower;

- I wrote a piece on Medium called The Tower of Incompleteness an Incomprehension on the subject;
- I've also been obsessed with Warehouse Design; In fact, I was just dreaming last night of "The Sublime Warehouse" as I call it; it's a fulfillment center / distribution center of Gargantuan proportions, greater in magnitude to any existing warehouse on the planet; It's closer to an actual Freeport, but even bigger than that; It's why it's called the "sublime" warehouse, it is terrifying in its mathematical magnitude;
- I also spent some time studying Evolutionary Algorithms, Genetic Algorithms, and the like;
- I also studied some sociology with regard to what some still call "race"; It made me think of the works of Albert Memmi and Frantz Fanon, and postcolonial theory in general;
- I also read up on the parable of The Prodigal Son, because a friend lent me a book on the subject, written by Henri Nouwen;
- I studied early blues music and statistical randomness; I studied Michel Foucault's concept of "dispositif"; I searched far and wide for contemporary artists using neural style transfer in their artistic expression, and found next to nil;
- As noted, I have been practicing my Python chops and in doing so have investigated the SQLite3 module; It's a relatively easy database to use, and it's the backend so far to my Refcards app;
- To be continued...

Sunday, September 2, 2018

ANTILOG_02Sep18a

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ANTILOG_02Sep18a

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17:18 2018-09-02

- Neural style transfer is only a few years old. I have searched far and wide and have found very few professional artists who actually use style transfer in their art work. "Deep Style" is still in its infancy. I have made a series of works based on style transfer methods and am now posting this "Lincoln Style" montage as a sort of monument to the use of machine intelligence in contemporary art practice. Each one of the versions of Abraham Lincoln's portrait was made using the style of famous artists.

- Le transfert de style neural n'a que quelques années. J'ai cherché partout et j'ai trouvé très peu d'artistes professionnels qui utilisent le transfert de style dans leurs œuvres d'art. Le "Style Profond" en est encore à ses débuts. J'ai réalisé une série d'œuvres basées sur les méthodes de transfert de style et j'affiche maintenant ce montage "Lincoln Style" comme une sorte de monument à l'utilisation de l'intelligence artificielle dans la pratique de l'art contemporain. Chacune des versions du portrait d'Abraham Lincoln a été réalisée dans le style d'artistes célèbres.

Saturday, September 1, 2018

ANTILOG_01Sep18a

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ANTILOG_01Sep18a

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14:18 2018-09-01

- A short while ago, I began playing with something that is called "neural style transfer"; That is, you take a "content image" and a "style image" and you transpose the style of the style image onto the content of the content image;
- The process is a little more complicated than that, but today there are apps that exist that do this for you;
- The problem is the same problem we always face in artistic creation, namely the problem of finding elegant solutions to "aesthetic problems"; That is to say, the apps don't do all the work for you, they only do some of the heavy lifting; The rest is for you to do, with your own hard-won artistry;

- Ste-Anne street, located in the Old Village of St-Hilaire, where I live, is one of my favorite subjects for a landscape; At all times of the day, in every season around the year, this angle, looking UP Ste-Anne street, the view is always splendid; It married itself naturally with the techniques of neural style transfer;

- This is also on Ste-Anne Street, a little further down, looking up; Here we see the Mont-Saint-Hilaire mountain at a time of day called "L'Heure mauve" or "The Purple Hour"; The namesake should be obvious, i.e. the mountain is of a distinct violet hue;

- This view is on St-Henri street looking towards the river; It happens to be a few steps away from my apartment; Again, the view here is always amazing, especially when the sun is setting, as it hits the houses on the right at just the right angle, and the light is of a yellowish hue;

- A visual artist can't really go without making self-portraits; Here I was able to give the photo a nice pastel-hued look & feel;

- Another self-portrait, except here I am playing with the Pointillist style;

- This is a view from the St-Hilaire side of the Richelieu River (in the "Old Village"); These are buildings found to the left of the Church of Beloeil;

- The bridge between St-Hilaire and Beloeil is beautiful at any time of day and at any time throughout the year; It lends itself well to neural style transfers;

- Here we have the Presbytery by the Church of St-Hilaire; I gave it a "rustic" look just to put the historical architecture in prominence;

- So far, this has been my most popular neural style transfer, the Church of Beloeil seen from the Old Village of St-Hilaire, across the Richelieu River;

- The Church of St-Hilaire, in the Old Village, seen from the back, on St-Hyppolite Street; This is one of my favorite "angles" of the architecture of the site of the Church of St-Hilaire; Paul-Émile Borduas, a famous Québécois painter and public intellectual, once made a painting of the same location from a similar angle; This is a "hat tip" to him; The house he was born in happens to be on my street, St-Henri Street in the Old Village, which I am told was once a commercial center in the parish of Mont-Saint-Hilaire, of which this is the origial parish Church;

- A bushel of lemons taken at a market in Montreal, near the Lafontaine Park, in Mont Royal;

- Another "rustic" look & feel, this time of a small barn near my apartment;

- Yet another view from Ste-Anne Street in the Old Village of St-Hilaire; As stated above, this particular view is beautiful all year round, at any time of day;

- There is a marina on the Beloeil side of the Richelieu River; Here we see the Mont-Saint-Hilaire mountain which is always visually delicious;

- Another view of the Jordi Bonet Bridge, between the towns of Beloeil and St-Hilaire;

- The Manoir Rouville-Campbell is closer to the town of Otterburn Park; It's a special location in the history of Quebec, a real historic building which was once the "Manor-House" in colonial times;

- Last but not least, a view of the Church of Beloeil at sunset; The sun sets behind the Church, giving it a darkened feel, with the full palette of the "Daylight Series" visible in the sky above;

Saturday, August 18, 2018

ANTILOG_18Aug18a

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ANTILOG_18Aug18a

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16:44 2018-08-18

- More of my recent TabSets, this time for the month of May, 2018;
- We start with an article from one of my favorite blogs, DSHR which is a blog about digital preservation; Here we are looking at Economics of Scale in Peer-to-Peer Networks;
- Next we look at a video from a series of video made by Jordan Peterson which have to do with the Psychological Significance of The Biblical Stories;
- Then we have a series of mostly unrelated topics, ranging from an Apostolic Exhortation by Pope Francis to a lecture by an AA Big Book Speaker, including a web resource about Murder by Government (democide) and one on how the Internet Archive can't preserve the web's history by itself;
- Also: Some links about the Quebec law about animals being "sentient creatures";

- Welcome to the age of Crypto-war; Apparently also capitalism is ending; A piece about Pirsig's work; An AA resource presenting William James' The Varieties of Religious Experience; Also a tablet called reMarkable and again some links about Quebec's Animal Welfare and Safety Act;

- Opinion piece on saving Barnes & Noble; Professor J. Schmidhuber's Formal Theory of Creativity; The concept of Algorithms-as-a-Service; Some links about big bookstores and one about David Icke;

- The concept of Typology in sacramental theology; Some notes about the news business; Tristan Harris' work on an Ethics for Designers; Some publications about Benjamin's concept of Dialectical Images; Woven Texts, a great resource about the Bible, a clever concept of the Bible as "woven text";

- Do-it-yourself Artificial Intelligence (from Google) + something having to do with Google's Material Design pattern language; Something about Autism from the UK; The concept of Constitutive Rhetoric; A comunity dedicated to learning hardware; More essays by Tristan Harris on Design Ethics; Some philosophical concepts like Interpellation, Interculturalism; Some stuff about email and also some of Louis Althusser's work on the ideological state apparatus;

- Pages about design briefs and creative briefs; A web mystery about a piece of audio sounding like both "Yanny" AND "Laurel"; Some Spiritual Maxims of St-Teresa of Avila; Stop fighting against cancer; Alan Watts is not my favorite cultural figure, but he has made some intelligent remarks, some resources here figured; The book Christ the Eternal Tao;

- Mathematics concepts; I'm always looking up mathematical concepts on Wikipedia; It is the source of much of my inspiration when making my visual designs on the computer;

- How to set up your Google Home device; Hippolyte Taine, who developed the concept of "moral temperature"/"moral climate" which I love so much and never tire of; Morphology (folkloristics), some resources about story arcs, the morphology of folk tales; A piece about DeepMind AI spontaneously developing digital navigation "neurons" similar to ours; Resources about Quebec's new health care "Carnet santé" now available to all Quebecois people; A piece on the surprisingly complex small brain of Homo naledi and something about some of the first stars to exist in the universe; The concept of Calm Technology and some resources about Supply chain management; Some resources about Geocriticism and a page on Bahktin's concept of Chronotope;

- Detection theory; The development of my Signal Science; Some links on physiological signals; Some books on my wishlist; a physicist's idea of time, Carlo Rovelli's new book, The Order of Time; The knowledge problem of tech platforms, cyclogenesis, and something about breaking deep learning with adversarial examples; Some AA resources;

- An experiment with Tinder; Theoretical computer science, all sorts of miscellaneous Wikipedia pages on functions, events, threads, etc.; Miscellaneous web resources, i.e. the idea of the production function in economics;

- On-line newspaper archives;

- Picasso and Cubism; The idea that people are less selfish under capitalism; Databases, i.e. the Dee library in Python, also Lev Manovich's Database as a Symbolic Form; A great program, a formalization of Spinoza's Ethics; Concepts in the Value Network software, in their wiki; Behavior-Driven Development;

- Mystical Theology, from the Ladder of Divine Ascent to Metanoia, the Neuroscience of religion, Christian contemplation, Ein Sof, Scholarly approaches to mysticism, etc.;

- The distortions and cognitive biases in cognitive-behavioral therapy, or CBT; A strange finding, a one parameter equation that can exactly fit any scatter plot; 'Roseane' show canceled at ABC following ractist tweet; Some thoughts about music, from accents to musical notation, graphic notation, indeterminacy, and some computing resources; Also, once again with detection theory, decision theory, the sensitivity index, as well as classification rules, test methods, experimentst, some information theory, anomaly detection, statistical hypothesis testing, and various related resources, etc.;