The Antilog: September 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;