Second Life Screenshots, roughly 2004
Not Really Confident
Looking at Abstract Art with Microsoft CaptionBot, April 17-28 2016
An excerpt appears in CLOG (2018)
For Not Really Confident, I've run 267 images of abstract art through CaptionBot (© Microsoft 2015), an image caption-generating AI that came online late March 2016. In CaptionBot's "own" words, "[I] was created to showcase some of the new capabilities of Microsoft Cognitive Services. These new capabilities are the result of years of research advancements ... Specifically, I use Computer Vision and Natural Language to describe contents of images. I am still learning, so sometimes I get things wrong."
My starting place was this list of abstract painters on Wikipedia; most images of the artworks themselves were found using Google's image search. I was familiar with maybe 15% of the artists in advance, and selected images by looking at several works by each and trying to find a decent example that summed up a main body of work, or style. Images were downloaded, then uploaded to CaptionBot for processing. You can also provide CaptionBot with an image's URL, but I opted for the upload route on the off chance the AI might search the contents of related pages for context-clues. I then took screen shots of the resulting captioned-images and organized all the before / afters into some shared folders.
As the process went on, I thought of some related works (poems, exhibition strategies, etc) which you can see under the Ideas section above. If you have any corrections, questions, or ideas shoot me an email.
Contents:
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In late 2012 I purchased the Whitney Biennial 2004 catalogue for $10 from a used book shop and was surprised to find all 107 of the artists' projects in the box set present. My first thought was "What a deal!"; there's a sticker by Cory Archangel, film strips from Stan Brakhage, a zine from Elizabeth Peyton and 100+ other items for less than $0.10 each. I went online to learn more about them, but almost nothing could be found. So, I assigned myself the task of generating a amateur archive of sorts.
I retyped all of the text found on all of the works in the box, a process that ranged from the fairly straight-forward transcriptions of zines and posters to a more laborious practice, using a photo loop to try and identify all the small bits of text in photos, collages and paintings. I measured each work, making notes on the paper stock.
Gumsmell
In 1994, a strike in Major League Baseball resulted in the season having no World Series –an event some suggest contributed to the rapid decline of values in the baseball card market. For this series I bought the complete Topps card set from 1994 and burned all of the “Draft Pick” cards to breathe some new life into them. While not pictured here, each burned card is preserved in a hard plastic screw-down case.
Collages
Paper and tape; fun to make.
Read more144 Darwins
A copy of a copy of a copy of … Charles Darwin.
Read moreSlowly Sinking
Slowly Sinking is an investigation and series of actions inspired by Charles Darwin’s book “The Formation of Vegetable Mould Through the Action of Worms.” The project was carried out in London with my friend Vickie Hayward and included a earthworm health survey for the Earthworm Society of Britain, the burning of some sage, and a poem.
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