*Making photographs with genetically altered bacteria. That’s a truly eccentric Italian scientific scheme. https://elifesciences.org/articles/36608 Here we demonstrate that millions of bacteria, genetically modified to swim smoothly with a light controllable speed, can be arranged into complex and reconfigurable density patterns using a digital light projector. We show that a homogeneous sea of freely swimming bacteria […]

*That’s not an artwork, but it is about human vision, and it’s really quite out-there. https://sites.google.com/view/stablediffusion-with-brain/ Reconstructing visual experiences from human brain activity offers a unique way to understand how the brain represents the world, and to interpret the connection between computer vision models and our visual system. While deep generative models have recently been […]

*Are you entirely sure that you even *need* any electrical saw? There are a lot of manual tools that do take some extra physical effort, but can’t harm you for life in one instant. *If you’re sawing wood with powered devices, and then you go to the gym later, it might be that you’d be […]

*Fraulein Kampf’s remarkably punk little house on the caravan there… As Maker shelters go, you really don’t see a “house” like that every day. *It was quite the YouTube saga for her to build that. I understand her motives in building it, and I sympathize, but since it’s mostly plywood and glue, there are a […]

*Some of those are arcane to the point of unearthly.

*This essay doesn’t have much to do with constructing technology art, but there are some interesting social and artistic implications here. https://davekarpf.substack.com/p/on-technological-optimism-and-technological (…) It has been less than two years since Jack Dorsey insisted bitcoin would bring about world peace. Elon Musk routinely talks about magically transforming the world, rising above both politics and politicians. […]

*Good luck with the contemporary Internet-of-Things.

https://openai.com/blog/planning-for-agi-and-beyond/ (…) AGI has the potential to give everyone incredible new capabilities; we can imagine a world where all of us have access to help with almost any cognitive task, providing a great force multiplier for human ingenuity and creativity. On the other hand, AGI would also come with serious risk of misuse, drastic accidents, […]

The Menace of Mechanical Music John Philip Sousa Originally published in Appleton’s Magazine, Vol. 8 (1906), pp. 278-284. Sweeping across the country with the speed of a transient fashion in slang or Panama hats, political war cries or popular novels, comes now the mechanical device to sing for us a song or play for us […]