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Recently while catching up with a good friend of mine from university, he told me about his latest “art-related” purchase, an NFT called “eternal beings.” For those who don’t know much about the eternal beings project it is a collaborative project of a famous rapper called Lil Uzi Vert which features the design of 11,000 different but quite similar characters. Essentially how it works is the day the NFTs were released, users could pay with cryptocurrency to acquire 1 of 11000 eternal beings characters, and an AI would randomly generate some of the features making them all unique. Things from background color, to character color, to hairstyle all determined the value of the NFT based on rarity and just “hype”/preference. What I found particularly interesting was that my friend showed me a couple of the “coolest” eternal beings characters and talked about how well designed they were. 

This brought me to the line of thought of how AI generated art may start to become a new field of interest. After a little bit of research I discovered the AI generated portrait sold at Christie’s art show for 432500$ at Christie’s art show, and the many other applications of software to generate art, whether fully automated or with slight interference from a programmer.

This brought back memories of a discussion I had in my “theory of knowledge” class back in high school, a discussion about what constitutes art. I would like to begin by distinguishing the use of software and AI to generate art as if as a paintbrush, to the fading line of human interaction that comes from self-learing or pattern recognition technology. 

As I think back to that class in highschool I recall our discussion about intention and human purpose in definitions of art. Even if you look at the google-provided definition of art it features that same premise. But I do believe as technology becomes more apt, the line of human intention in generating artistic pieces through AI becomes slowly blurred, providing for an interesting discussion of what we still classify as art. 

I personally find it weirdly unsettling looking at that picture from Christie’s art gallery of the AI generated art piece knowing that the creator of the art-piece had no direct intention for the outcome, yet created something that is in many ways artistically provocative. I don’t have any interesting conclusion but instead just enjoy provoking introspection on how technology rewrites definitions and phenomena around us in so many ways. 

Citations:

Ziv Epstein, Sydney Levine, David G. Rand, Iyad Rahwan, Who Gets Credit for AI-Generated Art?, Science, Volume 23, Issue 9, 2020, 101515, ISSN 2589-0042, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.isci.2020.101515.

Kazinka, K. (2018). AI-Generated Portrait Sells for $432,500 in an Auction First. Bloomberg.com. Retrieved October 7, 2021, from https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-10-25/ai-generated-portrait-is-sold-for-432-500-in-an-auction-first.

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Shifting home studios

As an avid music fan I decided to approach this blog post as an opportunity to shed some insight and light on how technology and information is changing the niche world of music production and sound design. 

The Digitization of Assets;

One very interesting alleys of progress in the world of music production is what I like to refer to as the digitization of assets. For the longest time when you think of what a music producer is doing, you think of large studios with a bunch of guitars, synthesizers, amplifiers, mics, etc. This however is no longer a necessity at all, recent technological solutions have found ways to completely recreate the analogue sound of real music equipment on digitized platforms (source). VST technology, and virtual modular soundboards represent the death of the necessity for owning many belongings that were once essential. Although an obvious point, why I find this particularly interesting, is that this shift represents an interesting step for humanity that we often don’t stop to reflect on. Tech solutions represent a large decrease in the immediate need for tangible assets as our phones replace our calculators, our laptops replace our pianos and studios, our kindles replace the books in our librarys and of course our NFTs replace our art.

Blockchain technology represents a big new step where the premise of “owning” something can now be moved from the physical environment to the virtual one (source). I know a lot of the blog posts on this page so far have been quite fact based, but I tend to be quite speculative and enjoy reflecting on what these changes mean for us as humans. “Reality” in the conventional sense will begin to slowly lose its fruits as our new definition of reality not only represents what we have in front of us tangibly, but also the virtual aspect of who we are and what we own. This may be the first big step to a new form of evolution where man is not only a tangible part of the environment, but as we tread into the creation of a new environment. 

Call me a romantic but this is a phase in technology that intimidates me as I’ve always found a lot of pleasure and intrigue in a more grounded form of human experience. That being said it completely fascinates me to study and examine these changes and how they impact and manifest themselves in the real world. For the longest time artists would show pictures of their studio setups but now they can just post screenshots of their laptop’s programs. People used to hang paintings on their walls, but now instead can show screenshots of the NFT they acquired. And finally people used to dance and smile at parties, but now they smile while taking pictures to upload online and proceed to dully sit down while they post them.

P.S. This blog post is intentionally a bit dramaticized hopefully to encourage some interesting conversation and comments. Looking forward to reading and responding to some thoughts.