Human In The Loop

Today's song goes back to the lockdown in 2020. The feel is darkly cinematic and "Hopperesque", and I was musing on how the moment would inform film-making. At the time, Hopper paintings were popular because of their lonely vibe. It's also self-referential in the sense that the process of abstraction of text is kind of an "exhaust" or by-product of existing material as Remix.

4/19/2020

All film-watching is now nostalgic because it is the way the world was. Social-distancing in any films that are theatrical in nature can't exist as before, evincing the over-the-shoulder shot, with characters in a blurred pull-focus, large wide-angle shots with just a few people in the distance, or the "0-Shot" (essentially landscapes), or all bleakly-staged like a Gregory Crewdson or Jeff Wall shot—and of course the great-grandfather of the vacuity of urban and suburban landscapes, Edward Hopper...We are in a great moment for film-making, image-making, or even sound and music-making, because it gives us new constraints, new metaphors to live and create by—pregnant with the revival of the humanities. For those people already predestined for art-making, this is a good time to get into making pictures.

4/19/2022

In terms of the appreciation of art, technology hasn't changed my mind about what I've always valued. It's interesting to see what randomized processes can do but the human isn't in the loop to any large degree. What's more interesting is to use the "exhaust" from neural nets and use it as raw material.