Weird Studies - Embeddings - Background Gen - Psychogeography  ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌

	Open in app or online If you upgrade to paid, you’ll have full access to these mid-month updates and my gratitude. Consider becoming a paid subscriber? You’ll help support my time off writing this up. TITAA #43.5: Torn Maps, Generated Settings Weird Studies - Embeddings - Background Gen - Psychogeography Lynn Cherny Jun 14 ∙ Preview   Share   Paris in a situationist psychogeographic map (G. Debord, 1957) (image Schmitt) A shortish one for mid-month, cuz I’ve got a lot of stuff going on. I’m buried in a bunch of new explorations because I started listening to the Weird Studies podcast, run by a couple of guys who do very erudite riffs on philosophy of art (and music), popular culture, magical thinking, Zen, and a lot of fantastical stuff. They mentioned the Situationists and their maps in one ep. as a glancing aside, so I went digging, and as with every one of their references, it was a hairball of wonder! The map above is from Situationist Guy Debord’s work on psychogeography, investigating “specific effects of the geographical environment . . . on the emotions and behavior of individuals” (source). Debord and friends say (via a great article by Karen Rourke): The practice of de-familiarization and the choice of encounters, the sense of incompleteness and ephemerality, the love of speed transposed onto the plane of the mind, together with inventiveness and forgetting are among the elements of an ethics of drifting we have already begun to test in the poverty of the cities of our time. The arrows represent the links between the different units of ambiance (source). In a directed event called the “dérive,” or drift, one would take taxis or other light transport to get between these regions of the city, so that the wanderers experienced neighborhoods as if connected by tunnels of motion. I was reminded of Harry Josephine Giles’s Flaneur project (which used to be a Twitter bot) of random directions, and the excellent Randonautica mobile app that gives you random destinations to walk to. Incidentally, someone decoded the areas of Paris from Debord’s map with Google Maps. The rest of this post is for paid members. Please join as a paid member if you haven’t, or at least drop me a note (!). Below are my experiments with the latest image editing background generation tools, latent concept decoding from image collections, a new text rendering model, some recent work on visualizing embeddings and explaining them, plus ongoing text style and agents work. Finally, an apropos poem about maps... Subscribe to Things I Think Are Awesome to read the rest. Become a paying subscriber of Things I Think Are Awesome to get access to this post and other subscriber-only content. Upgrade to paid A subscription gets you: Mid-month full post as well as end of the month, to get more news, faster! My gratitude! Great karma.   Like Comment Restack   © 2023 Lynn Cherny 548 Market Street PMB 72296, San Francisco, CA 94104 Unsubscribe