End of the month issue is free, but if you enjoy this and upgrade to paid, it would mean a lot to me. Paid subs get the option of the longer media recs (books, tv, games) separately, so it’s easier to save them. And you can read the mid-month news section that has the added section on weird & esoteric. Right now you’re only seeing 2 weeks of interesting projects and tool news! TITAA #54: I Hope This Finds You On A Latent IslandBrowsing Latents - Narrative Tips - Morph Animation - Procgen & Animated Text
I finally read Christopher Priest’s The Islanders, a fictional almanac and travel guide to the Dream Archipelago. In alphabetical order by the official and patois names of the islands, we find loosely connected stories about island artists and historical events. We visit haunted towers and time shifting winds, meet a construction artist named Yo who drills tunnels that sing in the weather, while another artist named Oy fills in landscape holes (yes they meet); read rumors about a philandering peripatetic painter who ruins lives; get several takes on the murder of a famous mime in a haunted theater; encounter twins and body doubles, confused aerial drones, military bases that are off the map, mystical sightings of long-dead activists; and we learn the many names and properties of winds. There are certainly flavors of Borges and Lem and Calvino in here.
Very early on there is some debate over the identity of an island with many names and possible locations, but it appears “to be real, or at least really there.” This is the flavor of it all! The book reminded of the work of JR Carpenter, one of my favorite text artists— especially some of her pieces on old travel texts, islands, and wind. From “And By Islands, I Mean Paragraphs”:
Another procgen (“procedural generation”) travel guide is the lovely Annals of the Parrigues, by Emily Short; and less poetically, there’s my own AI & procgen coauthored travel stories generated with data from Google reviews (written about here). Obviously there are lots of other fictional travelogues, the most famous being Gulliver’s Travels. In Public Domain Review, I also found Jean de Bosschère’s Weird Islands (1921) which has fantastic images. And chapter headers: “HOW THE SILENT ONES LIVE. A BIRD SINGS IN THE SKY. THEY ARE FED BY THE GALIPODES. STORKS BRING THEM FRESH WATER. THE YOUNG SILENT ONES CATCH FLIES. THE TRULY WONDERFUL PEACOCK. PUNISHMENT OF VARIOUS FAULTS.”
Coincidentally, a few days ago there was a good Austin Kleon post about “books with unusual but brilliant structures” that has great references linked in it, including one of my favorite challenging narrative books, "Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative” by Jane Alison. Obviously The Islanders fits in the list of examples. Onto the AI/tech arty news! Table of Contents (links on the web site):
AI Art Tool StuffLatent Explorers and AnimationCoincidentally, a bunch of folks are working on cool tools for browsing and/or animating latent directions in image generation. Some with prompts, some without — e.g. Ryn Murdock’s generative recsys experiment I posted about mid-month. He has extended it to animation in Blue Tiger — same UI, you like or dislike a mini video and it steers towards a new one. It takes a while to produce though and the videos aren’t always excellent, but I got some fun things, promptless:
I also played with Joel Simon’s LatentScape multi-user gallery tool for exploring related images from Art Breeder. It’s cute and fun if a bit obscure in some of the UI.
This guy Dan Wood on Twitter is doing fab clips of real-time latent video transformations. Here’s is an extracted gif of his art gallery that turns into a gallery for cats on mars.
Cog Video Morpher (demo on Replicate from fofr) is pretty cool. It requires a bunch of input images and interpolates between them very nicely. I made this pretty quickly with it! (It’s big high quality output, I scaled down and crappified it for size.)
Video/animation artist recs: Purz’s video gen animation work is very cool. Demonflyingfox keeps posting great tv show credit reworks. I love Anosha’s animated oil painting generations, here’s a single frame. Video gen articles and tutorials:
3D"Taming Stable Diffusion for Text to 360° Panorama Image Generation" — with code/model. Panfusion:
Adobe Project Neo is out in beta in Labs, for 3D object design, and people are saying it’s fun. The UI is nice at first look - you still should know some basics about editing 3D objects, thought. The other Labs apps include Project Blink, for AI-powered video editing, and a number of other interesting AI tools like object select-and-remove. BlenderAlchemy (from Stanford): An AI Blender plugin/code is coming that will help you do various “simple but time consuming tasks” with Blender, which, hallelujah. Bring on the AI help. Interactive 3D project: Edit your 3d models after generation. Edit the splat, then it gets turned into a nerf model. Very cool. Code coming.
“Going into iconic movie scenes using gaussian splats” — reddit video. (h/t Ethan Mollick.) Using clips from movies to construct a 3D splat and then cruising around in it. Ideal use of found footage! Fonts and SVG AnimationAniClipArt - animating clip art. So good. So little code (none yet).
Dynamic Typography! With code. I love it.
Misc Creativity & ProcgenA podcast interview about the web_sim Claude simulation stuff I’ve been covering in my mid-month weird section. AI audio:
Neurips call for Creative AI track submissions this year. On the theme of ambiguity. Updated epic Nature of Code by Dan Shiffman. A fractal book exploration from philogb, Indra’s Pearl.
Letterfall, a pretty three.js experiment on Codepen. Sadly the text substrate doesn’t seem to say anything content-wise.
⭐️ “I Hope This Email Finds You” mastodon bot by waldoj that uses Google books searches to complete the line. My new favorite idea. There is code. “I hope this email finds you even lingering around the premises, the contract is voided. (link)” Games, Agents & Narrative NewsEquinox — a web-based interactive threejs/Blender/Houdini narrative space game from LittleStudio. Case study writeup. (h/t Bob Rudis)
Lantern — a d3 explorer of Zork that constructs a node-link diagram from the game, you can browse the map by clicking on a room node. (Code and explanation; via hrbrmstr’s excellent tech newsletter.) PlayCanvas (code) — a “web first” webgl enabled game engine tool, which also now supports 3D gaussian splats. I can’t remember if I’ve posted it before, but it continues to be updated and cool. A cute builder that references Townscaper, Summerhouse. Oh, I see I own it, but have to play it still!
“I Built an LLM Bot in 3 hours to Conquer Slay the Spire” - PR post for AWS but still pretty interesting! GDC Vault - AI Summit: 'Age of Empires IV': Machine Learning Trials and Tribulations — use of ML algorithms, 2 years old but now viewable generally, interesting in any case. (H/t Julian Togelius.) Flow-Field Pathfinding notes from RedBlobGames. For pathfinding agents in, say, dungeons.
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