The mid-month news has a special weird & esoteric links section. Ands this time I got to write about a museum exhibition on Tarot, above the paywall. I hope you enjoy! TITAA #65.5: Motel of Crossed DestiniesWarburg Tarot & Calvino - Hopewell Geometry - 3D Cows - OLMoTrace - Fiction Context Benchmark - Weird Links
I have been on the road for 2 weeks and studying for a French exam for visa reasons, so this may be briefer than usual! (Update: maybe it isn’t.) Good thing it’s the weirdness issue, though. TOC:
The Tarot Exhibit at the Warburg InstituteI met up with friends to visit the Warburg Institute’s exhibit on Tarot cards a week ago. I’ve linked to the press about it in a few past issues (e.g., Guardian). Aby Warburg collected books on magic and the occult, and began collecting Tarot decks in 1902 as well. Warburg’s strange Image Atlas project contained a large section on Tarot art. The current exhibit features many beautiful and important classic works (including Pamela Colman Smith, Austin Osman Spare, Jean-Baptiste Alliette or “Etteilla,” Frieda Harris and Aleister Crowley…); as well as some historical mysteries, like how these cards from decks dated between the 15th and 18th centuries ended up in the sewers and water tanks of Milan’s Castle Forza:
Several very old decks were on display— on the right, a Tarot de Marseille deck (Nicolas Conver, c. 1860) and on the left, a rare Baroque style deck from Bologna, Tarocco Bolognese, by Mitelli (1634-1718), c. 1660, of which more below:
Frieda Harris’s paintings for Aleister Crowley’s Thoth Tarot are at the Warburg and were on display. Wow, they are bright!
The Tarot work of Austin Spare was also on display—evidently Crowley rejected Spare from his magical organization in 1912 because: “An artist. Can’t understand organization or would have passed.” I’m into how these cards connect across the seams:
Suzanne Treister’s modern HEXEN 2 deck was also featured. Her decks (there is now a 5, in 2025) are techno-futurist and hopeful, combining history and science fiction in text-dense designs. From her site: “real histories are reconfigured stylistically into alchemical art forms in order to open up alternative ways of working with and thinking about the subjects.”
The section on Italo Calvino and his book The Castle of Crossed Destinies was particularly interesting to me as a fan of games and procedural narratives. He wrote to Frances Yates at the Warburg (yes, THAT one, Art of Memory etc), calling his novel an “iconology fiction.” In the book, travelers who pass through an enchanted wood can no longer communicate, except by using Tarot cards. From a display note at the exhibit:
A spread from a copy of the book on display:
Intriguing to me — as one who works with museum imagery and semantic search! — the Warburg’s panel noting:
The artworks for the Hermit (left) are “Photographs of Antonello da Messina, Saint Jerome in his Study, c. 1474; Albrecht Dürer, Saint Jerome in His Study, 1514” and for the Knight, “Raphael Sanzio, Saint George and the Dragon, c. 1506; Vittore Carpaccio, St. George and the Dragon, 1516.” Technically, one could recreate Calvino’s idea by using a multimodal semantic search on aspects of a tarot card or spread, with museum artifacts as the search targets. It would be extremely easy to do this today, with a well-digitised, captioned, and indexed collection of assets. Finally — most hilarious: “Calvino had planned to write a third group of stories titled 'The Motel of Crossed Destinies' prompted by popular comic strips rather than tarot cards. The project was never realised.” This Must Be Done. I recommend calling it The Oceanview Motel. Preview for the sections below the paywall (please join us!): some important video model tool releases, monkeys writing Shakespeare, cows watching a video in a 3d world, a strange geometric archaeology site in Ohio, a long context fiction benchmark I didn’t know about, asking Claude what it wants to discuss, a model to train on dolphin squeaks and cow ear twitches, John Carmack on AI and games, a photography game that looks gorgeous, a good writeup of using AI tools to make a point-and-click visual CYOA game, some new multimodal embedding models, OLMoTrace to see how your output is biased by input text, and much more!... Subscribe to Things I Think Are Awesome to unlock the rest.Become a paying subscriber of Things I Think Are Awesome to get access to this post and other subscriber-only content. A subscription gets you:
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среда, 16 апреля 2025 г.
TITAA #65.5: Motel of Crossed Destinies
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