Banana Art Politics, Old Earth Vibes, and AI Art Turing Tests
Also: Arcane, Factorio, and ZIRP tech hubris
This week I cover bananas and politics in art, delve into the spooky vibes of old Earth, and dive into an AI Art Turing test.
What am I up to?
🕹 Gaming - Factorio
Been seriously enjoying the meditative “automate and grow the factory” experience of Factorio. Been playing a few hours every day now for the past week. Someone compared it to just playing at software engineering (or, perhaps more better put, systems engineering), and yes, it is that.
But, instead of the code having to do something, it’s just the methodical joy of building great architecture and systems. I’ve been in a mood lately where I want to enjoy things beyond it requiring some productive output. And so, even if you’re technically “coding” by building and automating a factory, it’s not more than that: you go from mining ore by hand to launching a spaceship. A simple joy.
📚 Reading - The Circle by Dave Eggers
It’s been interesting reading books from around 2013/2014 (as Caroline Kepnes’ You was as well). It was peak ZIRP, Obama 2.0, tech giants having lavish campuses, and social media - already big at that point - was still a feeling of a place outside of real life. It was still a destination, rather than a hyperreal wrapper over reality. It was somewhere you went to. An early quote caught my eye.
TruYou changed the internet, in toto, within a year. Though some sties were resistant at first, and free-internet advocates shouted about the right to be anonymous online, the TruYou wave was tidal and crushed all meaningful opposition. It start with the commerce sites. Why would any non-porn site want anonymous users when they could know exactly who had come through the door? Overnight, all comment boards became civil, all posters held accountable. The trolls, who more or less overtaken the internet, were driven back to darkness.
If only. 😅
📺 Watching - Arcane S2 + Pachinko S2
Thoroughly enjoyed S2 of Arcane. While it wasn’t as narratively tight as S1 for me (jammed quite a lot into nine episodes), the magical mystical nature of it was amazing. Almost Scavenger Reign-esque in its weirdness. Still, an insanely watchable TV show with beautiful spectacle. I would love to see this in a cinema one day tbh.
In addition, finally getting around to Pachinko S2. I remain in awe at how well it blends stories over different eras seamlessly.
✍️ Writing - Novel #2
Made some good progress this week! Not much else to add but I’m keeping up the good work. An interesting part of writing is sometimes falling into idioms/sayings/words that don’t have universal meaning, or have lost it. This week I tried to figure if younger generations would understand the phrase “slam the phone down”, cause you know, you can’t really angrily end a smartphone call.
💾 Links
Of Bananas and Politics in Art
I always wonder to what extent the art world is a leading or lagging indicator of society. Regardless, I always find the meta discourse around the art world interesting because it feels like a unique signal on the zeitgeist if you can see through its noise. Dean Kissick feels that centering identity politics in the art world has “ruined” art and for him it doesn’t feel like the ZIRP-era avante garde.
It suggested a kind of missionary zeal in reverse: rather than crisscrossing the globe and stealing the natives’ souls with cameras, curators now bring painted images of more primitive ways of life back to the disenchanted West so that viewers might be healed by their embodied knowledge, or otherwise access a direct link to the time before the Fall, to a paradise unspoiled by Trump, populism, Silicon Valley, globalization, modernity, the Enlightenment, capitalism, colonialism, nationalism, whiteness, linear time, and the Agricultural Revolution. Our god might be dead, but there is a wish to rediscover other, older gods.
In more direct terms, he laments the current status quo of identity-centered exhibitions:
The extent to which the art world has taken up these concerns raises another question: When the world’s most influential, best-funded exhibitions are dedicated to amplifying marginalized voices, are those voices still marginalized? They speak for the cultural mainstream, backed by institutional authority. The project of centering the previously excluded has been completed; it no longer needs to be museums’ main priority and has by now been hollowed out into a trope. These voices have lost their own unique qualities. In a world with Foreigners Everywhere, differences have flattened and all forms of oppression have blended into one universal grief. We are bombarded with identities until they become meaningless. When everyone’s tossed together into the big salad of marginalization, otherness is made banal and abstract.
I don’t partake enough in the art world to have a sincere opinion. I think beyond it being identity-focused, I do enjoy this kind of art because it does feel interesting and unique to modern tastes. I do also want my art to be weird, to challenge me, and a part of that simply comes from seeing into worlds I couldn’t see. So centering past practices is valuable. It feels very touch grass. I think it’s also generally easy to be dismissive of politics when a specific politics is the status quo (for a person or people). So when times change, it *feels* politics are encroaching a space, but it’s just always been there, but not what that space deemed as “political”.
Speaking of touch grass art: the famous duct-taped banana on a wall (Maurizio Cattelan’s “Comedian”) was sold to Justin Sun (yes, that crypto guy) for $6.2 million dollars, who said that he was planning on eating the banana.
The entrepreneur, who watched the auction from Hong Kong, added that “in the coming days, I will personally eat the banana as part of this unique artistic experience, honoring its place in both art history and popular culture.”
Note: the artwork itself has instructions on how to replace the banana. Sol LeWitt homage.
The wackiest part of the story is this:
The actual Dole banana taped to the wall of Sotheby’s on Wednesday evening was bought earlier in the day from a nearby fruit stand on the Upper East Side of Manhattan for 35 cents. Running the stand was a man from Bangladesh who did not give his name and said that he was not aware that one of his bananas was selling for several thousand times its original price.
Maybe there’s a merger at hand here that might satisfy the Dean Kissick’s of the world’s. Get weird like Cattelan while centering a Bangladeshi fruit stand at the same time. But, that being said: there’s politics in the banana too. Of the overt kind as well. Justin Sun is happy Trump won, and with the rise of global anti-immigrant rhetoric, an unexciting fruit stand owned by a Bangladeshi is now part of this story. There’s a joke here about banana republics, but I’m leaving that as an exercise for the reader.
It just depends what lens you have.
Either way. The discourse remains ap-peel-ling. (sorry, not sorry).
Old Earth TikTok
I found this TikTok page that creates videos symbolising old Earth periods. Like the Silurian period where massive fungi bloomed.
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It sent me on a rabbit hole, researching old Earth periods. From what little we know, the last 4 billions of life on Earth is endlessly interesting and fascinating. It tickles a strange itch that I can’t quite describe, almost as if some of our cells is aware of this past, hidden in aeons of genetic cellular tectonic plates. It’s almost a feeling of nostalgia embedded and wired within us. I'd highly recommend a whiskey and opening up several tabs of Wikipedia of Earth’s long geological history. An evening well spent.
AI Art Turing Test
Scott Alexander ran a test as to whether people could discern AI art from human-made art.
The results are interesting. I'd say over 60% at median is still pretty decent, higher than I expected. But it's because the audience of people who want to try this test is already partly primed to try and discern it. Would love to see a wider populace guess. I got around 70-80 percent but it's only because I do tend to look at art and AI art regularly.
I shared the sentiment that a lot of AI art is inconsistent in its detail.
When real pictures have details, the details have logic to them.
But, it's probably only a current restriction of AI art. The most fun was guessing the abstract work, especially when it didn't try to blur its intentions. It will get better, but I wouldn't put serious profoundness on it. Context matters way more today already.
Which, in coming back to the point about centering identities in art. I don’t think you’re going to get away from that unless there’s an explicit movement in the future to obscure the artist from the art as a form of protest. Not even as a Banksy, but more viscerally disconnected to any one person. Art without source.
🎶 Music
Remy Bond - Don’t Go Back to Paris
While Lana del Rey comparisons are apt, I find Remy Bond personally much more enjoyable. There’s more of an indie vaporwave bent to her music, reminiscent of artists like Washed Out.
Thanks to Sophie for this one (and my fam for forwarding her recommendation).
I also went to watch Plini & Animals as Leaders this week. Great, excellent show. It was interesting to see how many people were wearing earplugs (me included). Times have changed (in a good way). Wish I wore earplugs regularly when I was in my early 20s (where I went to a show at least once a week in some years). Pretty sure my hearing is 5-10% worse than it should be as a result. Not sure if Gen Z is also doing this at concerts? It was a more millennial crowd and maybe we’re just older metalheads that already have hearing loss (😅). Curious if there’s more data on this.
That’s it for this week, friends. Hope you get to see a lovely sunset.
Simon