Fragments | Joshua D. Graber

Rules for grief

A collage with all of the greens

Collage of 1940s-era advertisement featuring a professional woman in a teal suit, with images from 90s-era Wired magazines, lots of green, and a playful five-point overview of the grief cycle.

From a 1940s Life and a '90s Wired. All of the greens!

Two collages with kandinsky and various sources

A sketch Kandinsky's "Black Triangle," a weird political cartoon, and linen from a clothing catalogue I didn't ask for

I found this Kandinsky book, Point and Line to Plane, which is all manifesto-y and full of heady ideas about art and geometry.

www.wassilykandinsky.net

Wassily Kandinsky - Point and Line to Plane, 1926

This black-and-white sketch of "Black Triangle" caught my attention.

Cutting mat with sketch of Wassily Kandinsky's "Black Triangle"

I didn't try to match the geometry or subtle color composition of the original.

commons.wikimedia.org

Category:Black Triangle - Wassily Kandinsky - Wikimedia Commons

Cut some stuff up, and wound up with this:

Collage of a humanoid sort of figure, geometric, with blues and purples offset by oranges. Columns of printed words frame the figure

I kept working with some of the Kandinsky language, and started with that for this one, which also includes stuff from and '80s Games magazine, this summer's Marine Layer catalog, and a weird political cartoon from an '80s Newsweek.

Collage in steps, featuring various image and language and framed by rainbow lines. Includes text on the immutability of the dictionary and random text from a multiple-choice quiz, as well as images of morel mushrooms and paintings of "Stalin" and "Lennon" (like, the Beatle), from a political cartoon

(The political cartoon, which is worth seeing. Why is that portrait of Lennon there? Are they trolling?)

Newsweek political cartoon with Gorbachev, Bush Sr., and paintings of Stalin (the Soviet dicator) and Lennon (the Beatle) on the wall.

Will brain mapping help me understand Kafka?

Only if you ask nicely

Fun collage from last night, from two '90s issues of Wired and a Marine Layer catalogue that no one who lives in my house requested. Under the knife it goes!

Collage with images and text relating to brain mapping and Kafka

Any sufficiently powerful substrate

In which the authors create a neural network inside of Age of Empires... A nice counterpoint to the relentless anthropomorphizing of AI.

Our goal is not to argue in favour or against the existence of these attributes, but to point out that these conclusions could be incorrect. For this we build and train a simple neural network on the videogame Age of Empires II, and note that any entity in a sufficiently-powerful substrate, such as LEGO or the Greater Boston Area, could also present such attributes.

Colonize the universe? No thanks

The oligarchy has lost its collective mind

These myopic fools will kill us all so a handful of them can either live forever or enjoy the apocalypse as entertainment.

The details of the dream don’t actually make much of a difference. Because they all take us roughly to the same place. What matters now is whether the masters of the universe – invested in harnessing the energy of the stars, tempted by a moral calculus that posits that the wellbeing of the people of the present is of inferior value to the vastly more numerous humanoids of the future – will have the patience to care for the rest of us.
The signs are not great. Silicon Valley venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, for instance, wants to “ensure the techno-capital upward spiral continues forever”. His list of enemies encompasses pretty much any person or idea that might stand against technological endeavor. That includes “sustainability”, “social responsibility” and “tech ethics”.

www.theguardian.com

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A new belief set is uniting some of the wealthiest men in the world around a ‘transhuman’ future – actual humanity be damned

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