Roman ruins at Schönbrunn. Carl Moll, 1892.
Volos harbor at night. Volanakis Κonstantinos.
The Fall of the Damned. Peter Paul Rubens, 1620.
In this AI era, I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means for humans in the loop of formerly human tasks. When AI is inserted in all layers of the stack, what’s left for us?
Sari Azout hits on something I agree with: that the intangibles are (at least for now) resistant to AI. And these areas tend to be where we humans find joy in creativity in the first place. Taste, building context, intersecting divergent ideas, a respect for the tactile, the ephemeral, the unpredictable.
First, you need to cultivate a deeper relationship with your gut. The more our world becomes measurable and quantifiable, the more we need spaces that preserve what can’t be measured—the hunches we can’t explain, the patterns we feel but can’t prove. A jazz musician knows when to break rules in ways no theory explains. A good copywriter can feel what words will land without having a single data point to prove it. Taste isn’t some mysterious gift bestowed at birth—it’s simply what happens when you pay close attention to what moves you.
Our minds are good at finding patterns in the unquantifiable.
In the latest Res Extensa, I explored how craftsmen build expertise through deep understanding of their medium. It starts with the nature and properties of their raw materials, then moves to the individual parts, assemblies of parts, and their relationships to one another.
All sorts of woodworking, done well, benefit from skillful selection of material. The furniture builder making an arch at the top of a dresser will help themselves if they find a board with grain that flows in the direction that agrees with their design. You want your material to move with you, not fight against you.
This process perfectly illustrates a fundamental truth: mastery requires rich understanding of your craft’s raw materials. The path to expertise runs through the mastery of your medium.
Nantucket Sleigh Ride. John Stobart.
A Chapel in the High Mountains. Hugo Hodiener.
The Flood. Paul Merwart, 1889.
Winged Figures of the Republic. By Oskar Hansen at Hoover Dam, 1937.
Fantasy Landscape with Buildings by a Lagoon. Francesco Guardí, 1790.
Canyon de Chelly. Edgar Alwin Payne, c. 1916.
Cotopaxi. Frederic Edwin Church, 1862.
The Colossi of Memnon in a Sandstorm. Karl Wilhelm Diefenbach, 1896.
Shah-i-Zinda Mausoleum in Samarkand. Vasily Vereshchagin, 1869.
Wrote this week about the problems with feeds, algorithmic discovery, and passively letting the machines define your taste.
We all need a return to active participation in what we consume.
Prompt: “liminal space”
Recalls the finale of Interstellar.
An incredible project from Chris Hytha, documenting the gorgeous art deco architecture scattered across the country:
The prosperity of early 20th century America resulted in a boom of skyscrapers that still tower over cities across the country today. Focusing on the character and craftsmanship on display at the top of these landmark buildings in a way that can’t be seen from street level, the Highrises Collection reveals fascinating details and stories of these distinctly American icons.
An example, the Sun Realty Building in Los Angeles:
“Stages of Evolution of Plant Species” , from the Whole Earth Catalog , Spring 1970.
Omni magazine covers.
James Niehues’s famous ski resort maps.
Dune read by Frank Herbert, vinyl records on Caedmon Records 1977 - 1982. Art by John Schoenherr & Frank Kelly Freas (‘The Banquet Scene’)
Incredible. Would love a hardcover set with these images.
Entrance to the Cuiraing, Skye. Waller Hugh Paton, 1873.
Carl Röhrig draws the immune system.
Ruins.
The Wrath of the Seas. Ivan Aivazovsky, 1886.
Andor has some of the best cinematics of anything Star Wars.
The Zones of thought from Vernor Vinge’s eponymous science fiction series.
“Village Falls Asleep”, Karunchai Treetrong.
A cyberpunk rendition of Rear Window.
Dune artwork by John Schoenherr, 1980.
Gilbert Williams, Far Vistas.
I’m no big fan of the high modernist flavor of neoclassicism, at least when made real.
But damn Étienne-Louis Boullée ’s concepts are incredible.
We had some good things goin’ in the early days of visual graphics. From Creative Computer Graphics , 1984.
I dig Noriyoshi Ohrai ’s spaceship concepts.
Cylindrical space colony. Rick Guidice.
Bao Tran Trung.
Ralph McQuarrie.
Log booms and sawmills. From Edward Burtynsky’s Anthropocene project.
Vancouver Island above, Lagos below.
The Magic City , by Russian artist Artur Skizhali-Veis.
Great book, incredible illustrations.
The Destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum. John Martin, c. 1821.
Cross-section of Hong Kong’s Kowloon Walled City.
The interior of Wrocław Cathedral , Poland. Built in 1272.
Gilbert Williams, Entrance Into the Earth.
Sleepy.
Ecco the Dolphin was such a weird (awesome) game. Created an entire aesthetic blended from science fiction, solarpunk, and SeaQuest DSV-style futurism.
I recently was getting our Silhouette vinyl cutter back out, since Colette hasn’t used it in a while. The software for the thing is still ancient and janky — hard to believe anyone uses it at all.
But I found this new tool for creating vector-based designs for any kind of cutting machine — vinyl printers, CNCs, laser cutters. It looks like an excellent general tool for creating SVGs you can import into all manner of cutting machine proprietary applications.
The community around Stable Diffusion, the open source AI project for text-to-image generation, has been buzzing. From nonexistent a year ago to thousands of contributors and forks and spinoffs. There’s even a GUI macOS app.
Lexica is a project to index and make prompts and images from Stable Diffusion searchable. Playing around with it, it’s pretty impressive. So much incredible possibility here. This tech will make the volume of content on the internet literally infinite.
Amazing work. Not a dud in the bunch.
This was a livestream from a while back with Maggie Appleton (her work referenced in this past Weekend Reading) going step by step through her illustration process.
She uses a few straightforward but useful techniques, an iPad, ProCreate, and iteration to make some really great creations.
What a cool idea for a new type of “photography”, if you could call it that.
This combines 3D photos, photogrammetry, point clouds, and Unity rendering to fly through the streets of Hanoi.
After recently finishing The Tangled Tree, I was reading about the different domains of the tree of life. Somehow I landed on this work by Ernst Haeckel. Amazing art and even more incredible that nature has produced this diversity by mixing chance and time.
