If Jodorowsky directed TRON

 

what Image Synthesis is capable of, now and tomorrow

by René Walter

For a long time I wanted to post a list of my favorite stuff done with image synthesis, but it's a bit of a futile endeavour: The stuff posted in the subreddits is a flood of shimmering light, most of it is technically impressive and some of it is actually clever, and the top percentile of that crosssection still is way too much to filter, so i just postponed it and let the images wash over me. Maybe I’ll come back to it, maybe i’ll do it regularly, most likely i’ll incorporate the most mindblowing stuff in the usual GOOD INTERNET-issues, and rarely, i’ll devote a single issue to one amazing latent space exploration like i’m doing now.

With Midjourney v4 the jump in quality of AI creation is remarkable. Photorealistic faces combined with extremely detailed artwork while still preserving an edge of dreaminess which gives AI artworks their unique feel (besides the mutant hands of course, which even Midjourney v4 hasn’t been able to fix). The results are mindblowing. Treat yourself to the stuff happening in the Midjourney-sub or at the hashtag on the tweeties. And mind you, this is not necessarily about art. Of course these machines can create art, but that’s beside the point. You are looking into parallel universes where Charlie Chaplin played a robot in Westworld, painted in the style of Van Gogh. These things are not art, these are stochastic variations of our past, and we can create any combination of our combined knowledge.

For instance, this fantastic imagination posted to the Midjouney Group on Facebook by Johnny Darrell: If Jodorowsky directed TRON. This is amazing stuff, and your head starts spinning if you look at it. I'm jealous of my kids who one day, when they’re old, will be able to watch this movie in a CKPT-file of the future.

Even today you could generate a wonky 3D-model from these Jodorowsky/Tron-images, and make it dance with EDGE to a soundtrack by JukeboxAI. Soon, you can feed a storyboard and a script, and it spits out a movie and you may be able to sell the accompanying AI-model as new school merchandise: A mobile theme park about your movie, ready to be explored by everyone. Generative audio for these movies will be tricky, because voice and ambient sounds need to be not only in synch with movements, but some soundtrack also needs to be engaging, fun, climactic and nice to listen to. Because these details are hard, I guess this tech is still far away, maybe 10 years, maybe longer. But we’ll get there, I have no doubt about that.

For us, stuck in the past, we can only look at images from these parallel universes our grandkids will immerse in. I’m sure this technology and its sheer endless escapist possibilities will have an intense impact on our psychology and cognition and not all of them will be good. 

But damn. Look at this:

Nicole McLaughlin’s Designs Are No Joke

 

Her tongue-in-cheek approach to sustainable fashion sends a serious message: The only way to combat overconsumption is to produce less and repurpose more.

Nicole McLaughlin in her Brooklyn studio. Her designs are fashioned from repurposed materials, such as outdoor recreation gear.

Credit...

By Natalie Berry

Nicole McLaughlin, a conceptual artist focused on sustainability, loves coming up with names for her creations. A beanie made from jeans is a “jeanie.” Shoes constructed from sushi are “shoeshi.” A bra whose cups are two bagels, a “bragel.”

Though her projects may be more tongue-in-cheek than others in the world of environmentally conscious design, the message is the same: The only way to combat overconsumption is to produce less and repurpose more. Most of the clothing and fabrics discarded in the United States end up in landfills; the volume of textile waste increased by more than 800 percent from 1960 to 2015, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Ms. McLaughlin, through her designs and advocacy, wants to encourage people to repurpose the items they buy instead of throwing them out.

In addition to scavenging for materials in her home, she trawls thrift shops, resale websites and textile disposal sites for discards that can be upcycled. “When I look at material that already has shape or structure or a seam or zipper, it gives me a jumping-off point,” Ms. McLaughlin, 28, said in a video interview from her studio in Brooklyn’s Bushwick neighborhood. “There’s no rule book in upcycling. Every material is a challenge as to how I’m going to disassemble it and make a new thing out of it.”

Her studio includes a climbing wall.

Ms. McLaughlin grew up in an outdoorsy family and has been climbing since 2016.

Credit...

Credit...

Her creations have earned her recognition in the music and fashion industries. ASAP Mob and J Balvin are fans. Jhay Cortez has pulled pieces for his music videos. Pharrell Williams wrote the foreword to a 2021 book that showcases Ms. McLaughlin’s designs. She has worked with numerous brands including Puma, Calvin Klein, Prada and Hermès. Recently, Gucci commissioned her to recreate its top-handle Diana bag; she used old volleyballs, rather than new leather, for the body.

“People wanted to buy the bag, which wasn’t the goal,” Ms. McLaughlin said. Alessandro Michele, of Gucci, had asked her and five other artists to create the designs to help promote the brand’s heritage. But, she said, if repurposed volleyballs could get consumers excited, maybe luxury brands might consider other ways to incorporate recycled materials.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by @gucci

Ms. McLaughlin was raised in Verona, N.J., in an outdoorsy and creative family. Her father was a carpenter when she was growing up, and her mother is an interior designer.
She went on to study photography and digital art at East Stroudsburg University of Pennsylvania. After earning her bachelor’s degree, she began a graphic design internship at Reebok in Boston, Mass., working with the company’s logos. Eventually she was hired full time.

During her off-hours, she began experimenting with discarded shoe uppers, soles and laces, gluing, stapling and sewing them together in unexpected ways. “I wasn’t on a mission to be a sustainable designer. It was purely out of exploration,” she said. “I felt inherently guilty about working in an industry that wastes all this stuff, so I tried to use it.”

Ms. McLaughlin began posting her creations — often featuring repurposed items from big brand names — on Instagram, where her work earned a following. At Reebok, someone mentioned her designs in a pitch meeting without realizing an employee in the room had made them. Hearing her work discussed in that context gave her the confidence to leave her job in 2019, move to Brooklyn and start freelancing as an independent designer.

“I definitely think that the way I learn best is just hands-on,” Ms. McLaughlin said. “I like the challenge of teaching myself something — I’m not usually the one that opens the box and reads the instructions. I’m more the one that just tries to, you know, put it together and figure it out.”

Ms. McLaughlin said that the outdoor recreation industry has been a sustainability pinoeer. “A lot of outdoor brands are driving the conversation,” she said.

A climber since 2016, she has long been drawn to “gorpcore” materials: fragments of fleeces, off-cuts of ripstop and tangles of zippers, cords and carabiners. “Outdoor gear has a very tactile, utilitarian feel, with pockets, bright colors and carabiners where you can attach things,” she said. “My pieces may not look functional, but they are and I like surprising people with that.”

She believes that the outdoor recreation industry has pioneered sustainable practices in fashion and retail more broadly. “A lot of outdoor brands are driving the conversation,” she said. “They’re the most willing to collaborate and supply me with materials.” In 2021, she became the first design ambassador for the Canadian outdoor brand Arc’Teryx and began hosting upcycling workshops with the company’s excess materials.

Her love of the outdoors and climbing complements her creative work, she said. “The problem-solving element is definitely why I enjoy both climbing and my job,” she said. “I’m constantly using my brain to figure out how to make something work.” Sometimes the relationship between life and art is more literal: Once, when she misjudged a move while climbing and injured her arm, she fashioned a sling from a patchwork of North Face jacket swatches.

Ms. McLaughlin sells most of her creations at raffles and auctions for charities. In 2021, she raised $20,000 for the Slow Factory Foundation, which is focused on climate change and social justice. In April, a jacket she created in collaboration with eBay sold for $2,800 as part of a fund-raising capsule for the Or Foundation, another organization focused on the relationship between environmentalism and fashion.

In addition to her fund-raising efforts, Ms. McLaughlin hopes to educate individuals about sustainable design. She posts TikTok tutorials showing her construction process — such as making a tote bag crop top, or a croissant bralette — under the handle @upcycle. “I always want others to feel inspired to create things themselves,” she said. “Making the process feel more obtainable is my goal on TikTok.”

There’s a strong secondhand and D.I.Y. spirit among Gen Z, she said — something she aims to encourage. “If you buy something with a hole, you can repair it, you can hem pants,” she said. “These skill-sets help throughout your life as a consumer.”

Eventually, Ms. McLaughlin hopes to start a nonprofit connecting companies that have surplus material with budding designers. “My vision is to provide resources to young people who are entering this world of climate change and climate justice,” she said.

In May, Ms. McLaughlin decamped to Boulder, Colo., in order to have more access to nature. She’ll keep her Bushwick studio, returning occasionally for work.

“There’s something so special about New York City,” she said. “It’s an energy that can’t be replicated. I love the idea of coming back here and feeling inspired.”

‘You Don’t Become Lou Reed Overnight.’ A New Exhibition Proves It.

“Lou Reed: Caught Between the Twisted Stars” offers glimpses of a life in rock ’n’ roll — from doo-wop to “Metal Machine Music” — and tracks the evolution of one of music’s polarizing legends.

By Ben Sisario

Photographs by Erik Tanner

At a glance, it is a modest artifact: a five-inch reel of audio tape, housed in a plain cardboard box. Its wrapping bears a postmark of May 11, 1965, and the sender and addressee are the same: Lewis Reed.

But if there is a “Rosebud” in Lou Reed’s archive — a telltale totem from youth — this is it. The box, still unopened, was found in Reed’s office after his death in 2013. It was only after the New York Public Library acquired his materials four years later from Reed’s wife, the artist Laurie Anderson, that archivists finally opened it and played the tape. What they found were some of the earliest known recordings of songs that Reed wrote for the Velvet Underground, his groundbreaking 1960s band, in stripped-down, almost folky acoustic versions that may leave fans and scholars stunned.

The tape is at the center of “Lou Reed: Caught Between the Twisted Stars,” the first exhibition drawn from Reed’s archive, which will open on Thursday at the Library for the Performing Arts, at Lincoln Center.

Pages from Reed's yearbook.

A red tape box containing bootleg Velvet Underground cassettes.

The packaged postmarked May 11,1965, that Reed sent to himself, which contained some of the earliest recordings of Velvet Underground songs.

The full archive is enormous, with about 600 hours of audio, along with videos, correspondence, legal paperwork and forms of documentation that range from photos of a White House visit in 1998 to endless petty-cash receipts from life on the road in the 1970s. There are tour rehearsals, audio experiments, handwritten lyrics, stacks of Velvet Underground bootlegs and even Coney Island Mermaid Parade banners from 2010, when Reed and Anderson served as king and queen.

To Anderson’s delight, it is available for exploration by anyone with a library card, although, as she notes, the full character of Reed himself — irascible, sentimental, obsessed with sound and tech — can’t be conveyed from his scraps.

“This collection is to inspire people,” Anderson said in an interview at her TriBeCa studio, where a portrait of Reed performing in dark shades looms on a wall. “It’s not necessarily to say, ‘Here’s the real Lou Reed.’ That’s never what it was meant to be. Here’s a lot of his music and how he did it. Be inspired by it. But it’s not and can’t be a real picture of the man.”

For the show, Laurie Anderson lent some of Reed's guitars and tai chi weapons, which are not part of the library archive.

Anderson said she had originally intended to give the archive to the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, home to the papers of literary giants like James Joyce, Norman Mailer and Don DeLillo. But she changed her mind in 2015 after a law was passed in Texas allowing people to carry handguns on college campuses.

“I called them up,” she recalled. “‘This thing we’ve been talking about for a couple years? It’s off. Because of guns.’”

A few months later, Anderson read an article in The New York Times about a program at the New York Public Library to digitize archives, and began discussions there.

The exhibition, which runs until March 4, 2023, has a sampling of items from Reed’s complete archive, which takes up 112 linear feet of shelf space and has 2.5 terabytes of digital files, making it one of the library’s largest audiovisual collections. The show was curated by Don Fleming, a music producer and archivist, and Jason Stern, who worked with Reed in the last few years of his life.

A Christmas sweater Reed received as a gift that showcases the cover art from his album "Transformer".

Reed's handwritten lyrics for "Sally Can't Dance".

The box housing some of Reed's collection of 45 r.p.m. records.

Visitors will first encounter a video of Reed calmly reciting the world-gone-to-hell lyrics of “Romeo Had Juliette,” from his 1989 album “New York” (“Manhattan’s sinking like a rock, into the filthy Hudson what a shock”), establishing Reed as poet, provocateur and chronicler of Manhattan’s demimondes. Further galleries showcase Reed’s time with the Velvet Underground, his solo work and his poetry, and a listening room will feature the meditation music Reed created as a practitioner of tai chi and an immersive version of “Metal Machine Music,” his notoriously abrasive 1975 album.

The artifacts offer glimpses of a life in rock ’n’ roll. A small box houses part of Reed’s collection of 45 r.p.m. records, with some of his teenage doo-wop and R&B favorites like the 5 Willows’ “Lay Your Head on My Shoulder” and Huey (Piano) Smith’s “Don’t You Just Know It,” along with Reed’s own high school rock band, the Jades. There are boxes of Velvet Underground recording tapes and receipts for purchases as mundane as coffee and as striking as a studded dog collar that is almost certainly the one Reed wore on the cover of his 1974 live album “Rock ’n’ Roll Animal” ($13.50 from Pleasure Chest on Seventh Avenue).

Most endearing is a set of holiday greeting cards from Moe Tucker, the Velvets’ drummer, which address Reed as “Honeybun”; the ones on display are just a sampling among the many held in the archive. The collection has none from Reed, but “every Valentine’s Day he’d send Moe a card,” Stern said.

For the show, Anderson also lent some of Reed’s guitars and tai chi weapons, which are not part of the library archive.

Except for Reed’s personal Rolodex, every item in the library collection is accessible to the public. Discoveries have already been made, like a previously unknown song, “Open Invitation,” that was found on a cassette from the mid-80s — a rock ’n’ roll tune about tai chi, the martial art that became Reed’s great passion late in life.

Just last month, Fleming and Stern realized they had misdated a tape labeled “Electric Rock Symphony,” assuming it was a 1970s demo for “Metal Machine Music.” After examining the tape further, and comparing its audio to that of others in the collection, they now believe it was made in 1966, or possibly 1965, a sign of how long the “Metal Machine” technique — feedback-driven guitar drones, adapted from the composer La Monte Young — had gestated.

Reed's college diploma and dean's list award.

Holiday greeting cards from Moe Tucker, the Velvet Underground's drummer.

Reed's motorcycle helmet.

The biggest discovery so far is the May 1965 tape. Reed had shown it to friends, though its contents were unknown even to the Velvets’ most determined bootleg hunters. Featuring Reed playing acoustic guitar and harmonizing with John Cale like coffeehouse folk performers, the tape’s versions of “I’m Waiting for the Man,” “Pale Blue Eyes” and “Heroin” are miles away from the explosive sound the two young men would develop just months later with the Velvet Underground.

On Aug. 26, the specialty reissue label Light in the Attic will inaugurate a series of Lou Reed archival albums with the release of “Words & Music, May 1965,” with 11 cuts from that tape, along with other early recordings. Among those early tracks is Reed softly singing the spiritual “Michael, Row the Boat Ashore” in 1963 or 1964 with fingerpicked guitar accompaniment.

For Anderson, those tapes are a sign of the twisting path that Reed took to become an artist. “That’s a valuable thing for people to understand,” she said. “You don’t become Lou Reed overnight.”

Reed may have mailed the tape to himself as an attempt to establish copyright. But why he never opened it, and yet kept it so close to him — it was on a shelf filled with his own CDs — is a mystery.

“It’s amazing that he had this document from his very first songwriting with him the whole time,” Fleming said. “He just kept it there. He didn’t need to open it.”

An astrological chart reading for Reed.

Tapes from Reed's archive, including an interview with the former Czech president Vaclav Havel.

Receipts for stage clothes and alcohol.

The library exhibition includes a listening room where versions of “Metal Machine Music” will play, interspersed with the “Electric Rock Symphony” tape and a track from Reed’s ambient album “Hudson River Wind Meditations” (2007). “Metal Machine Music” will be heard in its original quadraphonic mix — for four speakers, rather than the two of a standard stereo recording — and listeners can experience an immersive live document from 2009 of Reed’s group Metal Machine Trio.

The story of the 2009 recording, made in the three-dimensional audio format known as ambisonic, shows Reed’s lifelong fascination with technology, as well as his mix of toughness and sensitivity.

In an interview, Raj Patel of Arup, the acoustic technology company that made the recording, recalled meeting Reed in 2008, and finding him intrigued but skeptical about the format. He eventually agreed to let Arup tape a performance in New York, with microphones placed around the venue and onstage, including just behind Reed’s head — to let listeners hear how the performance sounded from Reed’s own perspective.

A week later, Reed arrived at Arup’s studio, prepared for disappointment. After listening for about five minutes, Reed raised his hand to stop the music. Tears were welling in his eyes.

“That,” Patel recalled Reed saying, “is the best [expletive] live recording I’ve ever heard.”

A promotional banana.