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buffets
@buffets
Looking at the tapestries of interpolations using Chinese characters in Gene Kogan's 2015 work, "A Book from the Sky" (launched by @fellowship today for collecting), I am brought back to the many hours I spent learning Chinese as a second language when I was a kid. A significant part of this involved writing practice (习字)—copying out individual characters repeatedly until their constituent strokes and the sequences of each stroke were seared into memory. While I didn't enjoy these exercises at that time, I do credit them for making my engagement with Chinese a deeply embodied one. Writing Chinese was fundamental to me seeing and understanding it; the kinetic undergirding both the visual and the verbal. https://genekogan.com/works/a-book-from-the-sky2/
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buffets
@buffets
In this regard, Gene's choice of a dataset of 1 million images of handwritten Chinese characters to train GANs was especially resonant to me. It reflected the integral role of the human hand in drawing the nexus between the visual and verbal dimensions of the Chinese language—a process which I was thoroughly familiar with through learning Chinese as mentioned. At the same time, Gene's setup—creating a GAN to generate Chinese characters—also mirrored my gradual loss of familiarity with the Chinese written language once I left school, with digital technology almost fully displacing physical writing in my daily life now.
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buffets
@buffets
Notwithstanding this personal experience with learning Chinese, however, what I find most compelling about "A Book from the Sky" is just how it pries wide open our conception of the relationship between the visual and the verbal. To me, "A Book from the Sky" heralds a world in which meaning can be wrestled from words and images not only through examining their inherited lineages via cultural transmission, but also the mathematical lines connecting different points within a latent space established by machine learning. Where kinetic work used to embed the meanings of words and images in our minds, it can now also feed into mathematical embeddings underpinning novel forms of intelligence. With the Chinese written language as a prism, the work thus shows how AI can enable a different kind of substrate for interrogating and making meaning.
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buffets
@buffets
Indeed, as I stare at the individual interpolations I've collected from Gene's project, I cannot help but feel a certain sense of urgency: if I want to remain literate in the 21st century, I will need to learn how to "see" differently. Can I learn how to read old words in new ways? Can I learn the skills to navigate the spaces between the things we thought we knew, both big and small? Pieces from "A Book from the Sky" shown below: Left: i_oldnew - interpolating between old (老) and new (新) Right: i_largesmall - interpolating between large (大) and small (小)
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