buffets

@buffets

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Make something heavy: Motion → Mass Memes → Monuments Media → Meaning https://www.workingtheorys.com/p/make-something-heavy

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fascinating! do you know if "liquid" desserts (e.g. pulut hitam, bubur terigu, tau suan, bubur cha cha) are something quite distinctive to southeast asia too?

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MERIDIAN MONDAYS Left: Meridian #180 in the Prismatic style by @mattdesl on @artblocks, in the collection of @gaspard Right: My photo taken at Palomani Pass (~5,200m) while trekking for five days around Ausangate (~6,300m), Peru, December 2024. [P.S. Meridian Mondays will take a pause next Monday as I'll be in a place without internet.]

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出 : Out; exit 生 : Life; live Two separate AI generations of Chinese characters from @genekogan's "A Book from the Sky" project, released via @fellowship. Taken together, they form the verb "出生" in Chinese, which means "to be born"—the act of bringing forth life into this world. Might this work represent a birth of a different sort—the birth of a scene and a novel way of seeing?

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Do nothing 🍃 📹 : On the trail from Laguna Turquesa, Tierra del Fuego Province, Argentina, March 2025.

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Think it is $4 now for the bumboat to Pulau Ubin

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I think the fundamental reason might be the demise of broadcast media, which social media played a part in. Great speeches work only in the context of broadcast (one to many), and will probably get drowned out in the current many-to-many media context, which seems to prioritise attention to short-form content and non-institutional figures.

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Solid episode—feels like a good summarised version of 113's recent spaces 👍

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Just had this bowl of ceviche made with salmon and cod from the Municipal Market in Punta Arenas, Chile. Fresh and delicious!

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Open protocols → closed networks https://howdoyoufeel.substack.com/p/open-models-closed-networks

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MERIDIAN MONDAYS Left: Meridian #178 in the Procedural style by @mattdesl on @artblocks Right: My photo of the Perito Moreno Glacier, Argentina, March 2025.

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开 : Open; start 发 : To send; to emit Both from @genekogan's "A Book from the Sky" project, recently released via @fellowship. Individually, each of these two character generations conveys a certain sense of potential. Taken together, they form the verb "开发" in Chinese, which means "to develop"—the act of turning potential into something tangible. My hope is that this work can reflect a broader development—the birth of a scene that learns to harness the latent potential of our cultural creations to create something that not only speaks to our contemporary condition, but can also stand the test of time. Glad to have these two character generations in my collection.

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MERIDIAN MONDAYS Left: Meridian #666 with the Peninsula palette by @mattdesl on @artblocks Right: My photo taken at the Valle de los Machos, Tupiza, Bolivia, January 2025.

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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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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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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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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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MERIDIAN MONDAYS Left: Meridian #72 in the Prismatic style by @mattdesl on @artblocks Right: My photo with a self-cameo at La Serranía de Hornocal, Argentina, February 2025.

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