Somebody’s taken Childish Gambino’s music video This is America(original, YouTube) and used some AI face-swapper software called FaceFusion to sub in Nicolas Cage. You don’t need to watch the whole thing – just the moment at 2m40s where Cage/Gambino turns his face sideways and the face swap glitches out, back, out again and sits on Gambino for a beat, then back to Cage looks unnatural, settings in, then lights up and walks off.
The timing is perfect.
It seems to me like this is a visual trope we’re going to see more and more? It’s the paranoia and glitching in
A Scanner Darkly (2006), the visual glitch when your trust in subjective reality is shaken loose. I’m looking forward to this being a commonplace shorthand for doubt; a quick glitch in a romcom when somebody is acting out of character, say.
ANYWAY:
It reminds me that AI face swaps are not (in 2023) much good at ears.
This is the world now, logged on, plugged in, all the time.
—John Conner (from the movie, Terminator Genisys)
Less than 17 Minutes…This image includes all of the satellites captured by my camera during less than 17 minutes of shooting.
I originally planned to include all of the satellites from a 3-hour timelapse, but after painstakingly masking satellites into images for about 6 hours, I had gotten through less than 17 minutes’ worth of images.
Each image in the timelapse series was 2.5 seconds, iso 5000, f/1.4, and I was shooting with a 3 second interval. I processed 326 frames from the series, totaling 878 seconds or 16.3 minutes.
This image is supposed to be a bit shocking, if not downright terrifying. The impact of our species goes far beyond the surface of our planet or its inner atmosphere. We have filled the space surrounding our planet with an army of machines. While these machines generally serve to provide services believed to improve life on our planet, they are also constantly monitoring us. In addition, we are becoming increasingly dependent on them to maintain the world we know.
There are clear risks associated with our dependence on technology, but beyond that, we are losing our connection with our planet, our home, Earth. For most of us, we are somehow connected to the internet almost all the time. We use GPS and other satellite networks repeatedly throughout each day. At times it seems that our cell phones and other devices are part of our physical beings, an extra appendage if you will.
I wanted this image to bring on a feeling of dystopia, with the old building representing a time before now, and the vast network of satellites representing our future as dependents on technology. But I also wanted to include a glimmer of hope for a better future, symbolized by the small flowers growing in the foreground.
“The future has not been written. There is no fate but what we make for ourselves. I wish I could believe that.”
-John Conner (from the movie, Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines)
Reveil (2014—) is a collective production by streamers at listening points around the earth. Starting on the morning of Saturday 6 May in South London near the Greenwich Meridian, the broadcast will pick up feeds one by one, tracking the sunrise west from microphone to microphone, following the wave of intensified sound that loops the earth every 24 hours at first light.
Streams come from a variety of locations, at a time of day when human sounds are relatively low, even in dense urban areas. This tends to open the sound field to a more diverse ecology than usual. The Reveil broadcast makes room by largely avoiding speech and music, gravitating to places where human and non human communities meet and soundworlds overlap.
Each stream brings something different to the loop.
Reveil 10 goes back to its starting point, giving attention to live sounds of places as first light reaches them.
The Reveil broadcast will be played out at Stave Hill Ecological Park in a portable auditorium by sound artist Michael Speers and architects Public Works.
Swapping, streaming, assembling a collectively produced long radio form, REVEIL is a chance to gather tools and recipes for ecological radio, and listen together to acoustic commons in the making.
Reveil celebrates International Dawn Chorus Day, which has been celebrated annually on the first Sunday of May since the Urban Wildlife Trust organized the first such event in Moseley Bog, Birmingham, in 1984. Since then, it has become a global event, celebrated all over the planet.
The Reveil broadcast will be played out at Stave Hill Ecological Park in a portable auditorium by sound artist Michael Speers and architects Public Works.
Reveil 10 is produced in collaboration with the Locus Sonus soundmap, the Acoustic Commons network, the Cyberforest programme, BIOM Open Microphones, radio.earth, and others.
The Reveil 10 stream will be live mixed by Mixed by Fernando Godoy (Tsonami), Leah Barclay (Biosphere Soundscapes) and the Soundcamp cooperative, and it will be relayed by over 20 radio stations, including Wave Farm and Resonance FM/Extra.
Out of the ~320k new npm packages or versions that Sandworm has scanned over the past week, at least ~185k were labeled as SEO spam.
Just in the last hour as of writing this article, 1583 new e-book spam packages have been published.
All the identified spam packages are currently live on npmjs.com.
Here’s a breakdown of the main attacker profiles for the week’s worth of data we’re sampling in this article (22-29 Mar 2023)
An aperiodic monotile, sometimes called an “einstein”, is a shape that tiles the plane, but never periodically. In this paper we present the first true aperiodic monotile, a shape that forces aperiodicity through geometry alone, with no additional constraints applied via matching conditions. We prove that this shape, a polykite that we call “the hat”, must assemble into tilings based on a substitution system. The drawing above shows a patch of hats produced using a few rounds of substitution.
