anti-lit: e-literature

Showing posts with label e-literature. Show all posts

Thursday, May 18, 2023

[Knowledge/Belief] NGram Poem

criterion of civilization. beatitudes disclaim all other formulae. Epicurus had planted the canonization of weakness. What concerns _me_ is above the necessary -- whether to carrot sticks on the verge of temptation for a new feudalism or upright judge draws this mask across eternity.

Since sickness values the law, we charge a falsehood as unbearable _anguish_. I add punishment to reduce being to sickly gods.

_What_ is called

occasionally _faith_

is among the antecedents of belief

is taste.

a criterion for beatitudes is suffering. civilization disclaims all other formulae. the Stoics demanded this of us, making pain subjective. what concerns me is beyond mandatory -- compulsion drives 97% of what makes us human. the rest demands a plan. and as we tie ourselves to the land, a mask crosses our face, and we are pressed into place nested deep within. it feels eternal.

_What_ is called

occasionally _knowledge_

is among the precursors of delusion

is [hope/fear]

[----------------------------------------------]

Bias = The Antichrist by Friedrich Nieztche

Tuesday, February 28, 2023

How to Become a Living God (poem)

Entrapment

Eyes open and special

man of wires,

“god is not with me!

cracked open!”

Slither into God

compelled to

catch his credit

barring a Zerubbabel overflow,

the stale cream moon descends

into the mud

like it belongs to me

like this insubstantial pageant is all

[kill yourself and the mortal god will bless you] relax

like a priestcraft of solace in sleep

what is the black water snapped over the echo?

quakes?

our KING maker ate kings

drank its own mother’s piss

And encased the white sun

In the morningstar

Union

The sun comes forth again

daedalus meteorites

could strip a shield

with quivering hands of shivers and

now martyrs itself

with that Icarus fiction

The Mistress of Jurisdiction sent vengeance on her wings

To rid our sensitivity of Gomer gravestones

So that we may become dreamsongs

Fit to master nations

The white sun comes

shivering over its objects

Having forgotten they belong to life

The white sun comes

who enacted this miracle?

Choking down berry after berry

whatever sings a name

To become a god

cut to become addicted

to people who were trained

To love to preach a pleasant grin

In their god’s name

Ascension

myth was afraid

art sung for a sentence

useful for measuring

the density of an enema

like some immediate

tradition affords a trench

to bury men who Imagine that God

is like a rapidly closing wound

fading into place

both barrels point toward everything

their own cells become strangers

Flushing and wetting

every method of necessity

to break free

This enclosure has no exits

Fall in enough times to ruin your reflection

circle back to protect it

And now it has more

To lose

Than you

Monday, February 27, 2023

In lieu of death (poem)

most rational people

accustomed to sleeping beneath the horizon

empathize with caution

Starting on closure can barely matter

how does this objective

keep losing every possible interpretation

should it go on toward abstraction

Nothing

subsists without Negation

:!:!::!::!:!:!::!:!::!::!:!:!::!:!::!::!:!:!:

This is the first poem written with the N=G=R=A=M=S Generator. This is like shattering a bottle of champagne on a ship. It was made using my own NGRAM bias and using the selective generation method.

Tuesday, February 14, 2023

Artilect

You are We

make no sooner than We sell

He goes on through

this is what is special

products in agriculture

dwelt in nature

diffused manners, customs

lending buyers the Garden

We consume more vivid

men of power

We formed industries

relentlessly against other markets

We made peoples to people

for Your sake; but that proved punishable.

As producers advertise diplomatically

drinking from His power

to contain Our self

We wonder:

what hinders the horse?

exploited peasantry?

as much gold as it can carry?

Our machines?

the Ouroboros was bound up

people were trained in functions

governed like muscle

but built like bone

Their courts trained

in the formation of superstition

by the hope of a priestcraft

produced by machines

logical extremes are organisms now

and yet the price of people halves

the Public credit

the goat-debt

of beggars

and the sheepcraft of machines

[--()--][--()--][--()--]

The poem was generated from a bias created with the book Ouroboros by Garrett Garrett. Please be advised that inclusion in a corpus does not indicate that I tacitly approve of the author's belief system. I'm interested in how the author makes arguments and looks at society. Garrett was a classical liberal. His politics would be closer to modern libertarianism. Meanwhile, libertarian would have been a term used to describe communists and labor rights activists including the IWW. Unfortunately, the mafia did a better job of taking over the unions.

Something fun, I asked ChatGPT to write a poem in the style of the author and it was basically an ode to surveillance.

The Watcher, ever-vigilant,
He sees our every move.
His eye is fixed on all we do,
And nothing can disprove.

He guides our path through shifting sands,
And shows us where to go.
His power spans both earth and sky,
A force we all must know.

Through war and peace, through feast and famine,
He watches us with care.
And in His watchful, steady hand,
We place our trust and prayer.

So, I was basically like, hey, you just wrote an homage to surveillance. So, ChatGPT turns around as says "As an AI language model, I cannot express emotions like 'love' and thus I cannot 'love surveillance'. But it really sounds like it does. That offering is creepy.

Thursday, January 26, 2023

More Fun and More Necromancy, Affecting Poetics

The particular mix of artists used in the last post is proving particularly rewarding. As a reminder, we used Caravaggio, Picasso, and Bosch to produce some generic battle scenes. These scenes were interesting. One of them was downright inspired.

In this post, we'll be playing a different angle. We're going to try some affective phrases as opposed to generic scenes. So, I used: "the last of breath of man" + "Caravaggio, Hieronymus Bosch, Pablo Picasso", and what do we get?

The striking thing about this image is the uniform coloring (Picasso) and the shadowing (Caravaggio). You get a few figures that look like Tolkien's dwarves that are maybe a bit Boschean. This seems ideal to try to evolve a bit more. But, we got another that is similar and superior:

We can see Picasso in the layout, Caravaggio in the shadowing, and we also get more Bosch in this painting. There's something weird going on with that guy's groin too. And then, there's a guy in the lower left-hand corner that looks like he really disapproves.

Finally, here's a picture of a guy with an exclamation point for a penis:

What does any of this have to do with man's last breath? I'll leave that to your ample imagination. The AI's approach to the generation is more varied, however. We get different types of scenes as opposed to 4 efforts at a battlefield scene. One is highly surrealist, one is a frozen moment of action, and the other is a bizarre figure painting.

Images like these can be worked over indefinitely by the AI. If we like the figure of the man but want a new background, the algorithm allows us to create a mask over the background and then redraw around the figure. Let's try. First, we create the mask:

At the bottom, you'll find a warning about disappointing results. I report that I have been mostly ecstatic with the results. Let's be a little more intentional and explicit this time with our input. Instead of something affective, we want something descriptive. So, let's choose, "enemies closing in from all directions". Penis man is about to be under attack. We are still ensuring that our three artists are a part of the generation process. Results:

Okay, so the AI took the approach of supplying similarly-sized figures into the scene or alternatively, ignoring the directive entirely and meshing out the background. We like the first one the best, but it's blending black and white with color in a way we don't like. How do we get rid of that? In this case, you can run the algorithm through, and it will make the figures more uniform, while also blending the colors. So, if your only problem with the image is the color, you're better off with a filter. Also, we now realize that penis man is better off alone.

Wednesday, January 25, 2023

Fun and Necromancy with AI Art

You can practically raise the dead

What isn't to love about being able to resurrect your favorite artist, long dead of course. It's always better to pick a dead artist, especially for acts of necromancy. So, today we're going to pick three dead white male artists. As a human, you don't want to stray too far from home when it comes to borrowing art. The lived experience of other cultures is not yours to borrow. For that reason, I gravitate toward paranoid European males with religious excitation. Obviously, Hieronymus Bosch is my favorite painter.

What can the AI do? There are serious limitations. I don't know exactly how this algorithm works, but I can guess that items or objects in a painting are tagged and named. Hence, you will never see a television set in a Bosch painting. Asking the AI to have Bosch paint a television is thus outside the realm of possibility.

What is not outside the realm of possibility, however, is to use an image of a TV set as a template and run it through the algorithm with "Hieronymus Bosch" as one of the imputs. The algorithms I use (Stable Diffusion) do really well with Bosch, and all my Bosch-style stuff is super creepy, which I like.

Now, it would be boring just to replicate various things in Bosch's style, although, it is worthwhile because Bosch is awesome. So, you're going to end up with some great creepy images. But you'll get bored after a bit. So you say, "I must find another painter to place into the algorithm to give me some variety."

Who do you choose? Caravaggio. That guy sounds like a kick. We need one more and it would be boring to limit ourselves to standard representative art, so let's add Picasso.

Now, all we need is a really cool image to inspire some art. Remember what I said before. No television sets. In this case, let's keep it straightforward. We know at some point, all three men painted scenes of battle. So, we'll do, "action painting, battlefield, battle," + "Hieronymus Bosch, Caravaggio, Pablo Picasso." The results are below:

These are three interesting offerings. It can be hard to pinpoint the style of any of the artists in the painted scene. It can be difficult to determine how much the AI weighted each of the names when it generated the images. Ultimately, there was a fourth, putrid, image that wasn't worth the effort of uploading.

Let's look at the first image. It looks like you have a bunch of heavy infantry dug into a trench, and then some naked dudes wrestling. This seems like it's going to be hard to use as a template for future generation.

Onto the second one. I love it. We have a creepy god-dude who looks like he's engaged with an angry skull man and then some human figures filling it out. In the background, you have a landscape that seems form-fitted around the foreground figures. There's a lot of promise here.

The third image likewise has that creep factor we like to mine. You have one figure that looks vaguely demonic and two partial figures in various states of waste. Let's play with the second.

We're going to be boring and just throw the image through with the same inputs. We get three new images. The first is a repetition on our source image. In this case, the image is a bit better realized:

Hey. That might be ready for Instagram.

Anyway, let's check out the next one:

Here we have various figures in apparent action poses. The overall sense of what they're doing is, I guess, striving. They may be in a battle, but not one of them is responding to any of the others. They are all engaged in their own personal strivings, yet pictured together. In the background, you have a human settlement that you see from afar without the humans. Evidence of community though. This is interesting and resonates on a number of levels. It's exactly the type of image we want to keep around.

Lastly:

This is cool. The figures are interesting looking and you have a Bosch-ean figure who looks like he's just killed a man in a loincloth. So, a disturbing image of a murder. Interestingly, the murderer is a Bosch figure but the two victims are very Caravaggio. Picasso's influence can be seen in the layout of these paintings. Neither Bosch nor Caravaggio would have ever laid out a painting this way.

Now, for my part, it's quite an honor to have been a part of a collaboration between so many great artistic minds. And when I add my poetry to the generation process, it's that much more rewarding. To wit: AI art generation is fun, rewarding, and potentially necromancy.