Cultural Digital #215
AI, reports, publications, and more.
Hello
It feels like there are a million and one developments, applications and hot takes on AI-generated images and text out there at the moment. I find it all fascinating, but you can have too much of one thing, can’t you?
So I’d like to give my heartfelt thanks to anyone who published something different for me to include in this edition.
The Dalí’s Dream Tapestry “transforms personal dreams into individualized art pieces, then connects those with other visitors’ images to produce a one-of-a-kind ‘dream tapestry’ – uniting the inner worlds of individuals into a dynamic and evolving dream of humanity”.
It’s part of The Dalí Museum’s new The Shape of Dreams exhibition and was developed “in collaboration with Goodby Silverstein & Partners, with creative concepting by Minds Over Matter, and OpenAI – the creator of the text-to-image AI system, DALL·E, which was named in part as a nod to the iconic artist, Salvador Dalí”.
See also, The National Gallery of Art using AI to bring to life John Singer Sargent’s “La Carmencita”. In fact, AI is all the rage at the moment, so let’s look at some more things…
AI
Artificial Intelligence (AI) AOI survey results. How do illustrators feel about their work being used to train AI tools? “Respondents were overwhelmingly against to the government’s proposed exception, with 97% stating that they were opposed to their illustrations being used for artificial intelligence or machine learning purposes without their permission. Interestingly, 43% of respondents would be open to licensing their illustrations as data”.
Artists stage mass protest against AI-generated artwork on ArtStation. “members of the online community ArtStation began widely protesting AI-generated artwork by placing "No AI Art" images in their portfolios”.
Have I Been Trained? searches the image datasets used to train models like Stable Diffusion, Imagen, among many others. You can use it to opt-out of inclusion.
Over 1,000 songs with human-mimicking AI vocals have been released by Tencent Music in China. One of them has 100m streams. Although, I couldn’t spot a link to that song.
Reports
Digital Impact in Museums & Galleries Report. Art Fund and the Museums Association commissioned some research to "investigate the impact of digital on museums and galleries, through the lens of the projects they've funded over the last couple of years". As well as the report, there’s a link to a webinar discussing the findings (hosted by me).
Online visits: guide for cultural institutions. From {CORRESPONDANCES DIGITALES] et MUSEOVATION for the French Ministry of Culture. "The guide addresses a variety of visit formats, paid or not, to be considered in relation to the institution's strategic objectives. It highlights a corpus of good practices facilitating the design and promotion of an online visit".
Publications
Changing of the guard: why it’s time for the art world to take a step back from Instagram. Aimee Dawson's column in The Art Newspaper is branching out from focusing on Insta and "will now explore the full spectrum of social media and its uses in the art world".
Digicult is "one of the main international platforms investigating the impact of technologies and sciences on art, design and contemporary culture".
Other
Flickr Foundation. “Imagine if we could place ourselves 100 years from now and still have access to photos shared by millions of people on Flickr… We’re working on it”. I’m pretty darn sure there’ll be some interesting stuff to come from this.
Met Opera’s Website and Box Office Are Back, 9 Days After Cyberattack. "The attack, coming during the usually lucrative holiday period, knocked out the company’s ticketing system at a time when it would typically handle about $200,000 in sales each day".
How we tell stories online at National Museums Scotland. From Russell Dornan. "How can we harness the raging content river’s power instead of being at its mercy? And how do we produce content that matters?"
The Innovators: Avant Arte Founder Christian Luiten on How He Built an Art-Collecting Audience of Millions. “Avant Arte is a dizzying success story of the digital age. What began in 2014 as a visual blog run by two hip-hop fans on Tumblr and then Instagram has grown into one of the most influential online platforms for contemporary art today”.
Effie Frances Kapsalis's Obituary. "A passion for inclusiveness and outreach drove her work at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., where she was a longtime employee". I was sorry to hear of Effie’s passing.
Thanks for reading. Please pass this on to others if you think it’s worth it. I’ll be back with more in 2023.
See you again soon