Odd One Out - the Google Arts & Culture Experiment

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." That's one of Clark's three laws, and "Odd One Out" is proving it according to George Nimeh.

Odd One Out is an interactive game asking you to spot the AI generated image amongst four images presented to you, the other three being images of artworks created wholly by human artists.I have no background in visual art at all, but I did manage to go a few rounds without being out and scored 219. It's not easy though. Instinctively, I could spot some of the AI fakes, but they were not all obvious at all.

Of course, humans have also created the AI images. Prompts have to be written and the image chosen to be presented in the game. The software behind the image generators was created and written by humans. This makes me question where the line is drawn between human art and AI assisted art. It's blurred. And of course, this game or experiment has been created by Caroline Buttet and Emmanuel Durgoni who are both Artists in Residence at Google Arts and Culture Lab. Does that also make the experiment 'art'?

Anyway, I'm interested in what you think of it and how you score. You can find it here: https://artsandculture.google.com/experiment/odd-one-out/wAHNn4JsVTFOiw?hl=en

Art is good for you. Christmas Wrapped Up.

I was feeling pretty stressed today and it was getting me down. I always feel a creeping sense of anxiety as the New Year gets nearer and today wasn't a great day for various reasons. But I did have something to look forward to - a Zoom creative writing class. 

I haven't done any creative writing since I was at school so I was a bit nervous. I'd signed up for it on a whim but I'm glad I did. We started with a bit of freewriting and some sharing of our initial thoughts on the topic of Christmas. Hearing others read out some of their ideas really helped me shape mine. After that, we had some time to hone our poem. This is mine;

Decorations, tinsel, handmade cards

Christmas lights in the busy stores

Christmas Carols and Midnight Mass

I’m lonely in the crowd.

Everyone else with their families

Feeling the pressure to belong

Is that really the Christmas Spirit?

It’s simpler on my own

The glitz is overwhelming

Too much cash spent on nothing

Money can’t buy anyone’s love

No matter how much you have.

A Christmas wreath and Christmas lights

The Wizard of Oz, Morecambe and Wise, 

Nut roast and a mince pie

That’s my Christmas wrapped up.

It's better than I was expecting to come up with, even if it is a bit dour. Most of the group were a bit down about Christmas as it happens which I thought was interesting in itself. Anyway, Christmas will be done and dusted by the time of next month's session which is already in my diary. 

After a couple of hours doing something completely different, my mood lifted. Art is clearly good for you and I recommend you try this stuff. You never know what you might discover about yourself and others.

As a bonus, here are The Waitresses with their hit, Christmas Wrapping.

Geo-Graffiti reappears for Christmas

I do love it when people subvert technology and find a completely different use case for it. I first came across geo-graffiti back in 2005 when I attended the Freqout exhibition at the ICA. There were a selection of different exhibits created by young people who lived in and around the Ladbroke Grove Estate and engaged with the Vital Regeneration charity there. I wrote up my impressions of the evening here. My favourite exhibit that night was the geo-graffiti one.

Geo-Graffiti output from Battersea Park.
Freqout Exhibition, London 2005

"Geo-Graffiti - this was my favourite. Led by artists Jeremy Wood and programmer Hugh Pryor, kids went around with mobile GPS (global positioning systems) devices and traced their path on earth to create drawings. Back at base the 'drawings' were translated into a manageable size so that the likes of you and I can see them and make some sense of them. They started with creating simple shapes and then graduated to creating their signatures up to 400m wide at Battersea Park. Another project in this installation was to map the local area and mark the places most significant to them. In doing this, they created a map of the Churchill Gardens Estate including the best chip shop in the area. All good stuff." I've found an article here with some images of the output.

We're seeing more of this kind of thing now as mapping apps are more pervasive. And especially for the festive season, according to the Evening Standard, cyclist and Strava Artist, Anthony Hoyte, has created a giant snowman using the exercise and route sharing app, Strava. It took 10 hours to complete - that's pretty gruelling. One of the lovely things about it though is that it goes right through my local neighbourhood in South London! It's lovely to see that 12 years on, humans are making art out of whatever tools they have to hand. 

Day 24/25 Blogmas

A century of voting for women in the UK and the #BEGC campaign

The Mayor of London Sadiq Khan
announced his major new gender equality campaign
#BehindEveryGreatCity #BEGC
Photographer: Caroline Teo.

I've just been reading about London Mayor, Sadiq Khan's new campaign. To mark the centenary of the first women in the UK winning the right to vote, and to drive forward gender equality across the city of London, the Mayor has launched a year-long women's equality campaign called #BehindEveryGreatCity. You can read more about it here on Marie Claire and here on the Mayor's website.

The campaign includes a year of promoting women's art on the underground, a series of events, initiatives to tackle gender pay gap, including men in the conversation (after all, this is about equality for all and not men vs women) and in Parliament Square, the first statue of a woman will be unveiled - Suffragist leader Millicent Fawcett. If you're ever wandering around London, you will see that although there are a lot of statues in Central London, there are very few statues of women. This sounds like a great campaign and I look forward to participating in it next year. Maybe 2018 will be the year of the woman, at least in London.

It's hard to believe that both my grandmothers were born in an age where women did not have the vote. And although they got the vote as they grew up, their mothers and their grandmothers did not. It is worth noting that it was only some women who got the vote in 1918. You had to be over 30 and fulfil certain property criteria. It wasn't until ten years later in 1928, that all women over 21 got the vote and had voting equality with men. That's not very long ago.

I shall be mulling over all of this during the Christmas Holidays and thinking about how to support both the Mayor's initiative and also support the female entrepreneurs and female execs working in mobile. There will at least be some more of my meet-ups for women working in and around mobile, but with a bit of luck, I'll come up with something new. Meanwhile, if you have any ideas, feel free to share.

Day 20/25 Blogmas

Banksy is on to something

The latest Banksy via Kirsty Styles.

Tuesday Tidbits

A few links and articles that I’ve been looking at recently that you may enjoy too.

How not to be Alone by Jonathan Safran Foer in The New York Times. This is a good read looking at empathy in the digital age. Definitely food for thought.

A new tumblr site listing global app contests powered by Loudsource. They claim to be the best for app challenges, but I suspect that f6s is still more comprehensive (even if it isn’t particularly user-friendly yet).

Four reasons why some companies are late to the mobile party from Mobile Marketing Magazine’s, David Murphy. I would counter that fear of failure is the biggest reason, but that’s a discussion for another day.

Is the death of the bookshop a sign of progress? Damien Walter laments the death of the bookshop but questions as to whether this is progress or regression. What do you think?

Good new for arts and digital.. There are two upcoming initiatives that look to push the boundaries between the two sectors. One is the Art Everywhere project which has an added augmented reality element from Blippr to complement the main element of showcasing great artworks on billboards across the UK. They’re at crowd funding stage and seem to be going pretty well. The second project is Hack the Barbican where creatives of all kinds as well as coders and digital experts and amateurs are asked to come up with projects to be displayed or performed in August in the Barbican. There’s still time to submit your project (closing date 20th June 2013). I applaud the Barbican for opening its doors in this way to encourage participation and experimentation in the cross over between the two sectors. I’ll be keeping a close eye on this. It’s not their first foray into this area. The Barbican have been active in the hack space for a year or so now. Other arts organisations take note!

And finally, for those of you who love infographics, here’s one from the Harvard Business Review showing how people really use their mobile phones. You can see some of this for free, or you can pay for full access.

Museums are embracing mobile technology

Mike Short tipped me off to an interesting event coming up in September showcasing how museums like London's Tate Gallery are using mobile technology to enhance the visitor experience. (It's a one-day event "From Audiotours to the iphone" on 5th September and costs £150.)

And it got me thinking as to what museums are doing in the field of mobile marketing, advertising and media. And it seems they're up to quite a bit. And I imagine some of these things will be explored further at The Tate's forthcoming Symposium.

Across the pond, Cellit ran 'The Digital Post Office of Love', a Valentine's Day promotion, for the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art as part of its ongoing SMS marketing effort. This featured a large, interactive display where visitors could use their mobile phones to instantly post messages via sms to woo other visitors, all in the spirit of Valentine's Day.

Dan Sutch from Nesta's Futurelab has some ideas as to what mobile learning and mobile experiences could be like, particularly from a youth marketing and youth engagement perspective. The slides are interesting and should be food for thought.

Boston Museum of Fine Arts launched a mobile initiative, MFA Mobile. Through MFA Mobile, users are able to personalize a mobile device with works of art from the Museum’s extensive collection of art, ranging from a Claude Monet water lily or Edward Hopper lighthouse to an Egyptian sculpture or African mask.

However, I'm slightly more cynical about this as they were charging $1.99 for an individual image or $4.99 a month for a subscription. I suspect that you could actually take a picture with your cameraphone of *most* of the exhibits which would negate the need for the download. And not only that, if you go to the website, it's easy enough to save the images for free.

I think if I were running this service, I would look to make a donation optional but easy to do to help generate revenues. And perhaps provide the subscription package as an added value bonus to some other fundraising scheme. Maybe Boston museum-goers are happy to pay these prices?

I've been a fan of TXTual Healing for some time and they help create public performances with text messages, some of which are at museums and art galleries. Check out their blog for details of past events.

And if that's not enough, then a rifle through Textually's blog using the tag museum will come up trumps with some interesting examples of what's happening with mobiles and museums, including a lot of art exhibits.

New installation from Txtual Healing

I really like what the Txtual Healing artists do and the latest project, DripTxt is no exception. They've taken a famous (Jesus Saves) graffiti artist's tag style and made it into a font. They they ask the public to text in their message to their system, it then formats it into the graffiti artist's style and projects on to a massive wall - the latest ones being in Brooklyn, New York. They've also created a video to show more about how it works which is worth a look too.

Way back in 2003, I came up with a similar concept for a client who was putting on a Hip Hop event. No, honestly, I did! It was all about creating your own graffiti tag although we didn't plan to project on to buildings at the time. Maybe we'd have won the business if that's what we had proposed...

SMS graffiti in Rome

Paul Notzold of Txtualhealing.com is doing interesting things using SMS as graffiti. The idea is that you send in your text message to the central system and then the messages are projected on to buildings (interior or exterior) in specific shapes or formats. In the recent installation in Rome, Italy, as part of the Urban Portraits programme, the text messages appeared in speech bubbles.

Art meets mobile meets social media. Very interesting...