Earlier today, I wrote about AI and photography based on an interesting panel conversation at Fotografiens Hus in Oslo. During the Q&A session, a musician in the audience said that he felt that the AI systems he had tried behaved so properly and asked if an AI can be “drunk” and whether we could “pour some alcohol into the machine” to make it a little freer and less “stiff” in its creative output. That is a very interesting question, hence this little reflection. ...
Today, I took part in an interesting panel conversation at Fotografiens Hus in Oslo in connection with the exhibition What We Call Real by Camila Urrego. This was the first time they had invited a photographer to exhibit works explicitly made “with AI,” and I was invited to contribute thoughts on the potential of AI for creative practice (in this case, photography). As MishMash picks up speed, I receive many requests for talks and panels on AI and creativity, and I try to say yes when I can make it. I have found this to be an excellent way to think about various AI use cases outside my core focus areas and to meet interesting people. Here are some thoughts based on my preparatory notes and reflections after the event. ...
Earlier today, I attended a lecture by Antonio Somaini at the University of Oslo’s seminar series on aesthetics. There were many interesting things in the lecture, which apparently was based on the manuscript of a forthcoming article. Here, I will focus on one thing that caused my interest: the thinking of latent spaces as an “anarchive”. Latent spaces A latent space is a mathematical representation used in machine learning where complex data (like images, text, or sound) is mapped into a lower-dimensional coordinate system so that similar items are positioned closer together. Instead of storing explicit labels or complete files, models encode underlying features and relationships, enabling interpolation, clustering, and the generation of new outputs by moving through that space. ...
Back in 2012, I published what has become my (by far) most-read blog post: Disciplinarities: intra, cross, multi, inter, trans. There, I introduced a figure based on a combination of Stember’s textual description and Zeigler’s sketch. Making a vector version I published the figure “properly” in my book Sound Actions, and, as described in this blog post), made a vector version (PDF) and source file (ODG) available on GitHub with a CC-BY license. Making a SVG version Recently, I have tried using AI tools to create SVG versions of various illustrations. This has worked remarkably well, including “SVG’ing” the MishMash emblem and the MishMash Cube. One of the cool things about this is that it opens for creative things, like making the MishMash bubbles blink. ...
I am at the Movement Computing Conference (MOCO) in Montpellier and have been discussing motion capture and analysis all day. Someone asked about my work on video visualisation, and this reminded me about a long wish for creating a browser-based visualiser. I have been developing video visualisation tools for more than two decades. In the beginning, I did it with Max/MSP/Jitter, then moved on to Matlab, and later Python. Until recently, web technologies were not advanced enough, and hardware was not powerful enough to do anything in the browser in real time. And, I didn’t have the programming skills to make it work. Now, with the help of CoPilot, I have finally made it happen: VideoViz is here! ...
After concluding that it is not viable to use institutional person pages to build a “Who’s Who” directory for MishMash, I yesterday found that NVA can be a good solution. However, it would only cover affiliated (Norwegian) researchers, which may be too restrictive for MishMash, where we also want to list non-academic, non-affiliated, and international researchers. Then, ORCID may be a better solution. This is an international registry where researchers can register themselves (check my ORCID profile). However, what information is available there and how can it be retrieved? ...
I have seen that it is possible to build a complete CV from NVA data, the Norwegian research registry. As part of my quest to collect data of researchers connected to MishMash, I am looking for the best data source(s). Starting with a quick check of my own personal page at UiO, showed that institutional person pages are not the right solution. But what about NVA? Perhaps that is a viable solution? ...
The Open Graph standard has helped “automagically” collect information about partner events on MishMash.no. Now, we have started building a “who’s who” directory, and I have begun looking into how we can pre-populate pages from existing academic identity sources rather than asking everyone to fill out web forms. My first inclination was to look at what is available on institutional websites. Most researchers have at least one institutional personal website. In this blog post, I look at what can be retrieved from my UiO page. ...
I have previously explored how NotebookLM can generate ERC-style CVs based on publicly available research information. Now, I was curious to see whether it could also make a complete CV following the guidelines of the Norwegian Career Assessment Matrix (NOR-CAM). The NOR-CAM principles Creating a CV that follows the NOR-CAM principles is less about listing dates and more about telling the story of an academic career through a balance of quantitative data and qualitative reflection. If you are interested in learning more about NOR-CAM, have a look at the full report. Here is a 4-minute video introduction to the system: ...
We are currently working on developing the MishMash webpages. Since I don’t like adding and editing the same information in multiple places, I have been interested in whether the MishMash pages can (as far as possible) “automagically” collect information from other locations. When setting up our partner events pages, I realised that it was possible to collect most of the useful information (title, location, date, image) from the metadata of the pages already hosted on other websites. This makes it much easier to add partner events than if we had to set up our own pages on MishMash.no, which would also duplicate much content. The standard making this happen is called Open Graph. Since I didn’t know about this before I began my little adventure, here is a short overview. ...