TITAA #54: I Hope This Finds You On A Latent Island
Browsing Latents - Narrative Tips - Morph Animation - Procgen & Animated Text
I finally read Christopher Priest’s The Islanders, a fictional almanac and travel guide to the Dream Archipelago. In alphabetical order by the official and patois names of the islands, we find loosely connected stories about island artists and historical events. We visit haunted towers and time shifting winds, meet a construction artist named Yo who drills tunnels that sing in the weather, while another artist named Oy fills in landscape holes (yes they meet); read rumors about a philandering peripatetic painter who ruins lives; get several takes on the murder of a famous mime in a haunted theater; encounter twins and body doubles, confused aerial drones, military bases that are off the map, mystical sightings of long-dead activists; and we learn the many names and properties of winds. There are certainly flavors of Borges and Lem and Calvino in here.
“Islands gave an underlying feeling of circularity, of coast, a limit to what you could achieve or where you might go. You knew where you were but there was invariably a sense that there were other islands, other places to be.”
Very early on there is some debate over the identity of an island with many names and possible locations, but it appears “to be real, or at least really there.” This is the flavor of it all!
The book reminded of the work of JR Carpenter, one of my favorite text artists— especially some of her pieces on old travel texts, islands, and wind. From “And By Islands, I Mean Paragraphs”:
“These paragraphs are computer-generated. Their fluid compositions draw upon variable strings containing fragments of text harvested from a larger literary corpus. Individually, each of these textual islands is a topic - from the Greek topos, meaning place. Collectively they constitute a topographical map of a sustained practice of reading and re-reading and writing and re-writing islands. In this constantly shifting sea of variable texts one never finds the same islands twice... and by islands, I do mean paragraphs.”
Another procgen (“procedural generation”) travel guide is the lovely Annals of the Parrigues, by Emily Short; and less poetically, there’s my own AI & procgen coauthored travel stories generated with data from Google reviews (written about here).
Obviously there are lots of other fictional travelogues, the most famous being Gulliver’s Travels. In Public Domain Review, I also found Jean de Bosschère’s Weird Islands (1921) which has fantastic images. And chapter headers: “HOW THE SILENT ONES LIVE. A BIRD SINGS IN THE SKY. THEY ARE FED BY THE GALIPODES. STORKS BRING THEM FRESH WATER. THE YOUNG SILENT ONES CATCH FLIES. THE TRULY WONDERFUL PEACOCK. PUNISHMENT OF VARIOUS FAULTS.”
Coincidentally, a few days ago there was a good Austin Kleon post about “books with unusual but brilliant structures” that has great references linked in it, including one of my favorite challenging narrative books, "Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative” by Jane Alison. Obviously The Islanders fits in the list of examples.
Onto the AI/tech arty news! Table of Contents (links on the web site):
AI Art Tool News (Latent/animations, 3D, Fonts/ClipArt, Misc Procgen & Creativity)
NLP & Data Science News (a bit slim)
AI Art Tool Stuff
Latent Explorers and Animation
Coincidentally, a bunch of folks are working on cool tools for browsing and/or animating latent directions in image generation. Some with prompts, some without — e.g. Ryn Murdock’s generative recsys experiment I posted about mid-month. He has extended it to animation in Blue Tiger — same UI, you like or dislike a mini video and it steers towards a new one. It takes a while to produce though and the videos aren’t always excellent, but I got some fun things, promptless:
I also played with Joel Simon’s LatentScape multi-user gallery tool for exploring related images from Art Breeder. It’s cute and fun if a bit obscure in some of the UI.
This guy Dan Wood on Twitter is doing fab clips of real-time latent video transformations. Here’s is an extracted gif of his art gallery that turns into a gallery for cats on mars.
Cog Video Morpher (demo on Replicate from fofr) is pretty cool. It requires a bunch of input images and interpolates between them very nicely. I made this pretty quickly with it! (It’s big high quality output, I scaled down and crappified it for size.)
Video/animation artist recs:
Purz’s video gen animation work is very cool. Demonflyingfox keeps posting great tv show credit reworks. I love Anosha’s animated oil painting generations, here’s a single frame.
Video gen articles and tutorials:
Actually Using SORA by the Airheads video folks. We knew these tools were not reliable and they did a lot in post, because all AI art tools are like this.
The unreleased Chinese model VIDU that looks like SORA output quality, going around as video shares (YT link).
A Purz tutorial video on deforum motion presets and reforum. Very cool synced audio motion video result. I need time off to try this.
3D
"Taming Stable Diffusion for Text to 360° Panorama Image Generation" — with code/model. Panfusion:
Adobe Project Neo is out in beta in Labs, for 3D object design, and people are saying it’s fun. The UI is nice at first look - you still should know some basics about editing 3D objects, thought. The other Labs apps include Project Blink, for AI-powered video editing, and a number of other interesting AI tools like object select-and-remove.
BlenderAlchemy (from Stanford): An AI Blender plugin/code is coming that will help you do various “simple but time consuming tasks” with Blender, which, hallelujah. Bring on the AI help.
Interactive 3D project: Edit your 3d models after generation. Edit the splat, then it gets turned into a nerf model. Very cool. Code coming.
“Going into iconic movie scenes using gaussian splats” — reddit video. (h/t Ethan Mollick.) Using clips from movies to construct a 3D splat and then cruising around in it. Ideal use of found footage!
Fonts and SVG Animation
AniClipArt - animating clip art. So good. So little code (none yet).
Dynamic Typography! With code. I love it.
Misc Creativity & Procgen
A podcast interview about the web_sim Claude simulation stuff I’ve been covering in my mid-month weird section.
AI audio:
Glorb’s ai-generated rap videos for SpongeBob are huge. Song lore list. (H/t garbage day good piece on this.)
OptimizerAI - SoundFx generation from text, tool with API.
Neurips call for Creative AI track submissions this year. On the theme of ambiguity.
Updated epic Nature of Code by Dan Shiffman.
A fractal book exploration from philogb, Indra’s Pearl.
Letterfall, a pretty three.js experiment on Codepen. Sadly the text substrate doesn’t seem to say anything content-wise.
⭐️ “I Hope This Email Finds You” mastodon bot by waldoj that uses Google books searches to complete the line. My new favorite idea. There is code. “I hope this email finds you even lingering around the premises, the contract is voided. (link)”
Games, Agents & Narrative News
Equinox — a web-based interactive threejs/Blender/Houdini narrative space game from LittleStudio. Case study writeup. (h/t Bob Rudis)
Lantern — a d3 explorer of Zork that constructs a node-link diagram from the game, you can browse the map by clicking on a room node. (Code and explanation; via hrbrmstr’s excellent tech newsletter.)
PlayCanvas (code) — a “web first” webgl enabled game engine tool, which also now supports 3D gaussian splats. I can’t remember if I’ve posted it before, but it continues to be updated and cool.
A cute builder that references Townscaper, Summerhouse. Oh, I see I own it, but have to play it still!
“I Built an LLM Bot in 3 hours to Conquer Slay the Spire” - PR post for AWS but still pretty interesting!
GDC Vault - AI Summit: 'Age of Empires IV': Machine Learning Trials and Tribulations — use of ML algorithms, 2 years old but now viewable generally, interesting in any case. (H/t Julian Togelius.)
Flow-Field Pathfinding notes from RedBlobGames. For pathfinding agents in, say, dungeons.
flow fields are a vector field that tells agents from any location what direction to move to find a single destination
optionally, agents that are in between locations on the pathfinding graph can interpolate between the vectors in the flow field
optionally, a hierarchy of coarse and fine stepped fields can speed up pathfinding.
Agents & Narrative Gen
“Holding the Line: A Study of Writers’ Attitudes on Co-creativity with AI” - a study by Behrooz et al. (H/t Martin Pichlmair of creative writing tool writeswithlaika, which is refreshing in May!). “We found that most writing occurs across five stages and within one of three modes; we additionally map openness to AI assistance to each intersecting stage-mode. We found that most writers were interested in AI assistance to some degree, but some writers felt drawing firm boundaries with an AI was key to their comfort using such systems. Designers can leverage these insights to build agency-respecting AI products for writers.”
“Returning to the Start: Generating Narratives with Related Endpoints” — research on narrative infilling basically.
Greg Buchanan’s article on writing characters with “Always, Sometimes, Never” rules. And the followup writing exercise post develops it for game writing even more.
Agents:
Talk to Me Human — early access AI game with generated NPCs, oriented on conversation.
Running Llama 3 AI-Town agents locally using Pinokio install, a video tutorial by 1LittleCoder. (The pinokio fork of AI-Town codebase.)
“How Well Can LLMs Echo Us? Evaluating AI Chatbots' Role-Play Ability with ECHO”
NLP and Data Science
Network Analysis: Integrating Social Network Theory, Method, and Application with R - ebook and code! Looks good.
I like Llama 3 70B with few shot prompting. That is all I have to say here, been working too hard!
Book Recs
These are more detailed in the separate media recs mail for paid supporters.
🏝 The Islanders by Christopher Priest (fantasy/sf). Arranged as an opinionated travel guide to the Dream Archipelago islands, in alphabetical order, this is a non-linear series of interconnected stories. See intro article!
🤖 Set My Heart to Five, by Simon Stephenson (sf). This is legit funny and bittersweet, despite often being quite obvious in its satire. A humanoid robot dentist develops feelings, after watching a lot of movies with a human friend, and goes on a quest to explore this and write his own screenplay.
🥾 The Hike, by Drew Magary (fantasy). Guy goes on a hike and gets lost in a fairytale-ish horror landscape. He is told to keep following “the path.” Early on, there is a snarky talking crab and a giantess. It is indeed quite a long fantastical trek of weird stuff, but it lands the end IMO.
The Book of Love, by Kelly Link (fantasy). Another fairytale-ish horror tinged read. Dead kids are returned to life with no memory of how they died, and are required to find a thing for supernatural entities who guard doors of life and death.
The Maid, by Nita Prose (mystery). It’s a mystery told through the eyes of a neurodivergent woman who cleans rooms in a big hotel. I was a bit qualmy.
TV Recs
I am just watching and rewatching seasons of The Walking Dead 🧟, nothing to see here. I have not watched Fallout yet.
Games Recs
Mediterranea Inferno: It won lots of awards. But I don’t know if this really counts as a rec. It’s a visual novel of 3 gay young Italian men reuniting for a vacation post-Covid; but a ton of buried crap in their relationship history haunts them. It did not feel especially interactive.
VR
Fly — I wrote about this mid-month, in the AI news section, because it uses the Google Earth 3D tiles I’ve posted about before.
Secret of Retropolis — a very cute, short, hard-boiled detective noir robot mystery. It’s very very short, I’d recommend on sale. I haven’t tried the longer sequel yet.
Nano on Quest - I’ve just started this, and it’s fascinating: You do a 3d virus-fighting job inside a human body. You use organelles and cell processes to capture bacteria and try to track down a virus.
Walking Dead: Saints and Sinners. I bought this ages ago, and just started it for obvious reasons above in TV. It is very well done, with a tight story loop construction. The whole collecting resources and crafting thing makes a ton of sense in this environment. And it is physically tiring to shank the zombies in their heads, which adds to the realism.
A Poem
Be spiritual no more mechanical. Be spiritual—no more mechanical. Be spiritual—no, more mechanical. Be spiritual. No, more: mechanical. Be spiritual? No. More mechanical. Be more mechanical, no spiritual. Be mechanical, spirit; you’ll know more. No, mechanical spirit. You’ll be more. I can call me: be spiritual no more. I can be no more spiritual. Call me. Spirit me no more; I can be called. I spirit you all & call no more. No spear can be ritual; call me more I. Bemourn o spirit mechanical. Ritual, I call: Be no more.
—Ellie Black, “after a roadside church sign seen in New Orleans” (h/t Devin Kelly’s newsletter discussing it)
If you know of any other fantastical travel guides or island stories, let me know? Also drop me a note or share!
Best, Lynn (@arnicas on the sfka twitter, mastodon, and bluesky and Threads)
Just checked out "I hope this email finds you...". Not too many yet on the mastodon thread, but in the source file there are already some gems. "I hope this email finds you before we do." Brilliant idea.
And the Latentscape is cool, really dig the 3D interface.
Also heavily debating to get a Quest 3 now...