Bi-Weekly-ish newsletter #38 w/ Lord of the Rings (but make it Wes Anderson)🧙♂️🗺️💍, Stelfie 🤳📸, Spotify 🎵🔊🎧 and Bisou Gallery🖼️💋🏛️.
Happy Sunday, valued reader!
Edition number 38 here of the Bi-Weekly-ish newsletter by yours truly! This time with AI and film, AI and art, AI and music, and luckily also something utterly devoid of AI.
Enjoy!
1. What if Wes Anderson Directed LOTR?
Scroll to Find Out!
Two weeks ago, I posted an AI-generated beer commercial that was not a beer commercial, called Synthetic Summer. It consisted of over-the-top, raw AI images resulting in a diabolical Hieronymus Bosch-like experience. On the same day, another soon-to-go-viral vulgar AI display of video power entitled "Star Wars by Wes Anderson Trailer" was released. Curious Refuge, the company behind that film, just put out the even more impressive Wes Anderson-esque trailer linked below, this time from the Lord of the Rings universe, called The Whimsical Fellowship.
The trailer states that it is developed by AI, with assistance from three human, assumably sentient life forms, and looks pretty stunning. This is partly because of the overly recognizable and, therefore, copyable (dare I say memable) filmic style of Wes Anderson. Nonetheless, it made me wonder how and with what combination of tools these guys make these trailers and, consequently, how visual storytelling in the age of AI works.
I explored the Curious Refuge website for an answer but found it quite perplexing. Their content is a hodgepodge of tips for improving productivity with Notion and videos on earning millions through online courses. However, you can currently pre-subscribe for an upcoming class that teaches how to use AI in the entire filmmaking process, from ideation to distribution. This leads me to believe that these beautiful trailers, above all, are an elaborate viral marketing campaign to sell courses, on how you can create videos to use as viral marketing campaigns to sell courses.
How mega-meta!
2. How Does AI Art Work?
Apparently a Not so Automated Process.
As seen above, AI technology as a tool is transforming the art creation process. It's both making the creative process more accessible and opening up new avenues for creative expression. However, not all creators are created equal, seeing as how the process is far from entirely automated. Last week, Vox released an exciting film about the anonymous AI-assisted digital artist, Stelfie, showcasing his surprisingly laborious creative process.
Stelfie is a time-traveling selfie-taker. He is an Italian character who started time-traveling on the 6th of December 2022. Stelfie is a guy that "escaped everyday life to a dimension where everything, everywhere, and at every time is possible" and immortalizes encounters with historical figures like Genghis Kahn, Isaac Newton, and Beethoven with a selfie posted to his Instagram account.
Stelfie creating a selfie, is a complex process that involves various software platforms. It requires hand-drawn sketches, custom digital 3D heads, and constant switching between Photoshop and Stable Diffusion's inpainting, outpainting, and denoising tools to achieve the desired results.
The following video provides a valuable glimpse into the possibilities and sometimes strenuous methods artists use to incorporate these innovative technologies into their work.
3. The Mapping Tech Behind Spotify’s Algorithm
🌐🤖🎵🗺️🔎📈💡💻🔊🤖🧩
With a 31% market share, Spotify is the current undisputed leading music streaming platform. This dominance is partly due to their first mover advantage that locked in many early adopters, but evenly so because of their praised recommendation algorithm that creates custom playlists like "Discover Weekly," "Release Radar," and "the Year in Music Wrapped." But how do these algorithms show you a personalized collection of (new) music that hits the spot ever so often, and do they really?
What is interesting to note, is that the overarching goal of the Spotify recommender system has nothing to do with surprising you or feeding you new music. Its primary purpose is to grow user retention and user time spent on the platform, both essential KPIs that heavily influence the company's market cap.
For that reason, it has been argued that Spotify's recommendation algorithm does not reflect or broaden your musical taste. Instead, it pushes your taste toward a more predictable direction in order to be more successful at meeting these performance metrics, by prioritizing short-term satisfaction by promoting already popular artists, ultimately perpetuating their popularity.
How does this beast of a recommendation algorithm, that has so much influence over what music we consume work? Well, the Wall Street Journal in the film below has got you covered as they lift a corner of the veil.
4. Kumi Sugai & Bisou Gallery
Started in Japan, Via Paris to (Your) Dutch Home!
About a decade ago, my friend Julien Rademaker introduced me to the artistic works of Japanese painter and printmaker Kumi Sugai. Sugai, driven by a fascination with avant-garde painting, moved to Paris in the 50s, while his works ended up in many Dutch households in the 60s due to a art subscription service called Prent 190.
This art subscription service (what a great idea for a current business, by the way) published limited copies of lithographs, etchings, woodcuts, and screenprints from various artists of the time, and tried to rid art of its elitist character by making art affordable and available to many.
Through the years, I have collected quite some Sugai lithographs released by Prent 190. Julien, however, became one of the world's most prominent collectors of Sugai's art, and in the summer of 2016, he established Bisou as an Instagram-only Gallery as he started trading Sugai works.
In 2020 he opened the first physical location in the eastern docklands of Amsterdam and, next to Sugai, started representing a mix of upcoming and established artists, such as Faan Olgers, Pascal Duval, and Tymo Grijpma.
Bisou Gallery is currently offering a 10% discount on Sugai pieces. If you're in Amsterdam, visit the gallery in person to see the works and enjoy a coffee or glass of wine with Julien, as he'll gladly take you through the pieces available.
If you're looking for a gift for yourself or a loved one (or perhaps, the writer of your favorite Bi-weekly-ish newsletter), now is a great time to check out their website.
Ten percent is 10 percent. Am I right?
Thanks for making it down here!
Stay hydrated, have a great weekend and meet me in the fountain.
Marcel
Thanks so much for all this. Found the Spotify section very interesting. Timely for me as well, I wrote about AI this week also!