2 posts tagged with “art”

Here’s a fun visual essay about a artist Yufeng Zhao’s piece “Alt Text in NYC.” It’s a essentially a visual search engine that searches all the text (words) on the streets of New York City. The dataset comprises of over eight million photos from Google Street View! Matt Daniels, writing for The Pudding:

The result is a search engine of much of what’s written in NYC’s streets. It's limited to what a Google Street View car can capture, so it excludes text in areas such as alleyways and parks, or any writing too small to be read by a moving vehicle.

The scale of the data is immense: over 8 million Google Street View images (from the past 18 years) and 138 million identified snippets of text.

Just over halfway down the article, there is a list of the top 1,000 words in the data. Most are expected words from traffic signs like “stop.” But number twenty-five is “Fedders,” the logo of an air-conditioner brand popular in the 1950s to the 1990s. They’re all over the exteriors of the city’s buildings.

Best viewed on your computer, IMHO.

Christoph Niemann, in a visual essay about generative AI and art:

…the biggest challenge is that writing an A.I. prompt requires the artist to know what he wants. If only it were that simple.

Creating art is a nonlinear process. I start with a rough goal. But then I head into dead ends and get lost or stuck.

The secret to my process is to be on high alert in this deep jungle for unexpected twists and turns, because this is where a new idea is born.

It’s a fun meditation on the meaning of AI-assisted and AI-generated artwork.