Notices by Allison Parrish (aparrish@mastodon.social), page 13

paragraphs from a markov chain trained on garden plant descriptions from wikipedia

I've ranted about this before but one of the toughest moments in programming for me is when I realize all of the stuff I've been doing in a jupyter notebook really needs to be an Actual Module With Tests And Stuff

(since at that moment you have to start picking apart the prototype code and remember how all the parts were working together)

I love this weird typographical illustration for this 1998 xerox patent https://patents.google.com/patent/US6230170B1/en "Spatial morphing of text to accommodate annotations"

whoops this was supposed to be in reply to https://mastodon.social/@aparrish/100029075839939462 (for context)

This Is Just To Say

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

forgive me
they were delicious
you are cosmic
let us spoon for ever

Richard Aldington explains Imagism, Egoist 1 vol 11, June 1914: "We do not say 'O how I admire that exquisite, that beautiful, that—25 more adjectives—woman" or "O exquisite, O beautiful, O 25 more adjectives woman, you are cosmic, let us spoon for ever..."

...when in reality I think any imagist poem could be improved by adding

you are cosmic
let us spoon forever

to the end of it

my sketch rnn accidentally made an actual word (monocles)

@wrenpile oh wow yes, that is an excellent (and obvious in hindsight) counterexample. that opens a whole new line of thinking for me here, thank you!

@rotatingskull I don't agree that abstract expressionism (or any of its progenitors) as a movement argues or demonstrates that art communicates nothing coherent?

(which explains why the spoils of colonialism were so often exploited in early modernist art—dada and west african art, pound and chinese poetry... elsewhere in the world they found the non-imitative they had thought they were inventing!) this makes me wonder if this representational/non-representational distinction has arisen multiple times in history in multiple places? anyway, this has been Allison Pretends To Know About Art History, thx for tuning in, Blue Apron, a better way to cook

in a sense photography was just the culmination of a particular school of post-renaissance photo-realistic art in europe (which already used photography-like techniques like camera obscura etc), and the focus of "modern" art on materiality was a reaction to *that*, not a priori pioneering in non-representational art. because of course even a cursory glance at visual art throughout the world reveals a focus on materiality (from the beginning, even back to, like, lascaux)

it seems like the distinction between "representational" (or imitative) and "non-representational" art that arose after the invention of photography tended to lump all art from before this distinction arose into the "representational" category (with "new" art being distinguished, and seen as virtuous, as "non-representational"). but of course before this distinction was drawn there was no such taxonomy and artists wouldn't have conceptualized themselves as belonging to either category

printing the string of the entire syntactic subtree headed by each token in a sentence gives a lovely repetitive effect

@joshmillard perfect

turning the kl weight all the way up helped—reconstructions now somewhat reliably have the general shape and some of the same letters as the original words (though not always in the right orders). encouraging though!