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The November gloom is upon us. Low grey cloud cover for days at a time with not a ray of sun or a patch of blue. We are beginning to adjust to it however, even enjoying making the most of the light such as it is. Our sketching work has continued in the Bergby wood and from that we have a tree study showing a thick birch trunk interrupted by the spiky horizontals of the evergreen pine. There's even a myran stack1 at the back. Our plan is for a few closer views of these colonies but we cannot quite decide if they symbolize humanity or the advancing AI.
Speaking of which, where would AI be were it not for the tech libertarians? Where would the tech libertarians be without the Nrx? They are intertwined indeed but just how much is far right politics, taken to dystopian ends, a motive in the valley? Perhaps the march to singularity and the end of democracy craved by the silicone lads began innocently enough? Surely Orange Peel was not already envisioning the potential of the harvest of data and its AI application when he funded Facebook in 2004? Perhaps it was obvious what a commodity data was but at what point did it turn from money maker to surveillance? From predicted material desires to predicted behaviors and thoughts?
It was a two session affair with a drawing taken prior. After the first session we compared progress with the drawing and discovered that on account of the stouter trunk the drawing fared far better and our first job the next day was to sort that out on the canvas. Not a huge correction but it never ceases to amaze how subtle changes can transform the big picture.
Tut tut, let us not be naive. Orange Peel founded the big data analytics company Palantir in 2003 which suggests the ball was well rolling. It was first used in a military context to organize 'battlefield data and intelligence' as part of the War on Terror and as that business turned to domestic surveillance Palantir was again used. Police used it as part of some kind of predictive policing, launching a million more Kafka stories in the process and it has grown and grown and is now available to purchase like windows 97 judging by their strange website.
The picture is dominated by the interaction between the stout björk and the flimsy bounce of the pine needles fanning out gently in front and behind the trunk. We were very tempted to revert all the way back to the impasto of the Dutchman in remembrance of his famous treatment of the pine in that poets garden study from Arles but held back in favour of balance. As predicted our swift take of the Singulaity wires in the Earth study has broken our Cezannian patch run but we cannot give that up so early into the winter and besides we do not posses nearly enough colour for impasto.
In our mind Tech libertarians were a liberal democratic bunch, utopian even, sprouting and growing from the free culture, anti copyright, open source, internet 1.0 soil. Did it not begin so? As we all enjoyed our seemingly free digital lunch the data industry began to take off and the recently felt vibe of free culture that the early internet oozed disappeared and the online world turned into a fully corporate zone. Business caught up, data became the most valuable commodity in the world and the silicone lads were on top of it. We only became aware of the data industry as we woke to the chaos of the post truth era in 2018 following our doomed commercial campaign, during which we had the blinkers on and were aware only of the season. Of course we did hear about Brexit, the look on Sally's2 face when I told her the result alerted me to the gravity of it more than anything else, but then we put the blinkers back on for another couple of years.
Work on the above study came to a sudden halt when through the trees and branches I heard the call of my daughters harmoniously demanding lunch. I had indeed promised to be only a few minutes and had assured them I was just down the path but time got away from us once more. Having made said lunch we are now sitting in the barn looking at the study and while it has been realised to a degree there is still a sense that we could push it on further so perhaps we must go out for another session.
It was August 2018 when realities hit. We found ourself sitting in Galleri Svea in Stockholm wretchedly invidulating, day after day, our empty exhibition room. The reality of our commercial failure painfully playing out to us in real time was bad for a morale already low as a result of our panic at the election antics of the neo nazi rooted Sweden Democrats to mainstream their hatred based vision. (Their racism reaching Trästa bron!!) With nowt but our laptop we ended up whiling away those invidulating hours trying to understand what has been happening. Why had far right politics increased so across the world? The answers led us into our second reality of the week in the shape of the alt right, the IRA3 and the tragedy of social media. As we clicked and read and read and clicked a darkness and confusion rose up and erupted our mind as we realised that whatever 'it' was 'it' had already happened and 'it' was worse than anything imagined in the Occupy vs the bankers days of yore. Soon after we were forced to retreat into the shelter of the Dignity Scholarship to think it through.
We have sent another crypto batch by the way.
John
1. Ant nest or colony.
2. Refers to Newcastle artist Sally Madge.
3. Russian disinformation department: Internet Research Agency