Welcome to Transmissions by me, Martin Brown. Father. Husband. Designer at Craig Walker and lecturer at RMIT.
This will be a fortnightly newsletter that collates some of the more interesting stories, links, quotes and other curios that float my way.
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Here’s a sneak peak:
Design
An avocado armchair could be the future of AI
MIT Technology Review
Designers around the world issued a collective shudder when a OpenAI released an updated version of their GTP-3 AI model, called DALL:E, that generates alarmingly high quality ‘creative’ images from text descriptions. The lucidity of the output raises some fascinating questions around the long-term role of human agency in the creation of new visual ideas.
Ideas
A Game Designer’s Analysis Of QAnon
Reed Berkowitz, Medium
A fascinating teardown of QAnon by a game designer, noting that – by accident or design – the conspiracy theory QAnon is imbued with many well-known game design principles. An example is in apophenia, “the tendency to perceive a connection or meaningful pattern between unrelated or random things (such as objects or ideas)”
Quotes
I’ve been reading A Guide for the Perplexed, collection of conversations with the iconoclastic filmmaker Werner Herzog. The man knows how to tell a ripping story, and highlights are many, but here’s one:
HERZOG: Many years ago I became fascinated by a rooster named Weirdo, who weighed over thirty pounds. His offspring, Ralph, was even bigger. The man who had raised these extremely aggressive animals had been forced to singe off their spurs with a blowtorch. Then I found Frank, a miniature horse, specially bred from sixteenth century Spanish stock, who stood less than two feet high. I told Frank's owner I wanted to film Ralph chasing Frank - with the tiniest midget riding him around the biggest sequoia tree in the world, more than a hundred feet in circumference. It would have looked extraordinary because horse and rider together were still smaller than Ralph the rooster. Unfortunately Frank's owner refused. "My horse isn't going to show up for that," he said. "It will make him look stupid."
Other
Wistman's Wood, an ancient forest in Devon
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