Krystal South On FTP, AI, Robots, Neuralink, Bushcraft, Your Mom's House, Death Chunks, Wills, and Hummingbirds
Edition 3 of my Substack. On FTP, AI, Robots, Neuralink, Bushcraft, Your Mom's House, Death Chunks, Wills and Hummingbirds.
On FTP
I’m back in the old FTP of all of the Web Junk that I have amassed on my server over the last 20 years, and I thought that I would begin to share some old things that I happen to come across while I am digging through the old digital hoard. Thank you forever to Scott for being my Domain Daddy for the last 20 years and hosting my bullshit. I remain clugy at best in my efforts to maintain some semblance of Web Presence, but I updated the old index.html yesterday for the first time in 10-ish years.
I was excited to finally add that I was in a show the Whitney Museum of American Art, something that happened in 2016 and I never actually added to my CV. I took part in a group exhibition as part of a work by amazing Canadian Lorna Mills called Ways of Something, an internet art breakdown of John Berger’s Ways of Seeing. My minute in the museum was about glamour, and I am not sure where to actually find the actual video I made but it was about Photoshop and I really liked it. We attended the opening of the Dreamlands exhibit in person in late 2016 NYC, ate Katz’, and bought a Jeanette Hayes drawing that hangs in my bedroom. Though we did have a bad time at the Ace Hotel in NY.
Most of the galleries that I have shown in have long since ceased existing, and many of the online exhibitions have sadly let their domains expire. I’ve still not reflected my website to account for all of these dead links, but something tells me I will leave them there, like the rest of my digital backlog and test.htmls, as they show something of my development in an extremely online timeline. It feels strange to be a digitalish internety artist anymore, and I am underwhelmed by things that felt revolutionary to me at the time, but such is the contradiction of learning as you fucking go, and trying whatever feels right at the time based on what You Now Know. I’ve lost artworks to these dead links, art object things that are now the domain of the wayback machine. But someone saw them, once, and thus they remain on my CV. The dead links are proof of a once upon a time when digital exhibitions were a new and exciting concept. Now I have to wonder, are they even a thing? I am out of the digital loop but I know one thing I will never forget, The Art Happens Here, a wonderful animated GIF by early net artist Kevin Bewersdorf circa 2008-9.
On AI
My relationship with AI started a few years ago in 2022, but what feels like ages ago now, when I did a lot of fiddling around with Open-AI’s then freshly-released DALL-E image generation model. I wrote then about what first impressions the experience had left me with, and I asked not only what it was but what it meant, wondering, “If DALL-E is a tool, we may be the handle.” Hundreds of prompts later, I am still wondering what the role of the human is in the development of this new realm of images, or what the role of the image is in the AI age.
One fun AI tool I’ve been playing with recently is called Google Whisk, a lab project that allows you to upload reference images or prompts for a character, setting, and style, to then generate sexy, big images that can easily rip the style of any contemporary photographer or artist. As an artist who wants to make things I love it, and as an artist who wants to be able to keep making things it terrifies me. All you have to do is upload a reference photograph and you can eliminate the need to hire a model, find a location, and shoot the actual fkn photos. It produces incredible results and translates your images into prompts in a way that I think will become really popular as people look to reverse-engineer images into repeatable prompts. I used a bunch of modelling photos of myself to create some editorial looking images in about 15 seconds.
This blog post by Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, will likely be referenced on an ongoing basis as we move closer to the goal of ‘AGI,’ or Artificial General Intelligence, or an AI that is as capable if not more than human beings. He describes the ‘gentle singularity’ that we are already at the cusp of, and opines on the path forward to distribute this technology equitably throughout the world. “In some big sense, ChatGPT is already more powerful than any human who has ever lived.” claims Altman. I worry, of course, that the ethics of AI have not yet been settled and that the singularity may be gentle for some and obliterative for others. TBD?
On Robots
12 years ago I preformed at an event called Getting to Know YouTube organised by my dear childhood friends Crystal and Ally, and the format was a such: A YouTube playlist was played in the historic Portland Hollywood Theatre and I ranted over it on mic about ROBOTS, mainly about how humanoid robots would be widely available in our lifetimes and they will reshape the entire future as we know it, potentially leading to a robot singularity that ends the reign of man as apex predator. I swear it was funny, and featured clashing footage of synchronised robots dancing against iRobot war devices for Roomba reconnaissance. I wish that this rare public unhinged rant was not recorded.
I now fully believe that we will have robot butlers in our homes in the next decade, and that the robots being developed now will come in really handy when we are all old and alone and forgotten by society. As someone who requires assistance and support on a weekly basis already to accomplish basic household tasks, I look forward to our robot friends and am reminded of the funny 2012 film Robot and Frank. The story features an aged robber who has a robot accomplice, hilarity ensues. I could use a hand around the house, and human help is complicated and hard to come by.
So I get weepy about the robots as they pop up in my YouTube feed because I’m likely going to be dependent on one in the near future. I like the ones with screens for eyes and no faces. I hate the ones that attempt to resemble human flesh and I fear the fuck robots that will no doubt be first to market.
On a lighter note, if you haven’t watched it, The Wild Robot on Netflix is an amazingly sweet film about Motherhood and what is means to care for one another, two of my favourite things, causing me to weep through the back half of the film each of the three times that I have watched it.
On Neuralink
Not only will our basic needs be cared for by humanoid robots, but our brain could become a computer interface in the near future, as Neuralink has proven in their seven human trials currently underway. Their results, focused on neurological diseases like ALS and spinal cord injuries, allows their All White Male Test Group to interact with Call of Duty, control a computer using brain implants of electrical threads. These results are astounding, and I have watched a monkey play pong using the Neuralink as well, proving once and for all that a monkey is better than me at video games.
As someone with an incurable neurological disease, this research is especially fascinating, and as a person with mental illness, including Major Depressive Disorder since I was a teenager, I am interested to hear that they are exploring possible treatments for schizophrenia and depression. I am also proud to say that I am a better public speaker than Elon. I look forward to the new methods of computer input that are possible with brain-computer interfaces, and wonder what it would feel like to both send and receive data from a computer in an invisibly physical way.
On Bushcraft
To put the kids to bed, sometimes I need something quiet and a bit boring to put on YouTube, and we’ve begun watching these amazing videos of guys (I’ve yet to see a woman doing this online) building shelters in the forest. They source all of their materials from their environment, cutting logs from the forest and using termite mounds to form clay, and show the entire process of building their structure, presented without dialogue with just the sounds of the jungle in the background. My favourite part is always the fireplace, and they have inspired some indoor fires around our own. I’ve always been fascinated by survival (I cannot wait to read Hatchet and Swiss Family Robinson with my kids!) and these videos support a visceral need that I have to sit in the woods, which is difficult right now with my disability. If you, too, miss sitting creekside and watching someone build something from the Earth, do check out these videos. I look forward to training my future robots in these ancient skills using these exact videos.
On Your Mom’s House
I know I promised standup comedy, but I got distracted by a comedy podcast by two of my favourite standups, Tom Segura and Christina P, a married couple who for the past 15 years have had a podcast called Your Mom’s House. This podcast is half-cute-relationship-banter and discussion of their family (w/ two young boys) and their lives as comedians. The other half is an internet revue of Cool Guys and horrible accidents they find on YouTube and TikTok who don’t quite know how to behave online. They often have guests of other comedians and musicians, who don’t quite know how to respond to the often disgusting videos that they share. It feels like a lens on the old internet, before everything was slick and marketed, and it’s been a true joy to watch all of the hundreds of back episodes of the podcast on YouTube.
I’ve now exhausted their back catalog and am now moving onto their other associated podcasts. If you like weird stuff, slick stuff, cool stuff, you can become a fan of their podcast, called a Mommy, just like me.
On Death Chunks
Since I did promise standup, here’s something called Death Chunk by my current favourite comedian Jordan Jensen. I feel like this delivers on my commitment to death and grief, too. Jensen also has a podcast on YouTube called RIP that is worth checking out. But if that’s not enough for you, I’m also rereading Barthe’s Mourning Diary, an open letter from the philosopher to his mother after her death in 1977. It slaps hard.
On Wills
I’m nearing the end of the process of composing my Last Will and Testament, something I sincerely hope will protect my children from going through the hell that I went through when my mother died. Becoming the executor of someone’s estate when they do not have their ducks in a row is excruciating, especially in the throes of grief, and I hope that if you have anything to leave behind after you die that you get the ducks and line them up as soon as humanly possible. My will is pretty boilerplate, but I’ve specified that if my children don’t want to keep my art collection that it be donated to the Portland Art Museum, which I am sure would be interested in the few paintings and photographs that I have collected over the years.
It feels good to be through this process, or at least the harder parts of it, and knowing that my children will be protected from having to clean up a mess of my own design after I die.
On Hummingbirds
Australia doesn’t have them, I miss them desperately, and this documentary by David Attenborough is my favourite bit online about them.
On and On and On
That concludes the second edition of my new Substack, intended to reenter the writing practice and tell you about the cool shit on my mind. Please subscribe to keep up to date as I keep writing about what I’m on about. Did you know there was a character limit on these emails? Me either.
Good internet post