Masks | AI Uses

 

Interesting John Foxx (his stage name and performing persona ) interview on Identity, and that he thinks some performers he knew died because they didn’t separate their real self from the their stage performer. They tried to live out their larger than life stage persona all the time. 

Masks allow a performer to be more than themselves too.  

Andreas Katsula loved his G’Kar make up  

J. Michael Straczynski: “Andreas Katsulas loved the G'Kar makeup. He was a big fan of Greek theater (no surprise there) and he said many times he found the mask element to be liberating, rather than imprisoning. Behind the mask, he was truly free. “

There is a saying about Japanese people from a Jesuit Priest from way back when that says they have "three faces" .

1.The First Face (Public Persona): The mask you show to the world

2.The Second Face (Inner Circle): The face you show to close friends, family, and loved ones.

3.The Third Face (The True Self): The face you never show to anyone.

But why would you believe anything a Jesuit Priest said?

Also I think that pretty much applies to me as well, and I am not Japanese. 

Many Social Media users use a mask too, curating their feed. Not being their “warts and all” selves. Like that white American being the X expert on all Japanese Culture, or the like, and being the only thing they ever post on, while wearing a kimono.  

This music+comic uses as a background the tracks music visualization from  MilkDrop3.  Grabbed that using OBS. Formatted using Handbrake.  The comic animation done as usual with MOHO, but with a green background.

That was then chroma keyed over the visualization using my video editor MOVIE STUDIO. 

Image of composite layers:

Music Ion Storm can be found on Bandcamp

Other Things

A week since had stitches out and getting better faster now.  But Doc did indicate over 4~6 weeks to get back to "normal". Was out to local supermarket yesterday and walking with a shorter stride is more comfortable at the moment.

Rick Beato did a video on using AI locally using LM STUDIO and QWEN3.5.  His video is about  private, secure local use is better than using an on-line subscription service. Such services probably don’t have much of a future, in the same way Recording Studios didn't.  

The latest version he used wouldn’t install on my 32GB i7 Win11 machine ( some funny business by Microsoft I wonder?),  but I did find an older version and MODEL Qwen2.5 that did install and run.  Not the latest and greatest, but that doesn't matter without an idea of what I would use it for.  It is chat/text based and isn't the kind of thing I had bothered to look at at all previously even though it has been in the news for what seems like ages now. I have never bothered to touch ChatGPT either. Being "retired" being the main reason though I expect.

So I asked Qwen2.5 what it can help me with: 

So could it come up with better rhymes than I currently have in my track STORY SHAPED BEATS? 

It can.  

THAT is interesting.

I don't want to use what it suggested here, but will see what it comes up to improved what I do with spoken words and lyrics next time.

An interesting new application to me. I can't live without a spell checker, and a tool that comes up with alternate rhymes sounds useful to me, as an assistant or something to bounce ideas off.  It isn't the kind of function in any word processor I know of, like WORD or Scrivener.  

I later loaded the larger 8GB MODEL and enabled the OPEN CL for the PCs AMD graphic card:

Haven't done enough to know if this is better and faster or not. Just dipping a toe into the waters here. It remind me of sitting at a 300 baud terminal, as the text comes out at about that speed. And you wait a bit as it thinks about the request.

Of course you can just type this into Google AI and get results, and instantly, but that is feeding the art stealing machine that the AI industry is with your new work. (Yes the model being used stole lots of work before it was bottled too, but that isn't about to be undone from what I can see). Googles AI lets you upload a file, like an image, and get it to do something with it. So far the local system doesn't support that.

Most uses of AI are really bad for society, programmers and artists.  But I was interested to see that artist Takashi Murakami used AI to come up with variations to his own lion line art.  I have nothing against that use at all. 

This week I updated a large vector cartoon vehicle illustration that had 2 pets in it, as a minor but important part of the illustration.

The customer had sent me pet photos and one of them a cartoon done in AI they liked.  So trying AI is what I did too. GEMINI AI in this case.  But first I reduced the number of colors in the reference photo and made the background white. Uploaded it to GEMINI AI asking for a cartoon, and it gave me a PNG file. I then loaded that into COREL TRACE and it made a VECTOR image out of it, after optimizing the conversion settings. That produces a RGB vector file, so convert that all to CMYK with global color model search and replace in CorelDraw.

The AI made a few mistakes though, so I edited the resulting CMYK CorelDraw images, added more high lights, teeth, fixes to color and changed some of the colors to make the pets more visible in the final illustration.

I think this was worthwhile for a small part of the illustration, where the customer can complain about likeness etc. in this case.  

 

I did this with the help of AI last year to generate 3 different JOKER DANCING ON THE STEPS images. I had to edit the images quite a bit to have the same hands on each one, and I think I changed a head too. But for a quick throw away music animation it did cut down the effort required to do it a lot.

I read that many companies have laid off 1,000s of programmers and replaced them with AI.  Having been involved with a few large software projects, and that AI lies a lot, I expect that will not go well for the companies!

We can be found at ArtAndTechnology  KYOTO JAPAN

2 Weeks Down | Music YouTubers

So last surgery was 2 weeks ago tomorrow and not back to normal, but much better, mostly. Good to be on the mend.  I may start going out for coffee at a cafe later this week, again.  

There haven't been any nearby exhibitions announced this year so far that interest me. Kind of glad for that at the moment as I recover.  Last year thought the Osaka Expo had sucked all the air out of rival exhibitions for the first half of the year, but things sure picked up later. 

Expect the same this year, and that the GHOST IN THE SHELL: ANIMATION FILM exhibit will come nearby in a few months time.  

Wife and sister-in-law went to the cinema yesterday (saw RENTAL FAMILY) and brought back these coming film adverts.

I expect to go to PROJECT HAIL MARY opening session next week.  The Mandalorian ,edited to a film version, in May would be good too, as I don't have Disney+ and haven't seen it.

Music Youtubers. Did a draft  music+comic a couple of days ago featuring these two.

I had done a colored rough pencil sketch of Rick a couple of years ago and did a similar one of Billy on Saturday. The Rick one is a bit caricatured, Billy isn't.

That  music+comic  seems too simple at the moment, and doesn't say enough, in an interesting enough way. I wouldn't release it for a couple of weeks yet, so I may come up with something completely different by then. 

It was music that came first built around a sequenced bass part.  Guitars come in briefly in the center. Just love the sound. I am using the Hans Zimmer Zebra and many of his presets, and that is significant as to why synthesizer first recently. Sounds amazing. 

It was Rick's What Makes This Song Great? episodes  with the songs STEMS, so he could play individual parts and talk about them was what made me notice him. He hasn't done that for years now though and is mostly interviewing his music industry heroes.   

Billy is all about interviewing Creatives, many who are musicians but also actors.  Some who probably aren't even on Rick's radar. 

But there are many other Music YouTubers. Most shilling some product or another, like Ola with his guitars.  I guess I have more time for Glenn Fricker than most of the others.  He talks about interesting things, often, and is 100% right about Gearspace (formerly GEAR SLUTS ) that is full with people just think some piece of gear is the important thing (and big opinions). 

Speaking of Hans Zimmer. Mattias Eklundh posted he attended the current Hans Zimmer concert, helped by his friend Guthrie Gotham, who performs in it, and was amazed by it all.  I previously posted on the HANS ZIMMER: HOLLYWOOD REBEL documentary and how that was really inspiring to me. But when I saw the Japanese Zimmer Concert ticket prices I couldn't justify the ¥36,000+ price for a seat without a blocked view. Or the ¥50,000 VIP tickets. So I didn't go.

But the documentary is something I watch every so often, especially the bits on his approach.  Really simple themes, lots of 5ths, not chords, that repeat, adding another layer of complexity as they do. All being not at all what you learn in Music School.  

Back updating a complicated 6 year old vector design last few days. The only other thing I did last year was from a previous customer from years before too.

I think it is just another indication how broken Google is with their Search and AI now. The good Internet is gone. 

Saw something that mentioned how blogging is just so dead now yesterday. I had thought so myself until a year or so ago when I started posting here again.  Seems some, maybe just bots, access this, but it is really for myself, as I can't stick pictures and videos in my paper diary.  I just wonder exactly when Google will finally kill it,

We can be found at ArtAndTechnology  KYOTO JAPAN

Appleseed(S) | Recovery

 

MUSIC+COMIC on another artist picking up the APPLESEED world and characters with 3 volumes of manga many years later in 2011.

The music used in this is in the Assorted Bits3 album on Bandcamp.

I had bought the English GHOST IN THE SHELL manga around 1995 and was amazed. All the tech foot notes! I had watched the Japanese language ANIME many times before that, but I could never catch all that was being said. Didn't matter a whole lot.  

It wasn't till we moved back to Sydney in 2002, and I had a 6 month contract working at Town Hall and discovered the 4 volume APPLESEED manga at the nearby KINOKUNIYA BOOKSTORE, that I found out about APPLESEED.  I had seen the main characters, especially the Cyborg with the bunny ears antenna earlier but hadn't made the connection. 

The 3D animated films look great, but aren't. The second is particularly dull. Even if the action directed by John Woo. 

Other Things

A week and a half since surgery today and the wound isn’t weeping any more. Had the stitches out yesterday, and that is so much better.  They hurt coming out though!  A relief, even if not 100% yet. Didn't sleep well last night though. Even though the area wasn't painful, there was enough discomfort.

Had hoped to be back to normal after 7 days, but that didn’t happen.  Still had a weeping wound, probably from the ointment applied daily. Not painful, but sensitive, and when you moved and walked, the stitches could pull.  Made a small improvement daily though.  Great to not have to schedule going back to the clinic and can now get onto other things.  

Such a better experience than 9 years ago, as FB reminds me today, that was going to last 4 months and really take a year to get over.

Sometimes I set out to make a piece of music and think “this will be VERY METAL”, and end up finding a cool synth patch in the Zebra VST synthesizer that takes me somewhere else.  I may even start with a series of heavily distorted Guitar riffs, that would be metal on their own, but when I add pop-ish elements the result isn’t.  At least I don't think so.

I enjoy making the music I do, but you don’t have to be good at something to enjoy it. It is all simple and unsophisticated riff and sequence pattern based stuff, but that is fine.  I aren’t a “composer” and make my stuff by improvising a bunch of things, then editing them together, that then suggests something else that I overdub on top.  All made in my REAPER Digital Audio Workstation, which is like a word processor for sound and music. Never had any interest of being a performing musician or be in a band, just creating music and sound in a studio alone. It is just like drawing and painting to me which are both solo activities. My early technical career was about designing and building such studio music production systems.

I see other people I know repairing and renovating old music electronics or synthesizers. Some I designed a long time ago! That is something I was "good at", but have NO INTEREST in doing now in retirement! That was a job! Even if it didn’t start that way for me.  I am not that person now.  

Hay Fever is really bad around here now. Eyes stinging and nose running. Every morning have blood caked inside my nose. Even the cat is sneezing. And the amazing thing is, the troublesome trees where planted by the Japanese government decades ago.  They just didn't select a tree without a nasty side effect. 

Visited HANDS (used to be Tokyu Hands) just around the corner from the clinic in Kyoto Shijo yesterday for the first time after my visit to the clinic. 4F is my stop with stationary and art supplies.  Found and bought 2 A5 20 page clear files I use for printing my manga that aren't available any more at my usual ARC OASIS. 

Project Hail Mary hits the local TOHO cinema here Friday morning March 20th. This is the one with Ryan Gosling, to separate it from another movie of the same name, with same plot. Stop the sun expanding and save earth. I expect to be there opening session.

YouTubes current AI algorithm is showing me 80% garbage.  Facebook is 95% sponsored or sponsored Orange pile of Shit  content I have no interest in. A friend recently just gave up on Facebook. X is only saved by the Japanese content, which isn't manipulated the way the English is.  Haven't found any need to visit Bluesky often, and have stopped visiting MASTODON completely. 

Things change...

We can be found at ArtAndTechnology  KYOTO JAPAN