I have been working on a music video. I finished it last night, actually. It is, as ever, all AI, which, it turns out, means wildly different things to different people. I find the most inaccurate understandings of my AI induce rage in the general population. More general people experience a flicker of wonder encountering my AI, followed by a complete loss of memory, like people experiencing the flash of those memory adjusting pens in "Men in Black".
This small film, which surely I will show you after I get over my mostly uncharacteristic shyness (though it is on my YouTube channel already if you are eager enough), has no dazzling effects. There are no famous celebrities. Fantastical places are absent from every shot. And there are no majestic or anthropomorphic animals to be seen in any frame.
It is a series of very plain, older women singing. They are standing in parking lots for the most part. They are generally over lit. And this was the hard part. Computer generated images are hostile to plainness. Because their mind is made out of the Internet, they default to beauty and ugliness. The uglier and the more beautiful the better. But plain?
Plain is hard.
The truth is, I don't believe in plainness very much either, but differently. I wonder if clerkmanifesto isn't about plainness the perfect opposite of the Internet. Instead of a world made of stunning surfaces, horrifying, glorious, amazing, beautiful, that bear no further scrutiny, aye, that must be scrutinized to see the plainness in them, perhaps clerkmanifesto quixotically postulates: What if everything is plain, a flat and tired window, that, only if we carefully look through, is full of wonders?
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If you were wondering, yes, you should comment. Not only does it remind me that I must write in intelligible English because someone is actually reading what I write, but it is also a pleasure for me since I am interested in anything you have to say.
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