twenty-seven

 

Clerkmanifesto is going context free for 100 days!

While I retire from 31 years at the Roseville Library, sell nearly everything I own, fly with my darling wife to Japan for 40 days, and then move together to France to start to build a life there, I present a less explained clerkmanifesto, a clerkmanifesto of snapshots and time travel. Below you may see old posts without introduction from my 4,750 post collection. You may see random photos, brand new or years old. I may write a passage about Japan as if of course you know I'm in Japan, I may make a simple observation or joke, but whatever it is, I won't be explaining it. You'll have to take it as it comes.

For more context you are welcome to read this longer introduction.

And if this is all too confusing I welcome you to investigate our thousands of fully explained historic posts from the past 12 years, though I'll be the first to admit, hours later, you may still come away a little confused.

Here, however it works, is what clerkmanifesto has for you today:

I recently posted a picture to Instagram. I do this occasionally, but there's nothing there you wouldn't see here. An acquaintance was impressed with the picture, asking if it was real.

I understand the question.

I don't have the best answer.

In the wider Internetland I have seen plenty of evidence of hostility towards AI images, sometimes even approaching a kind of hysteria. I have encountered some of that in posting my short youtube movies. I have not particularly encountered it in the real world, where my heavily AI collaborated images have mostly evoked wonder and curiosity.

But also I make very few straight up AI images. Most of mine start with a traditional photograph, well, maybe not "traditional", an ever shifting word, but a photo taken with a phone camera. Then it is either massively or subtly altered by an AI reimagining, meaning an array of directions and attempts with, these days, usually Chat GPT as a photo generator/editor. From there it is sometimes finished off in Photoshop, which now may or may not mean more AI tools.

So for that picture where I was asked if it was real? I think it was this one:

Yes, this is pretty much how the bee was arranged in my original camera photograph. I guess it's pretty real. I mean, I think if I showed it to the bee he would be all "Hey, that's me! I look nice! What's the purple on my legs?"

The problem, well, let's face it, the fun of photography is that it is already plenty fake and alterable from the start.

Here is another picture I took recently. I haven't shown you this one yet. We are having a lot of smoky sunsets here and actually the air is pretty bad.

This looks very fake.

I tried to do some interesting things with it, but it's too weird and fake looking and nothing worked.

This one's real.

But I think you know you're just looking at a bunch of little dots on a screen.