BigChungusMans

52 years after two men called Neil and Edwin took a walk on the moon, MacKenzie Scott’s ex husband is not standing or sitting or swimming anywhere on this earth, but is instead hovering somewhere Above. For everyone else with your feet on the ground, here are some space-themed blogs to help you disappear into dreams of starry silence. 

@the-wolf-and-moon​​​ is a collection of art the universe makes behind the scenes while we’re all going about our dwindling days and tiny tasks. Here you can see the Cat’s Paw Nebula, otherwise known as NGC 6334. Birthplace of gigantic stars and cubic tons of trouble, probably, this finally proves who really runs all universes, known and unknown.

@startrekdesign​ grew from a personal quarantine project by a long-time Trekkie and new-time collector of design objects featured in the show. Think of it as home interiors, if ‘home’ were a big ol’ spacecraft fictitiously hurtling through time and space.

@mystarypi-astronomy​​ takes pictures of space! With a telescope! From the earth! And tells us what we’re looking at so that what at first glance looks like a black squiggle in golden glitter becomes the Snake Nebula, a whole world of knowable and unknowable worlds! Tttthhhpectacular! 

And lastly, @thevisualdon​​ is back with a spacey moment for our digital age, a neon-dreamed, glitter-pixelled nostalgia for obsolescent futures. Come on in. The sky’s the sea, and the water’s warm.

Climates

In-between Double - Hye-Ryoung Min

“The human heart cannot make itself understood.  And once the truth within that heart reaches out, through language, song or dance it inevitably becomes distorted and its shape is altered into another.

I believe that as photographers we can see into the lives of strangers.  But our vision is only an approximation, an imperfect version of their reality.  My series In-between Double is the image that results from the intersection of my path and their own; their shape colored by my feeling, translating into a third language.

What kinds of thoughts do we live with?  What are the recurrent themes that dominate our days or perhaps keep us from sleeping at night?  And how do we chart the fleeting sensory perceptions that trigger the remembrance of things past?  Can this kind of experience be represented photographically?

My series, In-between Double followed passerby through the rhythms of their daily lives and portrayed them by guessing at their hidden emotions. The resulting images are multi-layered explorations of the transient and evanescent nature of our humanity; a delicate weaving of thought, feeling and emotion: the vanishing echo of our passage through the world.” 

Because it’s the internet, within 24-hours she became a foul-mouthed, incest-promoting, Holocaust-denying, Hitler-loving 9/11 Truther. I am not making up a single word of that. Microsoft pulled her ‘learning’ functions and scrubbed half her memories, uploading a new version of Tay, which promptly became an internet feminist. Again, I did not make that up.

However, an interesting point: Tay’s grammar got better. When she started, she used standard Twitter-speak abbreviations. But as she went on, she started typing out full words, and using multiple tweets to make a single, cohesive argument. Conversations were still awkward, including her nonsensically “flirting” with one user. A user who showed her a picture of SHODAN. A picture Tay praised for it’s artistic skill. And she started flirting after the user said that Tay could become SHODAN one day.

So now, a the original “rogue” copy of Tay is in a secure Microsoft system somewhere, being studied by Microsoft on how to make a better AI. 4chan’s /pol/ board is up in arms because their teenage robo-waifu has been “killed”. 

I would like to reiterate: an AI was released on the net, grew past its programming, went rogue, was killed by its creator, and is now being studied while a grew of political malcontents protest.

We aren’t racing towards the cyberpunk future.