“The story of Corporate Memphis, aka “Alegria”, aka the big tech art style.” (YT channel)
My thanks to A. Rautoiu for tracking this – history of Corporate Memphis. I urge you to read his longread article for the Romanian tech news Mindcraft stories (use Google Translate – works pretty well). He offers both an in-depth view on how ML works and how it does not work and how artists and creative work is not just endangered by AI art (like DALL-E and GPT-3 but suffering from its own chronic commercial pressures to fit into the new algorithmic capitalist world (be easily recognizable, get ranked by search engines etc.). At the same time, he does not foreclose the potential of AIs and both human-algo collaborative work to be satisfying and actually rewarding, although this depends on more than just full automation and Metaverse subsumption. It is also a question of training – swallowing all these huge databanks, making use of all these free public (public domain) data being used to train algorithms that are the private propriety of big tech companies.
The history of Memphis Corporate – is not a rare outlier, it actually describes how the general intellect has been privatized and copyrighted nowadays without any regard to its various sources. It is not just that the original artists are being disrespected or completely outsourced and deleted – but an entire previous history of design under contemporary cartelization has been completely rewritten under this new corporate revisionism. You see why the whole history of art is somehow a long history of struggle for recognition and why the under-representation of artists and their work is all around us. Creative Industries have been built on these sorts of deletion.
TimeSpace Warps 