Mood Themes the World
Mood Themes the World

Summary/Abstract: Apparatus theory (a hybrid of McLuhan and Derrida) hypothesizes that a civilizationof electracy (the digital apparatus) must learn how to thrive in a lifeworld in which thevisceral faculty of appetite is hegemonic. The dominant axis of behavior today is fantasy-anxiety(attraction/repulsion). We propose that world theming has created a vernacular discoursethat may be raised to a second power of expression as vehicle of visceral intelligence. Theimmediate claim is that theming in digital media augments mood (ambiance) into a power ofimagination, just as dialectic in writing augmented logic into a power of reason. Fantasy todayis persuasive, just as logical entailment is (was) in the rational order of literacy. Decisions determiningreal events today are being made in worlds of mood.World theming is evident in the vernacular art practices arising from recent advancesin artificial intelligence. The availability of commodity GPUs, along with public access toadvanced research via GitHub, Kaggle, Hugging Face, and the proliferation of forums suchas Reddit, Discord, YouTube, and others, has resulted in a renaissance of public engagementwith technology-informed creative practice. In addition, the general availability of Google’spreviously internal-only development tool, Colab, in late 2017 provided access to cloud-basedGPUs and storage systems accessible only to data scientists and academics.In early 2021 Ryan Murdock released a Colab notebook called Big Sleep that combined OpenAI’srecently published Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) with BigGAN. Thismodel is a paradigmatic example of our observation. By early 2022, multiple derivations of thisprocess incorporated alternative image generation techniques. This paper will demonstratehow the fundamental basis of these methods are distinctly electrate in their use of ‘theme’ andemphasis on ‘mood’ in world-building, including a case-study animation called DissipativeOff-ramps.

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