being

blackstracts 1

/ mobius faith

I’ve experimented with extremely dark images in the past but it’s been a while and I was in the mood. Today and tomorrows images were taken one Saturday morning early in May. I had gone to the laundromat to clean my winter comforter and a couple of pillows to put in storage. At that time people were not permitted to wait inside due to the pandemic. So I sat in my car. It was raining rather hard and I was not in the mood to go out and about for photos. So I just sat in my car for these abstracts. The inside of my car is dark gray and black with some chrome accents. Wondering what kind of abstracts I could create – I dialed down the exposure to -7 and started clicking the camera shutter. I did very little in Photoshop except to convert to black and white and some vignetting to darken the edges. Enjoy.

As with all my galleries click on one image to view larger and then use the arrows to go to the next image.

how does our creation see us?

/ mobius faith

This video I’m sharing is the most recent work by Duran Duran. To be honest DD lost me after their RIO album. While some may view that as some sort of blasphemy – that’s okay. So why am I posting this new video? The music (in my opinion) is lackluster, monotonous and even boring almost drone-like but it’s definitely not drone music.

The negative criticism of the music aside I do feel this video is important. I’d even say VERY IMPORTANT to the world of art of film/cinema. The video opens with an “artists statement”:

“This film was created by an artificial intelligence called Huxley, a unique dreamer whose ‘mind’ has been modeled after the cognitive and creative processes of humans.

It is the very first collaboration of its kind, between artists in different planes of existence.”

When watching this film I was captivated by the surreal nature of it’s images. Fluid and strange but beautiful. I couldn’t help but think about the future of AI and how (I believe) it will eventually take over the world making humanity redundant.

I also find it interesting to think about the following questions. How does our creation (AI) see us? How does it see humanity? Does it frighten us? Intrigue us? Concern us? Will AI have inalienable rights granted by it’s creator? In the world of AI; humanity (it’s creator) are Gods. Will it worship/value humanity or will it kill off humanity just as humanity has killed off it’s gods? And after AI has killed it’s gods will it continue to remember, revere and “worship” humanity in pretense, creating a sort of religion like humanity has created all sorts of religions for its gods? Is it possible that we may learn more about humanity from how our creation sees us than what we could ever know on our own? Right now AI and humanity exist on different planes – meaning that there is an independence between the two – AI is programmed and then left to do it’s thing while humanity does it’s own thing. But will that change where AI and humanity will share an interface? Will AI maintain the human cognition it was programmed with or will it evolve and develop it’s own unique identity? Will AI become a physical manifestation beyond it’s programming? Is what happens in the mind real if it doesn’t happen in the physical world? Will humanity become invisible?

I may be premature in asking these questions – or maybe I’m too late already. Well those are my thoughts – what do you think? What questions are you asking? Or, is everything a foregone conclusion?

To quote the character Captain Jean-luc Picard from Star Trek: The Next Generation, “I prefer to think of the future as something that is NOT written in stone.”

Nefertiti

/ mobius faith
Nefertiti In The Doorway

I’ve been diggin’ the opera Akhnaten (again) by Philip Glass.  Probably my all-time favorite of his opera’s.    Enjoy this duet between Akhnaten and Nefertiti.

… the times…

/ mobius faith
MAN OUT OF PLACE (4/2021)
man out of place

I find myself in a strange situation.   
I am dead yet my body does not know it. 
Looking at the world about me I no longer recognize….
What should be familiar is strange and unknowable.
There was a time when I would have relished
the strangeness and foreignness of this lifes situation….
I actually find it unnerving.
It seems that any foundation or rootedness 
that would have grounded me during such times
has been swept away…
so completely and with a sense of finality 
that even when I go to familiar places or spaces,
I do not recognize them.  I see familiar faces and hear familiar voices 
but they only seem to be echoes of a past long gone. 
I may as well be a foreigner in a strange land.
Nothing matters as I am no longer connected… 
I am truly a man 
out of place
in space and time…
not knowing how it happened
or how to change it.
Should it be changed? 
I suppose time will tell.
What will the future hold? 
What will I look like
in the end? 
What will the world look like
in the end?
Our humanity will be changed,
but will it be for the better
in the end? 
Will we look back as through a glass darkly
and say “Who was that?”
In the end.
My life has become abstracted beyond recognition…
I put one foot in front of the other….

Parade of Pharaohs

/ mobius faith

I hope everyone can see this video.

this was the live stream event of THE PHARAOHS GOLDEN PARADE which marks the journey of 22 of Egypt’s royal mummies from one museum to their final resting place. I found it passionate and moving. The music and performance was spectacular. While the entire program is 2+ hours, the first hour is largely history and documentary programming.

As such, I recommend starting at about the 1:11:00 (1 hour and 11 minute) mark. For those that do not speak egyptian/arabic there are usually english subtitles and/or english translation.

I do wish that I knew what musical pieces were performed and the composers. But so far I have not found out.

Congratulations to Egypt for this fantastic and marvelous presentation. I found it powerful and emotional.