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Enlarge / An AI-generated image from an #aicinema still series called "Vinyl Vengeance" by Julie Wieland, created using Midjourney. (credit: Julie Wieland / Midjourney)
Since last year, a group of artists have been using an AI image generator called Midjourney to create still photos of films that don't exist. They call the trend "AI cinema." We spoke to one of its practitioners, Julie Wieland, and asked her about her technique, which she calls "synthography," for synthetic photography.
Last year, image synthesis models like DALL-E 2, Stable Diffusion, and Midjourney began allowing anyone with a text description (called a "prompt") to generate a still image in many different styles. The technique has been controversial among some artists, but other artists have embraced the new tools and run with them.
While anyone with a prompt can make an AI-generated image, it soon became clear that some people possessed a special talent for finessing these new AI tools to produce better content. As with painting or photography, the human creative spark is still necessary to produce notable results consistently.
This looks amazing. Follow the link. I'm working with Spooky on things for my graduate drama class next term. The title is Victorian Drama.
by P.D. Lesko
I recently read this great opinion piece by Julien Berman published in the Harvard Crimson. Titled “Adjuncts: The Faculty Underclass,” I expected it to be the same old tired arguments in favor of breathing, clean water and, yes, the need to treat adjunct faculty better. Much to my surprise, I got to the end of the piece and muttered, “What a great idea!” Berman, a college sophomore, writes, “Here are some immediate and practical solutions that universities across the country can implement to improve adjunct well-being and thus the quality of education received by undergraduates. First, institutions should index the adjunct pay per course to local living conditions.”
Yes, yes, yes. What a simple and elegant solution. Kind of. (I’ll get to that in a moment.) Adjunct faculty at NYU have, for years, used the high cost of living in New York as a reason to push for much higher per course pay. The NYU adjuncts’ latest contract, while not perfect, was a huge improvement where per course pay is concerned.
For non-tenured faculty who teach in cities such as Boston, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle and Chicago, the cost-of-living solution to piddling pay should be a must have for every part-time faculty union bargaining team. Never a fan of the push for $10,000 per course (it’s still three-course per year pay that is around the poverty line for an individual poverty), adjunct faculty in those cities need to be paid $25,000 per course, plus benefits.
So what happens when adjuncts at college’s in cities where the cost of living is low have their pay tied to local cost of living? Julien Berman either didn’t think of that. Perhaps, on the other hand, he’s a budding capitalist. In his piece he wrote: “From an economic standpoint, this move makes sense: Tenured professors are expensive investments under long-term contracts, whereas adjuncts are cheap hires that can be laid off more easily.” Either way, tying per course pay to the cost of living in a small city or town, would be a disaster for those non-tenured faculty. In those cases, adjunct pay would, instead, be better improved by being tied to what full-time faculty are paid.
Another of Berman’s suggestions is something I have been criticizing loudly for decades. He writes: “Second, adjunct pay raises should match full-time faculty pay raises, at least on a percentage basis.” No. No. And no. In fact, until adjuncts at a college or university reach pay parity (read more about that here), unions that represent adjuncts need to push for big pay raises, like 60, 70, 80, 100 percent. What Julien suggests is called the “equal percentage raise.” Slippery union leaders push this to make it appear as though they are treating all members equally and fairly.
Equal percentage raises for adjunct faculty union members are back of the bus union representation at its worst. Why? If a union negotiates a five percent raise for all faculty, who benefits the most, materially? The people who earn the largest salaries, of course, the full-time faculty.
The preceptors (non-tenured faculty) at Harvard launched their official campaign to form a union in Feb. 2023. In a press release, “Harvard Academic Workers-United Automobile Workers stated that it seeks to bargain a contract for the University’s non-tenure-track faculty, which includes lecturers, preceptors, postdoctoral fellows, instructors, researchers, teaching assistants, and adjunct faculty. Non-tenure-track faculty may only hold teaching appointments up to eight years,” according to reporting in the Harvard Crimson.
Union organizers have said they don’t expect Harvard administrators to voluntarily recognize the union. Any way you slice it, though, Cambridge/Boston is one of the most expensive areas in which to live. The average non-tenured faculty member at the university earns around $50,000. Average monthly rents in the area top $2,700. Full-time faculty at Harvard earn, on average, $182,992 per year.
Berman writes: “The adjunct problem has grown as universities have started to increasingly hire part-time labor. From an economic standpoint, this move makes sense: Tenured professors are expensive investments under long-term contracts, whereas adjuncts are cheap hires that can be laid off more easily. However, when university professors are paid so little that they are forced to sleep in their cars and apply for food stamps, it might be time for a change.”
Ya think?
Trance music never went away, writes Philip Sherburne, and I agree. But I’ve not progressed with the sound since I first fell for it 25 years ago, when I was a wide-eyed, impressionable teenage raver. Whenever I listen to my “Old School Trance Favorites” playlist on Spotify, I’m whisked back to 1998 — on some dance floor in some dark warehouse, with a classic track like Three Drives’ “Greece 2000” or Veracocha’s “Carte Blanche” blasting in the room. The trance we danced to in those years was uplifting, life-changing. But as I ventured deeper into this world, the sound was a mere step in a longer journey — it marked a period of raving with training wheels, of hours-long DJ sets of spoon-fed transcendence.
Still, as some of Sherburne’s sources perfectly put it in the piece, there’s just something about trance, and listening to a “vintage” trance anthem from the late ’90s and early ’00s, however schmaltzy it may be, can give me shivers like no other type of music.
Sherburne writes a fun piece about the revival — or perhaps reimagination — of trance among a younger generation of producers and DJs who are outside the scene and, thus, more open-minded and experimental.
But where those projects carried a whiff of mischief, the new wave of trance feels like a more earnest and direct homage. Perhaps it’s a generational shift, as artists who first discovered electronic music from their friends’ stepdads’ Tiësto CDs begin to look back on their own musical upbringing. Maybe it’s just that people are jonesing for all the euphoria they can get right now.
Vestbirk believes that the shift is partly generational. A new wave of clubbers doesn’t have the same prejudices about trance that the old guard did. And the artsier end of the scene is bored with techno, which—in its overground, festival-filling incarnation, with an emphasis on formulaic structures, identikit sound design, and gaudy spectacle—has become as stale, commercialized, and ridiculous as mainstream trance once was.
Height-adjustable tables are hardly anything new. These days, they’re found beyond contract spaces in many home offices and lauded for their flexibility in providing variety and comfort to those needing to maximize their productivity. However, they are sometimes a bit of an eyesore, require access to power or feel to cumbersome to adjust manually, and they often take up a lot of space. Herman Miller’s latest offering, the Passport Work Table, takes away these pain points and adds in much needed flexibility and adjustability for those looking to level up their productivity, whether at home or in the office.
If Goldilocks were to test today’s office desk solutions, she would say that the Passport Work Table was “just right” in terms of footprint and space. The surface is large enough for your essentials (laptop, notebook, a drink of choice). Any larger and you start to impede on the flexibility of the table to fit in small spaces or the mobility of it to maneuver around the home, the latter aided by the single-column base and lightweight construction. Accessories like bag hooks and privacy screens can be added if those types of needs are necessary in a specific office (or section of the office) but they don’t increase the table’s footprint.
While there are times a larger work surface is needed, there are perhaps even more occasions when a user just needs to carve out a small space that can be easily put away afterwards (like in a home) or pulled up for an impromptu meeting (like at the workplace). The Passport Work Tables’s small size is, indeed, its biggest flex for today’s hybrid work environments.
Passport is available in two sizes: one with a height adjustment range of 12” with a 22×16″ work surface, the other with a height adjustment range of 18” and a 27×20” work surface. At a starting price of $600, Passport also offers a wide range of finishes, colors, and additional customization through accessories which help to create the perfect work desk for any office style.
For more information on the Passport Work Table, visit hermanmiller.com.
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by Glenn Sacks
On her first day in office, Arkansas governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders signed an executive order banning “indoctrination and critical race theory” in schools.
She’s far from alone: a recent Education Week analysis found that over the past two years, bills, executive orders, or other means that would ban “divisive concepts,” particularly critical race theory, have appeared in 42 states.
With an eye to enforcing such measures, Fox News host Tucker Carlson calls for cameras in classrooms and a “civilian review board in every town” to root out teacher bias. Since I began teaching high school social studies in 1990, I’ve never seen such scrutiny of what we teach.
I believe that educators, particularly social studies teachers, should teach controversial subjects. How? My high school social studies teacher showed me.
He didn’t pontificate upon the controversies of the day—he stuck to the curriculum and the textbook. In other words, he taught me exactly what not to do. As teachers, it isn’t enough to present the material; we need to make the subject engaging.
Yes, it was my fault that I gained little from his class. My friend, a self-described “robotically efficient” student, was able to learn a lot from this teacher. I squandered the opportunity. But many of my classmates also found his class boring. Occasionally, someone would ask the teacher his opinion about a current issue, and I’d perk up from my daydreams. He’d only say, “Now’s not the time for that,” and, disappointed, I would start to fade out again.
Largely because of social media, more than in any other recent generation, our students’ lives are steeped in politics. Students want to know what their teachers think of the videos and posts they see about current controversies.
When we social studies teachers pretend that we don’t have an opinion, our students feel that we’re holding out on them, and that they’re being shortchanged. How could a teacher not have an opinion about the types of issues they’ve spent their lives studying?
Sometimes I think, “the material I’m teaching is interesting—how did my teacher make it so boring?” Often, it was because it was drained of any sense of controversy, of battle, of drama, of people fighting for a cause.
Critics confuse being opinionated with being partisan. Having a viewpoint doesn’t mean you can’t credit the other side when they’re correct. I oppose Donald Trump, but I do explain to my students that the Left sometimes criticizes him for silly reasons and puts him in double binds.
For example, when Trump was friendly to North Korea, he was accused of cozying up to dictators. When he was adversarial, he was labeled a warmonger.
Having a viewpoint doesn’t mean that you can’t explain the other side’s view. When speaking of an environmental law, for example, I might add, “conservative opponents contend it would drive up businesses’ costs and deter further investment—and sometimes that happens.”
When a student challenges me, I say, “I’ll tell you why you’re right, then explain the problems with your argument.” If a student fervently disagrees on an issue, I might toss him my marker, sit in back, and say, “OK, educate us.” And yes, this will be on the test—I hold the other students responsible for anything this student teaches, just as if I had taught it.
When a controversy is being debated, the teacher should modulate the political angle to encourage further discussion. A few months ago, I invited a conservative former student to give a presentation supporting the Republican Party in the November 2022 elections.
He did a creditable job, but a few students aggressively challenged him. I then explained some of the flaws in the arguments leveled against the conservative student, using them to demonstrate curriculum concepts.
For example, when one student linked a moderate California Republican congressman to the events of January 6, 2021, I explained that this was a “guilt by association” tactic and provided some other cases in which it was used by both Democrats and Republicans.
Some conservative critics are unconsciously lumping two distinct issues together. Yes, the (rare) instances when a teacher personally attacks or disparages students for their political beliefs are a problem. But the vastly more common scenario is when students or parents are unhappy because political views that they agree with are being criticized.
Critics have the right to demand we treat those who disagree with us respectfully. They don’t have the right to demand that we always agree with them.
I can’t promise that no student ever walks out of my class annoyed, and no teacher could contend that their students are never bored. But the further a class gets from what is happening in the real world, the less engaged students will be. If a teacher is opinionated but fair, the various sides of an argument will emerge in a productive, compelling way.
Enlarge / A computer-generated gavel hovers over a laptop. (credit: Getty Images)
Some artists have begun waging a legal fight against the alleged theft of billions of copyrighted images used to train AI art generators and reproduce unique styles without compensating artists or asking for consent.
A group of artists represented by the Joseph Saveri Law Firm has filed a US federal class-action lawsuit in San Francisco against AI-art companies Stability AI, Midjourney, and DeviantArt for alleged violations of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, violations of the right of publicity, and unlawful competition.
The artists taking action—Sarah Andersen, Kelly McKernan, Karla Ortiz—"seek to end this blatant and enormous infringement of their rights before their professions are eliminated by a computer program powered entirely by their hard work," according to the official text of the complaint filed to the court.
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