Ian Bunn | Political & Popular Culture Arts

Michael Bruce Sterling the 58 year old American science fiction author best known for his novels and his work on the Mirrorshades anthology helping to define the cyberpunk genre has been featured by George Dvorsky in an article published on io9 titled ‘Bruce Sterling Thinks Artificial Intelligence Has Jumped the Shark’. Dvprsky states “…if his recent comments about the potential risks of greater-than-human artificial intelligence — or lack thereof — are any indication, he’s itching to start a giant fight among futurists. …Sterling penned a four paragraph article saying that we shouldn’t fear the onset of super AI because a “Singularity has no business model.” He writes: This aging sci-fi notion has lost its conceptual teeth. Plus, its chief evangelist, visionary Ray Kurzweil, just got a straight engineering job with Google. Despite its weird fondness for AR goggles and self-driving cars, Google is not going to finance any eschatological cataclysm in which superhuman intelligence abruptly ends the human era. Google is a firmly commercial enterprise. It’s just not happening. All the symptoms are absent. Computer hardware is not accelerating on any exponential runway beyond all hope of control. We’re no closer to “self-aware” machines than we were in the remote 1960s. Modern wireless devices in a modern Cloud are an entirely different cyber-paradigm than imaginary 1990s “minds on nonbiological substrates” that might allegedly have the “computational power of a human brain.” A Singularity has no business model, no major power group in our society is interested in provoking one, nobody who matters sees any reason to create one, there’s no there there. So, as a Pope once remarked, “Be not afraid.” We’re getting what Vinge predicted would happen without a Singularity, which is “a glut of technical riches never properly absorbed.” There’s all kinds of mayhem in that junkyard, but the AI Rapture isn’t lurking in there. It’s no more to be fretted about than a landing of Martian tripods.”

Inspired by George Dvorsky, io9 ow.ly/gXH7O Image source Pablo Balbontin Arenas ow.ly/gXH9v

John Kampfner the 49 year old British external adviser to Google on free expression and culture and an adviser to the Global Network Initiative, which brings together technology companies and civil society to address human rights issues, has published an article in The Guardian titled ‘The fight for control of the internet has become critical’. In the article he argues that if plans to put cyberspace under a secretive UN agency go through, states’ censoring of the web will be globally enshrined. Kampfner states “Over the past few years, largely out of sight, governments have been clawing back freedoms on the internet, turning an invention that was designed to emancipate the individual into a tool for surveillance and control. In the next few months, this process is set to be enshrined internationally, amid plans to put cyberspace under the authority of a largely secretive and obscure UN agency. If this succeeds, this will be an important boost to states’ plans to censor the web and to use it to monitor citizens. Virtually all governments are at it. Some are much worse than others. …All governments, whatever their hue, cite similar threats: terrorism and organised crime, child pornography and intellectual property are the ones most commonly used. Unsurprisingly these, and local variants, are used by dictatorships, who need merely to point to precedents set in the west to counter any criticism with the charge of hypocrisy. The internet, as originally envisaged, was borderless. In theory, anyone could – if they had access to the bandwidth – find out information anywhere and communicate with anyone.”

Inspired by The Guardian ow.ly/djkTI image source Twitter ow.ly/djkhk

You're either a luvvy or a boffin (September 10th)

Eric Emerson Schmidt the 56 year old US engineer and Chairman of Google delivered the annual Edinburgh MacTaggart lecture, where he provided a cutting critique on the education system in the UK. Schmidt cited a two camp system with “a drift to the humanities… To use what I’m told is the local vernacular, you’re either a luvvy or a boffin”. Schmidt stated that while the UK had a record of innovation, it was failing industrially to make the transition from concept to production, “The UK is the home of so many media-related inventions. You invented photography. You invented TV, yet today, none of the world’s leading exponents in these fields are from the UK. Thank you for your innovation, thank you for your brilliant ideas. You’re not taking advantage of them on a global scale.”

Inspired by James Robinson http://ow.ly/6fit0 image source Guillaume Paumier http://ow.ly/6fiAk

Trawling streets for data (May 15th)

My work is about iconic people, places and events of our day.  Recorded visually through daily compilations of manipulated digital images, posted online and disseminated via online media and social networks. The works are diaristic in nature that metaphorically record a spectator’s experience of the contemporary digital age.  The resulting work intentionally has a painterly aesthetic acknowledging my historical painting practice.

Adapting Pop Art’s notion of mass media imagery into a context of the contemporary digital age, the work draws on a myriad points of reference. Utilizing fractured images to provide an allusion to the digital noise pounding away daily into our sub consciousness.  The work diverges from the traditional Pop Art notion of a pronounced repetition of a consumer icon, instead this work focuses on the deluge of contemporary digital content. The compilation of the fragmented imagery is vividly distractive, not unlike cable surfing or a jaunt through Times Square.

The work is premised on the basis that Pop art in its beginnings, freeze-framed what consumers of popular culture experienced into iconic visual abstractions. With the advent of the techno age, visual information circulates in such quantities, so rapidly and exponentially, that to comprehend a fraction of it all becomes a kind of production process in itself.  Hence this work considers fragmented elements of Pop Culture through an artistic and conceptual exploration of specific people and events of the day.

The works are presented as individual pieces printed with Archival-Inks on 308g Cottonrag-paper, along with A3 sized bound monthly editions, and monthly looped video compilations.
www.ianbunn.com