- Ridiculously unreasonable, unsound, or incongruous; an absurd argument: extremely silly or ridiculous absurd humour
- Having no rational or orderly relationship to human life: meaningless, an absurd universe, lacking order, or value; an absurd existence
- Dealing with the absurd or with absurdism; absurd theatre
Absurd (noun): the state or condition in which human beings exist in an irrational and meaningless universe and in which human life has no ultimate meaning — usually used with the theatre of the absurd (Merriam Webster Dictionary)
Will algorithmic creativity evolve and create an even more absurd universe? Or will it enrich and expand our existence? The following images were created using machine learning trained on dutch Golden Age floral still life paintings. The absurdist texts were created by machine learning apps in response to the words ‘absurd’ and ‘absurd still life.’
Absurd Algorithms One
The Dog in the second master bedroom.
You can just see the hole in the curtains from one of the strings of Christmas lights. The view from my office window.
Notice the little ball on the roof, courtesy of one of the cats. The living room after 3 days of snow.
That little fox is Nudge, from my parents.
Click on her and you’ll see her on my other blog. The tree after a full evening of colouring, singing, and making ornaments.
Don’t you love those caramels? They’re so dark, it looks like the tree is bleeding. This is Nudge at her best!
She was having a ball, under the tree.
I have the house to myself, well, sort of.
Ski is at his parents’ house, and after watching some of the Inauguration, he went with my sister to look at some property they are considering purchasing.
I’ve made a quick salad for dinner, and we’re just hanging out for a few hours before it’s time to leave.
The streets are still snow packed and icy, and it’s likely that I’ll be driving in all over again
Absurd Algorithms Two
Absurd, I know.
I called first thing in the morning and they had me come to the lab where I filled out all the paperwork.
My job was then to lie back and they drew my blood.
I was feeling pretty good about myself.
I know, not a very original and helpful way to get to the point, but sometimes you just can’t think of a more clever way to get a lot of people through a door.
By the time I actually saw the doctor I felt a little like a human pin cushion.
She took one look at my finger and said, “Okay still life machine
Absurd Algorithms Three
So, why did he let himself get his hands blown out of shape? Well there’s probably a pretty decent explanation to this one.
Just because a piece of paper isn’t much of a thing doesn’t make it any less of a life machine.
This paper from 2003 was shown at a special issue of IEEE, which was kind of an obvious attempt at a computer game. Unfortunately, it also used the same approach that was used in video games, but with a smaller piece of hardware.
Why, really?
Well, it was meant to show, in the same way as a paper clip, that if we don’t remove the paper from a game-board, then what happens when we change everything else in the game world somehow?
Let’s assume that we don’t change anything, and we’re trying to change the game world using this paper clip. Well if we do, then it starts behaving exactly like a paper clip that suddenly transforms to a paper square.
This could give us any number of reasons of how this sort of thing can be done.
And let’s ignore the physical consequences of that, too.
For example.
One possibility is that the paper clip’s paper square ends in a bunch of tiny holes, while the other end (the paper square itself), would have some other strange properties.
And of course it is possible that we’ve removed the paper
Absurd Algorithms Four
The most interesting part of the episode was actually the moment when, after some time is in order to get him back on the train, there appears in sight a huge, unidentifiable man, wearing full dark clothes with dark hair and a black suit. His face is actually red, his eyes red, and he looks more like the man who attacked our protagonist. He is really an ex-police detective, who may or may not be the killer.
Even worse in this scene is the fact that the man looks as though an octopus is being fed to him.
This is quite a little bad, because we all know that octopuses feed only to children, so this one in particular and this one in particular is of that breed. You can’t really understand who he is, even if you can imagine him as a fish at the end of an ocean. I mean, you have to imagine all the fish who ate his life (my favourite movie that you can remember). Yet he clearly has no idea what “fish” really means.
The weird thing is, he doesn’t know anything about anything about the octopus, other than that it is that the “fish” and “fish bait” which this dude was selling are actually pretty important. And also, as stated for the last few paragraphs, we see the octopus lying in his cage.
This post accompanies my current non-digital works showing at The Crypt Gallery London as part of FUBAR Collective’s Absurd exhibition which opens on the 26th August, 2021 from 6pm.