Submitting once again to the algorithmic overlords: the JPG newsletter illustrated by the Midjourney bot
TLDR: on machines stealing our jobs and some other cool stuff about jpegs
I’ve been following Midjourney and other text-to-image CLIP and VQGAN implementations for a while, and I think it’s time I submit to our machine overlords, the contemporary Skynet and let them do my job for me. I know I have done this before - in the GPT-3 prompted edition of the newsletter back in December - and I will do it again, and again. I will exhaust the AI resources of the world in order to allow me for more procrastination and for more legroom for my writers’ block to expand ad aeternum. This I can promise you.
So yeah, long story short, there are many engines that create text-to-image, and infinite possibilities to leverage them as needed. However, Midjourney stands out, and everybody is talking about it and posting their prompted images with astonishing results. Here’s a cool list I found on Twitter the other day that might be interesting for you. And a very new substack post by Lynn Cherny that probably also knows more about this than I ever will.
While there are many conversations on the commercial use of the Midjourney prompted images, there are no guidelines unless someone abuses the bot’s capabilities (as far as my research into the Discord goes, of course). Anyways, experimenting with them with the purpose of illustrating a newsletter should be totally okay.
What’s happening on JPG (the company and platform)
This past month we onboarded two new team mates, and now we’re a happy team of 10 (disregard the team photo missing one of us). Rob and Billy have joined us as front end and back end engineers, and the team’s now working harmoniously, trying to push an update per week, and all is well.
On the non-dev front, William and I have been working on editorial and expanding communications - and most specifically, our main focus is now on dogfooding and using JPG to create essay/exhibitions that educate and display the best of the NFT scene.
William published last week a really nice one on dhof’s Corruption(s), the CC0 Compendium and What is the Lootverse.
And just yesterday we co-curated The Found Robbies, an exhibition on AI Generated Nude Portraits by Robbie Barrat, featuring an essay by my esteemed writer colleague.
Also check what Sam has been up to with Fingerprints at Global Art Forum, this interview to Trent and yours truly in So-Far, and the presentation I did alongside ETHBerlin, Other Internet, and Hito Steyerl of our governance and quadratic voting experiment in Bonn, Germany (open source code of the app here!).
New collabs
After the super positive outcome of our collab with Zora, Office Impart and Panke Gallery, we’re looking forward to more of these opportunities.
During March, we got the chance to join FingerprintsDAO, Aaron Penne and Deca for a competition that ended yesterday. The competition was launched to celebrate Aaron’s new series in collaboration with Fingerprints, Within/Without, that minted yesterday.
Our community came up with some brilliant exhibitions to participate in the competition.
Face Yourself by 0xRob
In April, we’ll be collaborating with Art and The Blockchain, the IRL exhibition that will take place during the Devconnect week in Amsterdam, curated by Jan-Robert Leegte and Stina Gustavsson, and Art Brussels, where we’re hosting a panel and supporting galleries and the organizers of the NFT component of the fair, Alex and Nicolas.
Also, if you are an artist from Chile, there’s an open call to participate in MAD LATAM’s exhibition that will be hosted on JPG!
If you think you have a good proposal for us, we’d love to hear from you - just contact us on Discord!
Favorite new NFTs + others
While some of these might be old news already, we love to share what creations we are currently adminirng at JPG, and the news around them, so here’s the best of the past few weeks:
Ecosystem news/ must reads (some are some weeks old, but all worth it!):
Not news, but I’m looking forward to hearing more about Artwrld
Charlotte Kent on smart contract aesthetics for Right Click Save
Yobot’s flashbots for NFTs- frontrunning your friends is about to get easy AF!
I can’t believe I just discovered this amazing series by Outland this week: they have been exploring collectors and their NFTs for a while now. Here’s Whiterabbit and ZKM, a German Museum I like, but explore them all!
Left Gallery’s (Harm van den Dorpel and Paloma Rodriguez’ browser based gallery) decided to shut down and move on, their last release being the Spike magazine covers NFTs, since Spike was the first to announce Left in 2016. Very circular and friendly way to putting an end to a gallery that’s been instrumental to net art and NFTs, but it’s time to move on for the co-founders so all best to them :)