Twenty Twenty Four

N.B. This piece is unoptimized and may be demanding for computers without accelerated graphics. Designed for full screen viewing, and runs better when!

Welcome to Twenty Twenty Four! Each year, for the past decade or so, I've been making a 'cover art' to mark the new year. For 2024 I have made a work of concrete 3D poetry.  Specifically, this piece is a visualised word2vec model of the constituent lexicon of a paper I wrote concerning the current state of image-synthesising "AI" tools (an inescapable and exhausting topic in 2023). The word2vec toolset I made builds simple, multi-dimensional word-embeddings that can be used in a variety of applications. Nonetheless, when these dimensions are reduced and mapped along 3 axes, and the embeddings are scaled up by many factors, they can be rendered into a pleasing galaxy of textual constellations. To my own surprise, 2024 will be something of a "year of AI" for me, so I felt this piece would be most fitting.

The source paper was published in a special issue of OLH, “Cultural Representations of Machine Vision”: Carter, R., (2023) “Machine Visions: Mapping Depictions of Machine Vision through Critical Image Synthesis”. Open Library of Humanities 9(2). DOI: https://doi.org/10.16995/olh.10077. Readers wanting a more visually engaging exploration of the research that led to this paper, can go here: https://richardacarter.com/machine-visions/.