Midweek News Podcast, Velocity Fund, PAFA, Shakespeare, Tap performances, and AI prejudices

Roberta: Hi everyone, it’s Roberta.

Ryan: And this is Ryan and this is the Midweek News

Roberta: On Artblog radio. Ryan, good morning and good morning. I hope you’re staying cool out there. It’s such another beastly day. I can’t believe it. I want to talk to you about two newsworthy things that I’m excited about. One in particular is the Velocity Fund.

Artblog is happy to announce that the Velocity Fund has found a new host in Asian Arts Initiative, which is a wonderful nonprofit organization serving the Asian arts community headquartered on Vine Street. The Velocity Fund has been around for I don’t know how many years now, quite a number. I didn’t do my due diligence and find that number for you, but they’ve had years of grantees, they believe in giving money directly to artists to do projects in the community.

So these are projects that we support. We are the media partner of the Velocity Fund and have been from the get-go. And so we will be, I’m going to be interviewing three of their current grantees and in the future and that’ll come up on Artblog. And I want to mention that in the fall, the Velocity Fund will have its open call for artists who want.

Support for community arts projects. And I should also say this is a re-granting program of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. So it’s really, it’s a lovely program and I’m really glad that they found a new host in Asian Arts initiative. It seems like a great, great fit. The other thing I want to say is that there seems to be continuing.

Turmoil is probably too strong a word, but topsy-turvy dumb at PA with Anna Marley, who was the chief of curatorial affairs at PA for many years, a very respected, cur curatorial voice at the museum. And she has now announced that she’s going to the Toledo Museum of Art to be the director of curatorial affairs.

And we wish her well. She’s been a, a great curator in Philadelphia, very well respected, as I said. And she will be missed. And you know, PA has lost a significant number of curators over the years recently. And so they’re museum building again, I do believe, and we wish them luck on that. And those are my two big things that I wanted to mention that I think are notable, notable, Ryan.

So let’s turn it over to you.

Ryan: Great. There’s a lot of events going on. There’s a lot of new things happening here in July. Firstly we just passed Bastille Day for those who celebrate Bastille Day. I’m a Tour de France watcher. I’m a cyclist, so I enjoy that kind of thing. So it’s always fun to see that Vi La France.

Yeah, so there’s been a lot of things in the news. I know a lot of people have seen the hundred-million-dollar Broad Street redo. We’ll get into that at some point. But that’s really interesting. Saw some of those images. Let us know what you think about that. We’d love to get some feedback of what you’re seeing and what you think about that topic.

We’d like to get into that later. There’s a lot of really interesting events coming up. A couple of things that, right off the bat that I’m looking forward to is Lady Hoofers is a tap group, a nonprofit group here in Philly, and they have a free event coming up tomorrow, July 18th at Dilworth Park. So that’s City Hall and that looks like a lot of fun. The weather looks like it’s cooler, which is very exciting because, I’m excited for that.

Icebox had an opening now one with everyone, which was apparently a huge show that opened last week. Second Thursday and it runs through August 17th. Well worth a show. Over 200 people participated in that, it looks massive. Definitely worth a view. That’s at Crane Arts. That’s on display now. 

I wanted to say happy birthday, third birthday to Iffy books that celebration is 20th of July. They’re at 404 South 20th Street. If you have not heard of Iffy books, check them out. 

And as usual, my theater shout-out of the week. Last week or maybe two weeks ago, we talked about, Shakespeare in the Park, in Clark Park. So obviously that’s running. I’d already talked about that. But as you like it is coming up on the 24th through the 28th. But my shout-out this week is another I thought I would do another Shakespeare. It’s Julius Caesar being done by Delaware Shakespeare in Rockwood Park in Wilmington that opens July 18th tomorrow and runs through August 4th.

So those are my big calendar events. Make sure you take a look at those. And Roberta, I was messing around with AI art generators as one is apt to do from time to time.

Roberta: Well, you may be apt to do, but I am not apt to do so. Tell us what, what did you find?

Ryan: I was playing with Microsoft, so as a nonprofit we were looking for different Microsoft products to see if something could assist us in our day-to-day. And I stumbled up across their image generator and it’s free to use and you get a certain number of generations per day. You type in some text and it gives you a graphic display of what you’ve written and so I it gave a few prompts and so then I asked it what would be a fun art prompt to see whether further AI generated text.

Then giving you a graphic prompt, so using a prompt, like a professional artist, three-quarter profile painting on canvas. And I was a little bit surprised, maybe naively so that they were all generally, I would describe them as white straight men painting on canvas in a three-quarter profile. Wow. I don’t know why that surprised me, but I was rather surprised. So then I thought, well, that’s interesting. So I chose a few other adjectives, female professional artists. What did that look like? That was interesting. It could only produce three. It gives, it’s supposed to give you four, but it somehow was, it got stuck and could only give me three. Then I thought, well, what would non-binary look like?

Well, that was an interesting result as well. What does a BIPOC professional artist look like? Also, rather revealing of what the algorithm thought and then what’s a queer professional artist look like. And again, it was different than I expected. And so I’m going to put a link to the image generator and a thumbnail of the images that it created.

And I would be curious what you think of it. And yeah, there is still, we talk about AI taking over, but I sure hope the current model generators don’t take over because they’re pretty racist. Pretty, pretty, pretty terrible. And you,

Roberta: well,

Ryan: and they’ve known this for a while, you think they would get about fixing it,

Roberta: Not to stereotype anybody, but when you say tech nerd, what comes to mind quick without even thinking; a white guy. A white guy comes to mind. Hmm. That’s, I mean, it’s in the culture, the white culture that we live in, and so I think that’s who’s programming AI or that’s because AI doesn’t come out of nothing. Somewhere, some humans have given it some ideas right, to play with, and then it’s supposed to grow and generate and become its own thing at some point and take over the world.

But whatever, if you’re a conspiracy theorist but who are the people, the initial people in the tech world that are implanting the prompts or the, you know, the, the personality of this ai. Well, I’m not sure it has

Ryan: I’m not sure it has a personality necessarily. It’s building on what it finds on the internet. So I think if nothing else, it’s really maybe a reflection on us as a culture, as a society. It’s like this is what we’ve built. So as far as the AI authors themselves, the people who are creating these large language models, maybe they are not in their intention isn’t. They couldn’t care less what it’s producing so much as it’s fast functional and exactly what you’re asking for, and it’s building predicated on what culture and society is looking at.

So I think for me, I think of it less like what is the quote-unquote tech bro producing and much more of this is a reflection of society. What do we think of when I say artists, what is it? Did you think? White, cis, straight male. Well, maybe. And so that’s more maybe a reflection on us. What are we creating?

So I  think specifically at Artblog, that is not our intention. That’s not our goal, and that’s not our desire and that’s not what we’re trying to, to build ourselves. So it was interesting to see that that was the result I was getting from Microsoft. Yeah. Not so much that their developers are much more at society in general.

Roberta: Yeah. I do think even though the company is called Open AI, that really big company that does all the big AI stuff it’s not really open. You know, there’s no such thing. And so it comes with already chains, it’s got chains in it already, and you know, it’s collecting your data. So who’s out there searching on a, for a, you know, image generation who’s doing that?

And so that may also be a reflection you know, on who is, who is doing the searching online. And that’s, you know, high hierarchies of. You know, what comes up first? What comes up second? I don’t know, it’s complicated. Algorithms are complicated, but people do write algorithms. They don’t self-generate an algorithm.

It may get tweaked by AI once it’s out there, but someone had to write or create, maybe right is not the right word, but create the original algorithm. So, and I don’t know who that was, but they are a person and they. Write it in a certain way. So I don’t know, but I hear you, Ryan, and I hear what you’re saying, but I do think that who’s searching and playing with all this stuff is skews a certain way too.

Sure. You know, people although I’m really kind of horrified. I would like to see some of those examples. I’d like to see some of those images. Did you save some of those images?

Ryan: Of course, yeah. They’ll be available in the description. We’ll put them, 

Roberta: Okay.

Ryan: On the show notes.

Roberta: That’d be great. That’s fun. Yeah.

Ryan: Yeah. I’d love some feedback. Tell me, tell me what you think about them.

Roberta: All right. Well, that’s, that’s about all I have, Ryan, you got anything? That’s it for me. Anything else on your mind? Yep. I will sign off then saying Stay cool everyone. We do believe it’s going to get cooler at a certain point, but hang in there, drink your fluids, and come back next week and we’ll see you then.

Ryan: Yeah. Thanks for listening everyone. This has been Artblog Radio’s Midweek News. And I’m Ryan.

Roberta: And I’m Roberta. Bye-Bye

Ryan: Bye-bye.