A New Generation Of Memes

Home
United States
Madison, WI
A New Generation Of Memes

All memes are original

Some policies I support
Universal Basic Income
Ranked Choice Voting
Decrimi

04/09/2025

While we bicker, the bots are learning. 🤖🇺🇸🏭

11/07/2024

“For of those to whom much is given, much is required. And when at some future date the high court of history sits in judgment on each one of us—recording whether in our brief span of service we fulfilled our responsibilities to the state—our success or failure, in whatever office we may hold, will be measured by the answers to four questions:

First, were we truly men of courage—with the courage to stand up to one’s enemies—and the courage to stand up, when necessary, to one’s associates—the courage to resist public pressure, as well as private greed?

Secondly, were we truly men of judgment—with perceptive judgment of the future as well as the past—of our own mistakes as well as the mistakes of others—with enough wisdom to know that we did not know, and enough candor to admit it?

Third, were we truly men of integrity—men who never ran out on either the principles in which they believed or the people who believed in them—men who believed in us—men whom neither financial gain nor political ambition could ever divert from the fulfillment of our sacred trust?

Finally, were we truly men of dedication—with an honor mortgaged to no single individual or group, and compromised by no private obligation or aim, but devoted solely to serving the public good and the national interest.

Courage—judgment—integrity—dedication—these are the historic qualities of the Bay Colony and the Bay State—the qualities which this state has consistently sent to this chamber on Beacon Hill here in Boston and to Capitol Hill back in Washington.

And these are the qualities which, with God’s help, this son of Massachusetts hopes will characterize our government’s conduct in the four stormy years that lie ahead.

Humbly I ask His help in that undertaking—but aware that on earth His will is worked by men. I ask for your help and your prayers, as I embark on this new and solemn journey.”

-John F. Kennedy, The City Upon a Hill Speech (1961)

11/07/2024

“The technocrats of medicine tend to promote the interests of science rather than the needs of society. The practitioners corporately constitute a research bureaucracy. Their primary responsibility is to science in the abstract or, in a nebulous way, to their profession. Their personal responsibility for the particular client has been resorbed into a vague sense of power extending over all tasks and clients of all colleagues. Medical science applied by medical scientists provides the correct treatment, regardless of whether it results in a cure, or death sets in, or there is no reaction on the part of the patient. It is legitimized by statistical tables, which predict all three outcomes with a certain frequency. The individual physician in a concrete case may still remember that he owes nature and the patient as much gratitude as the patient owes him if he has been successful in the use of his art. But only a high level of tolerance for cognitive dissonance will allow him to carry on in the divergent roles of healer and scientist.”

- Ivan Illich, Limits to Medicine (1975)

11/07/2024

“Pre-industrial society waited for the harvests, the industrial society waited for progress. Today it’s not the wait, but dread that characterizes us. The three societies have three distinct existential climates in relation to the experience of time: the climate of agriculture is that of patience, the climate of industry is that of hope, and ours is that of boredom. …

There is a “bossa nova” that sings of a functionary that waits for the five o’clock train, while his wife waits for him at home with the dinner and in her womb a child waits to be born in order to wait for the five o’clock train. This is the phenomenological description of waiting in times of functionalism. That is what we wait for and what awaits us. That is what the futurologists calculate and what the planners program. However, these calculations and programs cannot obviously count with the unexpected. Despite the theories of catastrophes, the unexpected is unpredictable. And everything that is unexpected is terrifying. Because only the unexpected is capable of transforming our current form of waiting. So that we hope that the unexpected, the catastrophe, happens. We hope for that which terrorizes us. During such expectancy hope and dread amalgamate. This is the fundamental “balance of terror” under which we live.”

- Vilem Flusser, Our Wait (1983)

07/03/2024

Doing my part to help meme Kamala into the presidency

05/09/2024

My core supporters and followers seemed to appreciate my set of Kennedy images where I started to explain my artistic practice. Last post I mentioned the concept of latent space without explaining it. At a high level, latent space is a compressed high dimensional representation of a dataset based on dominant extracted features. Locations in latent space are defined by the closeness in relationship between those features. So as an example, in an image model, two photos of dogs would be very close together in latent space, a photo of a cat and a dog would be relatively close but further apart, and a photo of a dog and an abstract painting of a tree would be very far apart. So think of latent space in this example as the realm of all possible images that a generative model could produce mapped by similarity of dominant visual features. More abstractly, think of Borges’ Library of Babel as a prototypical latent space of text.

My academic background is in archaeology, and my interactions with generative models reflect that background. I see my work as exploring the latent space of different models looking for interesting visual or literary artifacts buried among endless piles of noise, mediocrity, and chaos. When people say that generative models only produce bad quality content, that’s a sign that the users are bad at prompting. There are incredibly interesting things to be found in the immense latent spaces of state of the art generative models, it just takes effort and patience to dig them up.

For every image in this 10 slide set the starting point was a presidential portrait of George Washington. I then told Midjourney v6 to use that image as a prompt according to the same process defined in my last post. Below is another example of my wandering through Midjourney’s latent space.

1. Oscar Bluemner
2. Oscar Bluemner and Mark Rothko
3. Mark Rothko
4. Mark Rothko and Jean-Michel Basquiat
5. Jean-Michel Basquiat
6. Jean-Michel Basquiat and Jackson Po***ck
7. Jackson Po***ck
8. Jackson Po***ck and Georgia O’Keefe
9. Georgia O’Keefe
10. Georgia O’Keefe and Oscar Bluemner

01/06/2024

Some Midjourney memes from drafts. Hope you like them

12/23/2023

In a better world Amazon wouldn’t have bought Goodreads and we’d be able to have a Goodreads wrapped season. But since we don’t live in that world, I’m riding Obama’s coattails and making some favorites lists of my own for 2023.
-
Without further ado here are my top 10 books. Swipe to see short reviews for my favorites.

12/22/2023

Obama just dropped his yearly book roundup for 2023, so here are my top 10 of the year.

11/30/2023

Alright I haven’t been ratioed in a while so here’s a quick thought for people to hate. I have mixed feeling about Henry Kissinger.

Yes he was instrumental in many of Americas foreign policy blunders over the past few decades. Many of which were profound moral failings on top of their strategic failings. But he didn’t make those choices alone, he was a man who was emblematic of the attitudes of his time. A Holocaust survivor, an inheritor of a rabid anti-communism of the 40s and 50s, a member of the liberal power elite.

But he also was a thoughtful man, and in recent years his writing on artificial intelligence changed how I felt about him and his legacy. While most technocrats are pretending to be philosophers and most philosophers and politicians are pretending to be expert technologists, Kissinger seemed surprisingly aware of who he was. His writing on AI asks many questions and answers almost none. I found I could respect that— even appreciate it at points— even if his role in the Vietnam war (and resulting spillover into neighboring countries) is a stain his legacy will never shake.

His 2018 Atlantic article on AI is well worth reading and I’ll end these passing thoughts (for admittedly I haven’t done enough reading about Kissinger to speak conclusively about my feelings) with a passage from that article.

“The Enlightenment started with essentially philosophical insights spread by a new technology. Our period is moving in the opposite direction. It has generated a potentially dominating technology in search of a guiding philosophy…AI developers, as inexperienced in politics and philosophy as I am in technology, should ask themselves some of the questions I have raised here in order to build answers into their engineering efforts.… This much is certain: If we do not start this effort soon, before long we shall discover that we started too late.”

11/30/2023

Low effort meme to let you all know that Henry Kissinger has passed away at the age of 100

11/29/2023

Happy Spotify Wrapped to all who celebrate! 🎵🎸🥁🎹
-
Repost from last year. Follow for more!

Address

Madison, WI
53711

Website

https://www.redbubble.com/people/ANewGenofMemes/shop?utm_source=rb-native-app&utm_campaign=share-artist&utm_medium=ios

Alerts

Be the first to know and let us send you an email when A New Generation Of Memes posts news and promotions. Your email address will not be used for any other purpose, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Contact The Organization

Send a message to A New Generation Of Memes:

Shortcuts

Want your organization to be the top-listed Government Service in Madison?

A New Generation Of Memes

04/09/2025

11/07/2024

11/07/2024

11/07/2024

07/03/2024

05/09/2024

01/06/2024

12/23/2023

12/22/2023

11/30/2023

11/30/2023

11/29/2023

Address

Website

Alerts

Contact The Organization

Shortcuts

Share

Category