artificial intelligence

Equator used to be my favorite page on the whole instagram. It showcases old photos from pre-digital era. Initially it showed mostly photos from the equatorial regions, as the handle would suggests, ocassionally some from East Asia and other regions. I liked it because it showed the beauty of places on the equator in the olden days. Because we are so used to perceived old traditional European culture as beautiful, or those of East Asia, but very rarely are we exposed to the beauty of old traditional culture of South East Asia, before it became the cities they are today with the ugliness of modernity.

I also liked it because it reminds me of intentional photography. Most photos we see today are from social media and most of them either are for engagement or to seek attention to oneself. Photos on equator reminds me of the photography I used to know, the one taken with intention, the one that is taken to tell a story, the one that celebrates life.

But then, one day around the end of last year, the page posted a very weird archeology photo of a giant leaf with a bunch of white men around it. It was a very strange photo and it has a long strange caption explaining the whole archeology thing. Soon after it was posted people flooded the post with comments suggesting that the page was sold and was run by someone else who now post AI generated images. Not long after the post was taken down with no further explanation. And it keeps posting old photos although nowadays it clearly no longer focus on the equatorial region.

After that one AI generated image, I found myself examining each of their posts more carefully, with suspicion about whether it really was an old photo taken by a photographer or another fake one. An then soon after I no longer care. I no longer put likes on their posts like I used to, I just see and scroll past through. A lot of people today still don't see the problem with generative AI and I am unable to convince them that art is meaningless without the intention, without the process. That it is meaningless when it's not created by human. The point of people viewing old archival photographs is to see how people live in the old days, what it was like, how it might feels. What do you actually get by viewing a fake archeological leaf photo?

I fully realized that AI is here to stay and it's going to get even more sophisticated and I don't actually know what we should do about it. Then there's AI that is not genAI. AI is not not useful. AI is sometimes useful to make things efficient when you're already smart enough to know how to use it without wholly swallowing everything it tells you. But the way people are embracing it full on makes me think that we are totally heading to be a dumber and less humane society. And it is scary.

a humble documentary

"i’m a person who like to postpone things. i see no reason for being in a rush."


in this self-centric society today where everyone is trying to get attention to themselves through various kind of social medias and in this fast pace modern day where achievement is seen as everything, watching saul leiter approach to life and to art is very much like an oasis to the soul. seen as one of the pioneer of colored photography in the 50s, he said "i mean i think i’m being sincere when i say that i’ve never been driven. i didn’t walk around feeling that i was an important. i had not spent my life feeling important. what does that mean? i was hoping to be forgotten. i aspired to be unimportant". 

i watched this humble documentary twice to take note and to remind myself to not take things too seriously. "i don’t know. i’m not supposed to worry about it. i’m allowed not to worry". i guess i'm just not the kind of person who is inspired by a 23 year old kid who invent apps and sold it for billions. or a successful architect who built an iconic building reviving a city. or the first woman of minority who won certain kind of award. but i'm more than inspired by people like saul or bill cunningham, who lived their life with such simple attitude, and for the love of what they are doing, they just live to create, not for achievement or recognition. not for other people but for themselves. in the end, what's not to love about a person who described himself as, "a lost and confuse person who sometimes uses camera, with a touch of intelligence, but not so much."

the melancholy

"This town lies on top of a hill shaped like a sugar loaf. From the western end of a promenade lined with rather handsome trees, one looks down over a beautiful valley and then upward to pretty hills on the opposite side that form an amphitheater..." - Perugia in Italy, as described by Stendhal (1783-1842) on the book Travels in the South of France

amsterdam, noord-holland.

arriving at Amsterdam what immediately fascinated me was the bike culture. the city was crowded with bicycle everywhere and they're all moving harmoniously. being raised in a city built for cars, this atmosphere of a city crowded with bikes was a much pleasing experience. one of the things i liked doing while i was there was observing the way people dress while riding their bike. somehow they're just so visually pleasing. and yes i know obviously the lady on the last photo looks a bit piss off noticing me taking her picture. haha.

i remember me and my friend arriving at a street market. and in the middle of the market was a stylish street musician playing his violin. he's playing his last song and not long after he packed his violin and stuff and took a walk to a corner nearby to then disappeared on his bike. now that, was not something i got to experience everyday and it soothed the heart even when just remembering it.

la biennale di venezia

the most thought provoking moment of all the time i was in italy happened here at the biggest art festival in the world, la biennale di venezia. and it was the longest entry in my journal. although over all i think i only had like three hours to browse through the event due to the limited time we had. i remember i couldn't stop writing about it while all of my friends were sleeping in our train compartment riding back for hours to perugia.

what had became my conclusion was that it really takes something else to be able to create. certain emotion, certain pain, struggle, or anything negative. i had been in italy for three months prior to the event and it came across my mind that italy inherited too much beauty from the ancient time, it's like you take all the beauty around you for granted, and there's no longer any necessity to create more beauty coming from inside yourself.

it was also here that i really realized how a city, a place where you live, defines who you are and what you become. i was a byproduct of jakarta. my attitude towards life was shaped there. but when i was in italy i was a completely different person. it was on cyprus pavilion when all of the sudden i missed my jakarta personality, the one who bothers to create, the one who's sensitive enough to the agony of living to be able to create. it had been so stable, so normal and functional in italy i don't find that pessimistic attitude towards life i usually had.

i experienced lots of great things here. it's impossible to record the emotion with pictures or words. there were works that made me say things like, "shit this is awesome, i think i can also do this kind of thing". there were works that really evoked deep thoughts and feelings, like the third picture below. the sculptures' faces radiated real human emotion while their bodies weren't even human. then there's this south american pavilion where they use smell to define the space (fifth picture), it was just genius. then there's also the one who really really portrayed one of my biggest fear: the ocean. for real. there's this vault where you could enter and walk on a bridge toward a large video display of the ocean at night time. i couldn't even approach it nearer as i almost lost my breath i needed to get out of there. it was like someone projected your scariest feeling for real. then the second last picture was an art installation on an artist research in an insane asylum before turning herself into one.

while some works impressed me a lot, some others not at all. i think that's what so great about art, it speaks differently one person to another. you got to choose what's more comfortable for you.
 
"it is a major achievement to realize that the body is only a vehicle for the soul."

roma 29-3-90

il tesoro del giorno. found in a secondhand bookstore. happy as a kid finding her sweet candy.

vernazza, liguria.

i was kinda surprised realizing i don't have much photo of this place. but then i guess i was just too busy being idle and soaking up all the beauty and the chill while i was there. i think i spent hours just sitting and chatting with my friend after we got very tired hiking from Monterosso. then we spent another amount of time wandered around trying to find the fried seafood everyone was eating. it was time well spent.

monterosso al mare, liguria.

Monterosso is one of the five villages known as the Cinque Terre (literally translated as "five lands") span along the coast of the Ligurian Riviera on the north western part of Italy. we didn't spend much time exploring Monterosso, just strolling around, had the best lemonade i've ever had for one euro, sold by some local students trying to raise fund by selling products of lemon. then we went straight hiking the trail to Vernazza, the next village. the hike felt like forever, we had to climb endless stairs which seemed like leading nowhere. but the fun part though, was when you got to rest a while during the hike, you got this wonderful endless horizon exposed in front of you, all for your eyes to take in.

Cinque Terre itself were once dying of poverty before tourism brought it back to life around the '70s. they were actually a bit different from what i imagined before when i read about them in some books, but not in a negative sense at all. we didn't have enough time to explore other three villages, Corniglia, Manarola, and Riomaggiore, but i couldn't be more content being there in those two villages.

brussels hoofdstedelijk gewest.

brussels to me is one of the cities with the prettiest facade. houses row in lines, each has different facade with each other. architecturally, modern ones could easily blend in with the older ones.

but it's so sad that the prettiness felt almost soulless. above the ground, i felt like the city was like a lonely pretty girl, while under ground on the metro, i constantly felt like we're all in a movie scene shooting episodes of resident evil waiting for the next extermination.

brussels is the capital of the european union, but in the city i rarely saw crowds. there were crowds in the city center, but they were tourists. and i found the people here were all so strange. i rarely saw people smiling to each other, it's like they don't have any positive energy. and the metro was the most pathetic. the trains were poorly lit and most of the stations we passed through were poorly designed. and even on supposedly rush hours, there were not many people.

#75008

8th arrondissement, paris.

celebrating architecture across europe

as a still i usually don't fancy this type of photography. the editorial type. the post card beauty type. usually required high technical knowledge and gears. but. as a time lapse, this one totally gets me. i don't know how many times i've watched it already today. it's just too beautiful. and it shows how important lighting design is, something that i'm currently put interest in.

antwerpen, vlaanderen.

i've never been so overcame with awe being in a train station like i did when i was in Antwerp. Alighting from the train i was like, holy moly, this has got to be the prettiest train station. sadly we didn't have enough time to visit the city. we were here on the way to Amsterdam from Brussels. from Antwerp we're supposed to go to Roosendaal. too bad we got such a short time enjoying the train station because of the short transit time. although in the end the train to Roosendaal was delayed for i think like almost an hour so we had to take another train to Rotterdam instead. it was short but surely pretty enough to be remembered.

nervi, liguria.

Nervi is a small town, a quartiere of the port city Genova in Liguria. It can be reached in a couple of minutes of train or bus ride from the city center of Genova. Nervi was probably the most contemplative place i've been to in Italy. it was rather quiet and not crowded (at least the moment when i went there on a breezy late spring). the sea water was one of the most beautiful i've seen, it's very clear and foamy. also when you walk along the promenade you'd get that light and airy feeling hearing the sound of the waves hitting the rocks and the seagulls flying.

and also, the most important, the gelateria by the seaside was like the most wonderful thing :)
 

viaggiare!

i keep saying to my friends how i miss the days when all i had to think about were what to cook for dinner and where to travel on the weekends.

from top, left to right:
* waiting for our train in Rotterdam, on the way to Amsterdam
* learning Deutsch 101 from a German classmate
* Berlin flughafen (my favorite German word, means airport)
* studying for final exam on the train to Venezia
* planning itinerary in our hostel in Berlin
* a bus passing by in Barcelona
* travel essence! always carry a journal to write
* stranded night in a train station in Terontola
* boarding to Barcelona from Sant'Egidio, airport between Perugia and Assisi

the night 11k km away

architectural wise

i will always have a love and hate relationship with architecture. no matter how regretful i am with it, i'd always be thankful for what i know right know and how it has equipped me with better sense. now, these days i found myself no longer fond of fancy architecture by all those starchitects which for me is getting more and more ridiculous, inhuman, and out of context. however, it's funny cause in my journey i always tried to find if i had the chance to visit famous architectural sites, which was normal i think, being exposed for the whole four years (and more) to those stuff.

first off, Barcelona, aside from the obvious Gaudi's, i came to visit Mies van Der Rohe's Barcelona Pavilion. It has that strong historical context, i really hoped to feel the space (and the materials) myself, but unfortunately when we were there, there was this architectural award ceremony so it was closed for public. although we could step close enough to the pool side, still it's not the same as being inside. and beside this in Barcelona, i passed through Norman Foster's Torre Agbar, and trust me it was like the most horrible thing extruded among the skyline.


Musee du Louvre. at first i didn't meant to put it on the list cause it's too cliché and touristy, but then it was here that i got to understand what those I. M. Pei's glass pyramids are doing there and how modern architecture intervenes successfully in the older historical context.

also in Paris i visited the Bibliothèque nationale de France (Bibliothèque François Mitterrand) by the famous French architect Dominique Perrault. well, a local told me that the pretty building facade doesn't work so well and does harm to books, but aside from this or other technical failure, i remember being like a happy kid when we arrived. architectural wise it was enjoyable, the way the space flows. being here kinda reminds me a bit of the times when i did my thesis in the Singapore National Library listening to Kings of Convenience. now if only i could have access to the book collections.


Berlin has too many interesting architectural sites but i only got to visit some. first was of course Daniel Libeskind's Jewish Museum. exterior wise, i have to say i hate it but being inside, for me it was one of the best example of how architecture can really evoke human emotions. it was created in such a way that it really guides you to certain feelings. photos can't do any justice, really.

then i got to visit another Mies van Der Rohe's, the iconic Neue Nationalgalerie. i spent quite some time here sitting and writing while amazed with the clear architectural form and the solid black steel. then i also went to the Bauhaus Archive. i got lost on my way here so it was somehow tiring and i wasn't so impressed with what's in there.


in Italy i visit Massimiliano Fuksas' FieraMilano in Rho, near Milan, for the Salone. the salone itself already had too many things to see and it's very crowded and frenetic there so i wasn't really paying attention to the pretty wide span structures. i planned to visit some of Renzo Piano's and Zaha Hadid's in Rome but some things came up so i failed my plan.