The Godification of money nears completion.

This will impact everyone.

The intimations, signs and portents are in plain sight.

One cannot be prepared without knowing the genuine history of capitalism. Once one knows that capitalism was born in the Reformation, one will see how religious capitalism has played such a determining role in the American forms of racism, slavery, genocide, iniquity, and the hateful fears underlying misogyny, rejection of “other,” and destruction at every level.

I know of no better resource for learning this history than Eugene McCarraher’s The Enchantments of Mammon: How Capitalism Became the Religion of Modernity.

This is not the history we learned in school. But it is now a necessary history for being able to see more clearly the nature of what is coming. You will learn how the leaders of the time justified the slaughter of Indian’s because they did not “improve” on their land as God intended. You will even learn how powerful alchemists were in many ways, such as John Winthrop trying to form an “alchemical economy,” as Governor of Massachusetts. America was “new” in so many ways; feverish religious capitalism had no barriers. America was the new Eden. Virginia was declared the only earthly paradise. Even Shakespeare was affected, modeling Prospero’s Island in The Tempest after voyager’s accounts of Virginia.

Get ready.

Christmas Dream, 2022

In the dream, a female voice announces:

The door is ajar.

I wake and note what the dream voice had said. Looking, I see I have written:

The door is a jar.

This sort of parapraxis on the edge of wakefulness is not unusual for me. Most often, I experience this as a kind of “mind play,” nothing conscious, of course, but something valuable has been “presented” to me.

So, the dream and the written text form a couple, and I must attend both.

I won’t go into what I did, because the main point of this note is to daw your attention to such possible couplings of dream and presentational experience, and to aver there is something vital in this.

ral

GPT-3 is an artificial intelligence developed by OpenAI, a billion-dollar-funded research lab promoting the use of AI for the betterment of all humankind.

Notice this is not a question. 

Here is a link to the website:

An AI Answers Life’s Big Questions

Over the next while, I will offer a few posts on the subject of a book's design and a book's motif. I will comment on books I have published and designed, as well as books where design and theme have caught my attention.

As an example, I will begin with Great Women Artists,  a rich resource published by Phaidon in 2019.

Here is a photo of the cover.

The book is large: 10 X 11¾ inches with 464 pages. Notice the book almost is square and does not emphasize the vertical. The book cover is yellow. There are five parallel horizontal lines (red, green, red, blue, and orange), four of which do not span the page. The center line (red) crosses the title word WOMEN, using strike through text, WOMEN, throughout the text. There are many more design features, but these will be sufficient to make the points I want to emphasize.

Typography is inherently symbolic, as are all design elements. This must be kept in mind when trying to discern the design messages conveyed by the designer's decisions.

The color yellow is used for the entire field of the book cover (front, back and spine). The most common symbolism of the color yellow is the sun. Solar imagery is typically associated with male.  So here, this male element is pushed to the background. The color is so prominent that this aspect might be missed. Against this yellow background, the black text becomes prominent and is made more prominent by the use of all capitals, type that is bold and without serifs. Why a non-serif font? It is used only for the cover. All interior text is set in serif type. Well, there is a design rule that says: Don’t use serifs if you want to appear futuristic or modern. So, here, with the male solar element pushed to the background, the theme of great women artists is forgrounded, boldly. and with a modern and futuristic intention. What about the horizontal parallel lines? In symbolic terms, the horizontal is associated with the feminine and the vertical with the masculine. So here, the feminine is emphasized. Parallel means "side by side" and here we see that lines of different dolor are in parallel, side by side. A strong element pointing to diversity (different colors) belonging side by side, belonging in parallel. Why are all but one of these lines "complete," that is traversing the entire cover. Because these aspects of diversity are not yet complete.

And, now, what of that solid line through the word WOMEN that traverses the entire field. This is a bold declaration that the gendered adjective (women) is no longer applicable in speaking of greatness. It is not a distinction that belongs. As Gombrich said: "There really is no such thing as Art. There are only artists."

There is rarely any mention of design in a published book. Perhaps this little note will trigger some deeper looking.

Here is a description and a video link to some recent work by Russian media artist Vadim Epstein.

I'm working on a post about the psychological significance of AI contributions to art. I would

appreciate your sending any comments about this post and video to me directly at ral@ralockhart.com

Many thanks,

Russ

With human help, AIs are generating a new aesthetics. The results are trippy

Warning: this film features visual effects that could be unsuitable for photosensitive viewers.

Ghosts is part of an ongoing project in which the Moscow-based media artist Vadim Epstein explores AI technology via animation. Epstein created the video’s trippy, shapeshifting visuals through a program called StarGAN v2, which uses a neural network to generate new images by pulling from a user-created dataset. The image-to-image technology is similar to what’s used to change one’s hair colour or age à la Snapchat face filters, but anyone who has tried re-inputting a filtered image back into a feed multiple times, as Epstein does here, knows that the results can get pretty strange. For the piece, Epstein built a dataset consisting of celebrity faces, cats, paintings by Wassily Kandinsky, pencil drawings and other artworks, creating a feedback loop of abstract art and digital information that builds upon itself in uncanny, unexpected ways. With StarGAN v2 given almost full control over the process, the result is an ever-changing wave of obscure and expressive visuals that seem unbound from the world of human art and aesthetics. It’s hard to predict what neural networks like StarGAN v2 will produce as machine learning technologies continue to develop, but Ghosts cleverly shows how far the technology has come, and how weird the results can (already) get.
Director: Vadim Epstein

Here is the link:

https://aeon.co/videos/with-human-help-ais-are-generating-a-new-aesthetics-the-results-are-trippy?utm_source=Aeon+Newsletter&utm_campaign=85c061c897-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2022_09_20_12_24&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_411a82e59d-85c061c897-70343981

“The Wounded Healer”

A conversation with Thomas Moore, Murray Stein, and Russell Lockhart

with questions from Rob Henderson

ralockhart.com/WP/Wounded Healer Interview.pdf

...in the dream, the voice from the speakers announced that it has been decided at the highest levels that because of the inherent weaknesses of humans, they no longer would be the keepers of state secrets but that this responsibility would now be the sole prerogative of state computers. All levels of security clearance for humans have been canceled and appropriate levels of security for computers has been completed. All government employees, appointed officials, and elected officers have been assigned specific computers to which they must now consult in the course of doing their official duties. It has been further announced that this policy is not subject to change.

The NEXT Method

One of the first courses I taught in university was “Theories of Learning.” The most common question among students whenever I taught this course, was “how can I learn better.” This question was not confined to the course material; the discussion showed that this was a general life question. So, I made a point of teaching to this question. The key was always to increase the degree of active learning. Many such strategies were easy to generalize from the learning theory the students were learning, and the students became more adept at becoming active learners not just in class, but in other ways reported by them.

One of my favorite ways of active learning I taught was what I called the Next Method. The basic idea is simple, but the range of application is unlimited. Suppose I give you the first sentence from an introduction I wrote on science and psychology for a book entitled Contemporary Readings in Psychology, edited by John Foley, Russell Lockhart, and David Messick, and published by Harper & Row, in 1970. This was a “reader” to accompany introductory psychology texts and the articles selected were ones on the cutting edge of the field at the time and were not yet incorporated into current psychology texts. For the three editors, it was our first book publication.

The first sentence I wrote was this:

Most introductory textbooks do not give much information

about what is happening at the frontiers of the field.

Now imagine you are the student and instead of just reading on, I ask you to write the next sentence. Students invariably balk at this assignment, claiming that how could they know what to write if this is something they are supposed to be learning? Fair enough. So, then I begin to raise questions. Did you understand that first sentence? Everyone says “yes.” Does the sentence seem beyond your capacity? Everyone says “no.” Can you imagine yourself writing a “next” sentence? Here the responses become uncertain. “How is this learning?” one student might ask. “I would be writing what I already know.” “Yes,” I answer and tell them about tacit knowledge, the knowledge they already have but likely do not know they have. And then I talk about how they can now compare their own second sentence with the author’s second sentence. What is the same or similar? What is different or unexpected? Do they actually learn something? What? At this point, the whole process becomes engaging in a way that is surprising in many ways.

I have used this method with analytic candidates in relation to dreams and dream work as well as in understanding texts. Imagine, for example, hearing the first sentence of a dream and being asked to supply the next. Or consider some book or essay of Jung’s and follow this procedure. Or with a novel you are reading. Or a poem. I have used this method in many ways and continue to do so even now. It is a powerful and rewarding method and I encourage you to give it a try. And, I find it endlessly entertaining!