I timidly asked her if she’d be willing to share it via my blogs, knowing that the topics would be relevant to some many different readers, and I was grateful she agreed. Her interest in rock is very visible in the opening which shows how the album design for the Sex Pistal’s Never Mind the Bollocks helped to inspire Fairey. But what she gave me was so much more - an exploration of artistic and musical appropriation since the Punk era, how they have shaped Fairey’s aesthetic project and how they have impacted the current state of law around Fair Use. I was certainly intrigued to learn more about her thoughts on Fairey and especially on the current legal struggles he is engulfed in. She really dug deep for the Herald story and found out much more than could make it into a newspaper piece, so she asked if she could expand this work as her final paper for the class. She’s already written three books and edited two more, mostly dealing with rock music, and she’s now working on a project dealing with the shifting relationship between artists (popular and high) and their publics. McDonnell is a cultural reporter of the highest order - the kind of student you hope you will get at a place where journalism and communications students co-mingle.
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One of the students in my New Media Literacies class last term, Evelyn McDonnell took advantage of Fairey’s visit to USC to interview him for the Miami Herald. Now, having seen and talked with the guy, I suspect they were an odd blurring between the two - a bold experiment in tapping the power of participatory culture to spread images across the planet and relying on local contexts to shape what those images meant to participants. At first, I envisioned the stickers as a new kind of fan art - since I was deeply into the World Wrestling Federation at the time - and only gradually came to understand them as a form of culture jamming. I have been following Fairey for some time since he was an art student at the Rhode Island School of Design and “Andre the Giant has a Posse” stickers started to appear on lamp posts and underpasses around Boston.
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Fairey spoke on stage with my new colleague, Sarah Banet-Weiser. who I regard as one of the most significant visual artists of our times and a focal point for debates about the politics/poetics of appropriation and fair use. Jules Anh Tuan Nguyen, the paper’s lead author and now a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Minnesota, spoke with NVIDIA AI Podcast host Noah Kravitz about his efforts to allow amputees to control their prosthetic limb - right down to the finger motions - with their minds.ī of the many highlights of my first semester in LA was the chance to see and meet Shepard Fairey. The effort is detailed in a draft paper, or pre-print, titled “A Portable, Self-Contained Neuroprosthetic Hand with Deep Learning-Based Finger Control.” It details an extraordinary cross-disciplinary collaboration behind a system that, in effect, allows humans to control just about anything digital with thoughts.
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It could one day give users almost superhuman capabilities. It’s a demonstration that not only promises to give amputees more natural and responsive control over their prosthetics.
#MIT MEDIA LAB MIND MAGIC MISCHIEF PC#
Using GPUs, a group of researchers trained an AI neural decoder able to run on a compact, power-efficient NVIDIA Jetson Nano system on module (SOM) to translate 46-year-old Shawn Findley’s thoughts into individual finger motions.Īnd if that breakthrough weren’t enough, the team then plugged Findley into a PC running Far Cry 5 and Raiden IV, where he had his game avatar move, jump - even fly a virtual helicopter - using his mind. Path-breaking work that translates an amputee’s thoughts into finger motions, and even commands in video games, holds open the possibility of humans controlling just about anything digital with their minds.