New Studies Show Love is the Strongest Meme, Vice Media Has Folded, and More

Love is the strongest memefollows a study on bonding voles showing nearly identical brain activitypatterns noninvasive BCI for VR is coming soonRIP Vice MediaAmerican AI-Psycho I + IIFebruary 2024 beats record of heat recordsReddit makes a deal with Google for AI training data worth 60 million bucksGoogle pauses Gemini image generator after accusations of racismTwitter now allows you to swipe right to see more content (awful news for left-handed people)Re-Insurance profits rise 580% and this is not good for the climateNew studies on AI and Tech impact on climate and environmentFour Fab Four Biopics from Sam MendezSynthballs for MuskMinidocumentaries on streetartist collective Rocco and his Brothers and Grannies travelling beyond the limits of Red Dead Redemptions virtual worldAI-Emergence VoodooNeue Haas Grotest in PETSCIIOpenAI disrupted state-sponsored AI-misuseSecret Mathematical Patterns in Bach's MusicElle Cordova and inventions hanging outand much, much more.Enjoy and have a nice weekend!

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UPGRADE: 40minute documentary on Berlin avant garde street artist collective Rocco und seine Brüder (in german with english subtitles available)I'm following Rocco and his brothers for more than ten years now, with their most impressive works being interventions in infrastructural urban spaces like building a secret bedroom and office spaces in the subway to comment on gentrification and exploding rents, giving away masterkeys to the subway stations to the homeless in winter, building an altair with a neon cross on an ATM, or installing no less than 32 CCTV-cameras in a single subway car. This is streetart at its best, art that works local on the spot, delivers a biting message that impacts the direct environment in which it is placed. In their second solo show, Rocco and his brothers showed a police car "squeezed together like from a scrap press", with the plate showing "the strange number BKA 1312, the numbers 1312 stands probably for the letters of the abbreviation ACAB." Now look, I consider myself on the left, but I'm not an ACAB-leftie. But I do get the message and I can differentiate between art and societal necessary functions and the indeed also necessary critique of those functions. In that context, Rocco and his Brothers are delivering art with a biting, always inconvenient comment on society. It's great to see the brothers still going strong.The oldest logo in the world gets a rebrand: Tate & Lyle's Golden Syrup rebrand drops dead lion: "The image of a dead lion being swarmed by bees is to be dropped from some of Lyle's Golden Syrup packaging. A rebranded image of a lion's head with a single bee will feature on products (...) The original logo (...) is the world's oldest unchanged brand packaging, holding a Guinness World Record, having remained nearly identical since 1888"The Grannies "follows a group of Melbourne-based artists (Goldie Bartlett, Andrew Brophy, Ian MacLarty and Kalonica Quigley, and friends) known as The Grannies as they break 'out of bounds' in Rockstar Games' hit action-adventure videogame Red Dead Redemption 2, travelling beyond the authored limits of the game's virtual world and into the increasingly broken and abstract space beyond." Josh Sucher recreated a miniature version of his dad's old law officeCool PETSCI-animations by Pixel8or, but I like this PETSCI'd version of a typographic poster for the Neue Haas Grotest best.Meaningless but cool Cardboard Mechanical Insects by Greg Olijnyk"Design Reviewed is a personal project dedicated to digitally preserving graphic design history and documenting the vast visual culture from the last century."Blotter: A new book from MIT press on the history of LSD-blotter art, "the untold story of an acid medium"What have you gotten away with over the years, as a manipulator of PDFs, SVGs, & JPEGs? Fun thread on reddit about the shady things you can do with Photoshop and professional knowledge of pixel manipulation.Eric Drass turned American Psycho into a game of telephone, where he feeds frames from the movie into an LLM for it to describe what it "sees", and then fed those as prompts to Stable Diffusion whichs output he then fed into Stable-Video-Diffusion to turn it into a moving mess of American AI-Psychosis full of wrong memories of a hallucinated movie that never was.Each step involves a wander into the conceptual space of the respective