Olympic gymnasts stun the world with their performances on the uneven bars. Fortunately they don’t have to compete with squirrels.

Suppose instead of the uneven bars, human gymnasts had to fly through the canopies of trees, leaping gaps of varying distances, from branches of varying thicknesses, some stiff, some springy. And every landing would be different, on everything from trunks to twigs.

Oh, and then there are the hawks to watch out for.

What makes squirrels so good?

Lucia F. Jacobs, a cognitive psychologist who has studied squirrels extensively, and was one of the authors of a report on the work in the journal Science, said, “In some ways as a squirrel biologist, none of this is very surprising. If we were going to have a squirrel Olympics, this would not even be the qualifying meet.”

But the meeting of cognitive and biomechanical minds to do a joint investigation was unusual…

Read James Gorman’s full article in The New York Times

Stochastic artist, provocateur, and technologist Alexander Reben has produced another series of visually arresting paintings — this time without picking up a brush or a tube of paint.

Reben’s technique begins with a computer model that combines words together to generate a single — often unsettling — image. The artificially intelligent program might combine the words “clock” and “jellyfish,” for example, creating a melted visualization that looks like the spawn of a psychedelic art exhibit and a nightmarish dream. The results are paired with other images, creating a “child” image that somehow enhances the visual chaos, according to Reben.

When Reben views those images, an AI measures his brain waves and body signals and selects which image he likes best. An image that passed the likability test undergoes several more rounds of AI retouching to enhance resolution. Once completed, the finished images are sent to China, where they are painted by hand.

“It’s going to be their best effort and interpretation of what they see,” Reben said, referring to the painter’s final product. “That whole loop from my brain waves to an anonymous painter is a really interesting chain.”

Read Peter Holley’s full article in The Washington Post

The popular dialogue around CRISPR to date has focused largely on its exceptional potential to cure challenging diseases such as HIV and Malaria or doomsday scenarios of epic proportions. Meanwhile, the scientists developing this radical and compelling technology face a much more nuanced set of investigative and social concerns. A select group of artists and creative practitioners will be given an unprecedented opportunity to work alongside these scientists as they explore the groundbreaking topics that will shape the future of this critical field – and the world as we know it.

Stochastic Labs and the Innovative Genomics Institute at UC Berkeley announce:

CRISPR (un) commons: creative considerations and genetic innovation

Residents will attend a weekly seminar in five program areas (biomedicine, technology, agriculture, microbiology, and society) featuring top international scientists, and a monthly meeting with cross-disciplinary scholars interested in the ethics surrounding CRISPR applications and the regulation of this pioneering technology.

Watch the TED talk by Innovative Genomics Institute founder, Jennifer Doudna.

Congratulations to Andy Cavatorta, Alison Irvine, Kate Nichols, Sheng-Ying Pao, and Dorothy Santos! More information on the artists and their projects is available here.

When 33-year-old quadriplegic Felipe Esteves saw Stochastic resident Katia Vega levitate a small drone just by blinking at it, he knew that was the kind of superhero he wanted to be. Wearing a white wig to keep her secret identity intact, channeling X-Men’s Storm, Vega was demonstrating her superhero tech at an expo. Each time she blinked with purpose, a tiny circuit nearly invisible to onlookers completed and instructed a controller to move the drone. That circuit was hidden under her wig, and was completed every time a pair of metallic false eyelashes met for a long enough time and connected to conductive eyeliner Vega was wearing. Signals were transmitted to a Zigbee radio, with the receiver kept in the superhero’s handbag.

Sometimes, her blinks instructed animated images that read “POW, Bam, Zap” to pop up.

The system builds on Vega’s existing body of Beauty Technology prototypes, many of which take inspiration from special effects makeup used in movies. There are even characters, many of whom would not look out of place on the set of the Fifth Element: Arcana, for instance, is a futuristic messenger who changes the world around her with each blink, controlling the proliferation of music and images. Then there’s the hauntingly beautiful Kinisi. “Kinisi could change the world with a smile, a wink, raising her eyebrow or closing her lips,” says Vega. “Each of these muscle movements will trigger different light patterns.” Here, Vega employed the skills of FX makeup artist Larca Meicap, who combined her traditional tools with sensors applied to muscles and LEDs hidden in the skin and hair in patterns that came to life everytime signals from the sensors activated a microcontroller.

“Wearable computing has changed the way individuals interact with computers, intertwining natural capabilities of the human body with processing apparatus,” Vega explains. “Beauty Technology transforms our body into an interactive platform by hiding technology in beauty products to create muscle-based interfaces that don’t give the wearer a cyborg look.” Vega lists some example products her company is working on: Conductive Makeup, Beauty Tech Nails, FX e-makeup and Hairware (“a new prototype I am working on in order to make your hair interactive”).

Read Liat Clark’s full article in Wired

Pat Morrison of the The LA Times caught up with Stochastic resident/Center for Humane Tech co-founder Aza Raskin, and asked…

LA Times: What remedies does your group suggest?

Read Pat Morrison’s full interview in The Los Angeles Times

“We [understand] the power of mass media, like television, advertising, etc.–they teach this even at school,” Cirio tells Fast Company. “However, it’s not common knowledge how the media of algorithms, user interfaces, and personal devices are much more powerful and sophisticated in manipulating people. This should be an educational issue but also a legislative one.”

Read DJ Pangburn’s full article in Fast Company

In one of the starkest pieces in Alexander Reben’s AI Am I? (The New Aesthetic), a series of plungers of varying lengths sit before a white wall, their descending pattern hearkening to cell phone bars. The description for the piece, titled “A Short History of Plungers and Other Things That Go Plunge in the Night,” reads: “The sculpture contains a plunger, a toilet plunger, a plunger, a plunger, a plunger, a plunger, each of which has been modified.” It states that the piece was created by a collective of anonymous artists founded in 1972 known as “The Plungers” (quotes theirs), who were dedicated to “the conceptualization and promotion of a new art form called Plungism.” The work apparently made such a splash that it became a “landmark of conceptual art and one of the most famous artworks of the late 20th century, and it was even featured on an episode of Seinfeld in 1997.”

None of the above, unfortunately, is historically accurate. The entire description—art, artist, history, even the title of the exhibition and the majority of the artist statement—was produced by GPT-3, the third generation of the language-predicting deep learning model created by OpenAI…

Read Jesse Damiani’s full article in Forbes

Eleven million Amazon Echoes sit on kitchen counters today. Most people who own one–or any other smart home speaker–probably don’t spend a lot of time questioning the fact that this always-listening device records data about them and then ferrets it away in a server, where it is used in ways they may never know about. But would we question that arrangement if Alexa were a real person, rather than a device?

Autonomous drone technology in the military sphere is challenging structures of accountability and responsibility. Stochastic artist and creative technologist Troy Lumpkin uses drone technology to create art – his graffiti drone, which he hopes will soon be capable of autonomously creating its own artworks, challenges our notions of authorship, creativity and power: Who is the artist, the human or the machine?

Stochastic: Tell us about the Icarus drone project. What do you hope to achieve?

Troy: The Icarus drone is an ongoing experiment in examining automated painting systems as well as collaborative open source hardware initiatives. The drone is made of easily accessible materials. It’s a consumer grade camera quadcopter and a micro Arduino with a 3D printed robotic spray system (which allows it to spray work that’s larger and more far-reaching than anything that could be achieved with any other tool currently available on the market). Ultimately, I’m looking  to expand the creative reach of the human body, and to raise questions like whether artificial intelligence and computer systems are capable of creating art that humans will appreciate.

Stochastic: What does this mean for artists?

Troy: Aside from reaching previously unreachable surfaces, drone-painting technology begins to examine how the actual labor of art fabrication can be outsourced to autonomous systems. What if the things we created could create art? Would they create art? And if so, who is the author? At the moment, I have little control over the aesthetic with drone paintings, but technically, I retain the underlying authorship.