This blog post is part of the Random Sampling Singapore project. The Project aims to sample 100 places on the island of Singapore over a one year (+) period in order to gain an unbiased and holistic view of the city state.

This blog post is written by my husband Sven.

Up to coordinate #68! Already a while back we were going to Toa Payoh, where the GPS coordinate of #68 is located. The exact position was directly at the entrance of a company called ST Microelectronis. There was only a 10 Cent coin on the sealed pathway at the entrance to sample – as the area was almost sparkling clean. We imagined the sterile hallways in the clean room inside the building and all the machines and robots that are building new computers.

Under the company logo, the marketing phrase was “life.augmented”. This is of course a bold statement, but so true for our everyday life. Technology is part of our everyday life and is in some way linking Bettina and me. I brought certain technology into Bettina’s life and many aspects changed since then. Especially her practice in heritage conservation and as artist. But even more my life got changed through her views and critical opinions. It changed my view on technology completely. I see technology more holistically, challenge it and be more reflective about it.

To see aspects in a different light and challenge your reflective thinking is a key feature in Bettina’s art. I see this message in the artwork wavelengths, which got a new background recently. It was put on a silvered canvas with UV fluorescent acrylic paint beneath and has a touch of “outer space”.

At this time we are looking into new developments in artificial Intelligence (AI). As many others we were playing with Chat-GPT since it was released in mid November 2022, just a few weeks back. It is a rollercoaster of emotions while using it and surprised me how accurate the answers on topics as cybersecurity have been. It will even generate programming code for you in seconds, by just describing its functionality in a few simple sentences. On the other side, it is concerning to think about the impact on the job market. Professions where creativity is a core component and where a process can be abstracted into a text input – like writing a poem, drawing a picture or programming code – getting done by AI easily.

Let’s do a proof of concept! The question is:

Can AI describe the artwork “Wavelenghts outer space” in the way the artist would like to have it and write this blog post for us in a creative way?

We were searching further on public available AI’s that can produce stories out of pictures. We found two interesting demos on HuggingFace done by akhaliq, called “CLIP_prefix_captioning” and from autonomous019 called “IMAGE_STORY_GENERATOR” that both can do exactly that. And this is the result:

It didn’t help to write a full blog post, but it was helpful in a fun way to find a title for the post!