GYM NAME: Minimal Ekphrastic Morphs
ACTIVATIONS: understanding of artists’ styles, factual knowledge about artists, visualization of objects, attention to visualized objects, knowledge of materials, imagination, fancy, geometry, minimal pairs differentiation
SYSTEM DETAILS: This gym presents the user with prompts concerning works of art that do not exist but whose names are similar to works that do exist. It generates these nonexistent-but-linguistically-proximal works of art using a vector space model of language that we trained based on a large collection of text (Project Gutenberg supplemented with Amazon reviews). A vector space model represents words as items within a vector space; for any item (word) in this space, similar vectors (similar words) can be retrieved by calculating cosine similarity between vectors. For instance, for the noun “forest,” the most proximal vectors are those corresponding to these words:
[(‘jungle_nn’, 0.8949941396713257),
(‘woods_nns’, 0.8826379179954529),
(‘wilderness_nn’, 0.8368756175041199),
(‘forests_nns’, 0.8284994959831238),
(‘swamp_nn’, 0.8180193901062012),
(‘thickets_nns’, 0.8143609166145325),
(‘woodland_nn’, 0.8071541786193848),
(‘thicket_nn’, 0.7933866381645203),
(‘desert_nn’, 0.7926554679870605),…]
The numerical values represent the cosine similarity to the target word.
Given the title of an artwork, alternate titles are created by swapping one or more words from the title with semantically related words of the same part-of-speech. Minimal pairs training is effective in developing phonemic awareness (distinguishing two slightly different words) (Barlow & Gierut 2002), and here we extend this phenomenon to aesthetic awareness. Likewise, developing generative models (imagination complexes) can support subject matter learning (Egan 1989).
INSTRUCTIONS FOR USE: The user enters the title of an artwork and the name of its artist. Artworks with titles containing two or more nouns are preferred.
enter title of work> Verdant Expansion
enter name of artist> Janny Baek
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Describe the evolution between Janny Baek’s Bosky Expansion and Verdant Expansion.
Bosky Expansion was more representational—about 60% representational, 30% abstract. A small copse halfway through meiosis into convex hull. 60% of the time (or for 60% of viewers, or from 60% of angles) obviously trees. Verdant is only 15% representational (cucumber laurel anemone crown).
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Why do critics prefer Janny Baek’s Umbrageous Expansion to their Lush Expansion?
Because the former, so gloomy and tuberous, has the trick where if you pick it up the bottom comes off it and shows you a sneaky coral butt. UmRAGEous!
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Provide a critical assessment of Janny Baek’s Verdant Distribution.
The two jaws of a fly trap, the two lobes of an engine block, but one slightly in front of and tilted against the other. Tubes (three from one side, two from the other) seem like delivery pumpules into the ground or table or plinth or whatever (totally flush, so it does really look like they are going in, continuing down, impressive).
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Precisely describe Janny Baek’s Verdurous Centralization.
An undomesticated bluetooth speaker with thirty-ish aloe ridge rows and three chubby feet. Gyring itself contentedly like purring.
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Precisely describe Janny Baek’s Verdant Inflation.
A wadded-up frog dipped in frog smoother. Vertigo-inducing gradient. Deep green within the two circular vents, accelerating to body light lime, then lime white towards bottom as well as near the maxima of the bigger bumps. Smallest piece in the series.
Janny Baek’s verdant expansion. Photo courtesy of the artist.
enter title of work> The Dragon Devouring the Companions of Cadmus
enter name of artist> Hendrick Goltzius
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Precisely describe Hendrick Goltzius’s The Dragon Gnawing The Captors of Cadmus.
Ares has quit the field, is resting now, almost asleep on his helmet’s curvilinear tufts of horsehair like flexible marble alloy, Ma-Ti-8 maybe. His feet are tired so the dragon is gnawing them and the ankles and the calves, the tendons and fascia and the solei and fibulares take turns bulging and making crunchy poppy sounds beneath invincible skin, thank you, Ismenoka, that feels like deep medical comfort, this is what Ares deigns not to say. The dragon was born of legendary spaniel and so looks away, toward stupid nada, with kissable spaniel eyes. Its body is long though, seven or eight spaniels. Its eight hind-claws have curled down to knead the shoulders of the Tenebrae.
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Why do critics think that Hendrick Goltzius’s The Heron Licking The Companions of Cadmus is less accomplished than their The Dragon Devouring the Companions of Cadmus?
Wet skin is rightly the concern of oils, hence the smallest brush was often called la langue de la souris; folds of all kinds of cloth are neutral, dual-owned subjects, equally suited to oils’ deep shadows and engraving’s brave geometrics; but IUSs (irregularly undulating surfaces) are proper to engraveiture alone, where cross hatching is like free-hand rational splines.
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Provide a critical assessment of Hendrick Goltzius’s The Dragon Smothering The Neighbours of Cadmus.
Note the corpulent strength of the dragon, the way its body is composed of distinct masses which could be muscles but also sacs or other barely-submerged organs. Goltzius’s Farnese Hercules possesses a lesser measure of this quality, which no doubt influenced H. R. Giger among others. And the way the Boeotian Merchants struggle beneath the dragon—sweaty with resignation and disgust, their robes twisted tight to reveal their own smooshed thighs and asses—may have influenced Paul Cadmus (no relation).
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Precisely describe Hendrick Goltzius’s The Dragon Devouring The Brethren of Cadmus.
In this version, it is only in the background (top right) that the dragon devours Cadmus’s men, Cadmus’s brother men, who back there are too small to be (for all their oaths professed to Cadmus and from him to them) much more than piths of limb, while Cadmus is in anguish wide and straining toward them and his own nude failure, a mile across a road like iron silk caught between electricity battles.
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Describe the evolution between Hendrick Goltzius’s The Dragon Feeding The Neighbours of Cadmus and The Cobra Devouring The Companions of Cadmus.
Between them, he was gifted a copy of Gessner’s Historia animalium.
Hendrick Goltzius’s The Dragon Devouring the Companions of Cadmus. Photo via The Metropolitan Museum of Art (open access).