Mall Music, “Full Body Deepfakes”, and 20 Quadrillion Ants

I bring you the finest Internet reading in my weekly Linkfest

Holly Wilkes, “Let the Colors Go Where They May”

Okay people.

Time for the weekly Linkfest!

Immerse yourself in the finest linkage I could scavenge from the beach-shores of the endless Internet.

To begin …

1) 🧵 The intricate beauty of the “Tiny Tapestries” exhibition

Every two years, the American Tapestry Alliance runs a “Tiny Tapestries” event in which they solicit tapestries 10 inches square or smaller, based on a theme. This year’s theme: “Tiny But Mighty”.

There are photos of some contributions at the My Tapestry Journeys blog, and they’re really striking!

I love tapestry for its innate beauty, but also for nerdy reasons: Early low-rez computer graphics of the 70s and 80s borrowed extensively from centuries-old tapestry techniques. It turns out that if you need to make curves and patterns with low-fi chunky bitmaps, tapestry folk had pioneered tons of useful aesthetic tricks looooong ago.

So when you look at these small-and-square tapestry works, they seem weirdly like textile screenshots of artsy, unreleased Gameboy cartridges. Go check out all…