Latest news with #AdamLowe
The Guardian
13-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Tthere's some sentience there, but it's not ours': how AI is reshaping our idea of beauty
It's the artist Qualeasha Wood who tells me about Snapchat dysmorphia, 'a term coined by plastic surgeons who noticed there was a shift in the mid 2010s when people started bringing in their AI-beautified portraits instead of a celebrity picture'. To resolve your Snapchat dysmorphia, you get your real face remodelled to look like the ideal version of you that artificial intelligence has perfected on your phone screen. There is a fundamental problem with this, says Adam Lowe, whose Factum Foundation in Madrid is at the forefront of art and technology, digitally documenting artworks and cultural heritage sites around the world. When you have surgery to look like your best self as shown on a flat screen, the results in three-dimensional reality can be very odd indeed. You can feel Lowe's sadness at the way plastic surgery botches human restoration in pursuit of screen perfection: 'I have to look away,' he says. Such are the paradoxes of the digital age explored in Virtual Beauty, an exhibition opening at London's Somerset House on 23 July. The exhibition brings together more than 20 international artists to examine how artificial intelligence, social media and virtual identities reshape our understanding of beauty and self-representation in the digital age. It feels particularly resonant as the choice for Somerset House's 25th anniversary of its public opening – the institution has borne witness to the complete transformation of how we present ourselves to the world. Wood herself stars – her artworks drag you into the heart of online life, juxtaposing her selfies with a ceaseless churning of texts, emails and layers of onscreen windows in montages that capture the restlessness of digital existence. But there's a twist. Her snapshots of what it's like to be a queer Black woman in the social media age are rendered as tapestries. In this older, more substantial medium, the grey frames of computer windows and harsh lettering of abusive messages become almost contemplative. And there is a hidden history here. Digitally controlled weaving is more than 200 years old: the Jacquard loom, invented in the Industrial Revolution, was programmed with punch cards telling what pattern to produce. 'I was born in 1996 so the internet was already there,' says Wood. 'My whole life has been mediated through that. I got my first computer at the age of five. At six I was online and playing games. The first game I ever played was The Sims, and it's a life simulator. The first person I ever knew to die was my Sim, not a true human being.' As an artist of the selfie age, one inspiration was Kim Kardashian. 'Most of my upbringing on the internet involved using websites like Tumblr, just any image-based platform. Working in self-portraiture was really natural. I was looking at women like Kardashian who were very popular on the internet at that time – she even produced a selfie book.' Kardashian's 2015 book Selfish is a seminal moment in the rise of social media portraiture, not least for providing the template for 'Instagram face', the plumped up, feline aesthetic (the look was famously described as resembling a 'sexy baby tiger') that has come to dominate contemporary beauty standards. The more we shape and propagate our own images online, the more we feel compelled to copy that screen image in the flesh. Wood sees virtual beauty as 'an era: it's a marking of time, like BC and AD. There's the beauty before technology and filters, and the beauty after. So much of beauty now isn't about how you see yourself: we look instead at likes and metrics, and how much attention we are receiving or someone else is receiving.' Wood's art shows how specific the glare of internet visibility is for her. One of her tapestries includes a string of aggressive online messages and her replies – 'Qualeasha were you born to Crack head parents?' 'Nope both military veterans!!' Among these brickbats, her physical image is by turns peaceful, melancholy, provocative. True beauty, she insists, does not lie in transforming yourself into an AI product. 'I refuse to contribute to the beauty standard. Those works where I think I'm the least put together are the ones people are most drawn to and find the most beautiful.' Yet she admits she is not immune to the beauty ideals proliferating all around her. As an artist who shares her own life, she wonders how her image will change with time. 'What will it be like when I'm 60 and have an older and less perfect body? Even now, I'm of that age when women start getting worked on.' Another piece in the exhibition plays off arguably one of the most famous bodies of all time. The pose is unmistakable. Even if you have never stood in front of Botticelli's The Birth of Venus in the Uffizi gallery in Florence, the way this nude goddess stands on a giant shell, legs curved yet with her upper body straight, one hand holding her long golden hair over her groin, another covering her right breast, will be familiar from its endless reproductions. But in the climactic scene of a film by Sin Wai Kin, Venus is played by the non-binary transgender artist in drag – nude drag – standing in white high heels on soaking wet rocks against crashing waves, flowers scattered around them like the painted flowers that delicately fall through Botticelli's perfumed air. 'It's the idea of the ideal of beauty,' Sin has said of this recreation of The Birth of Venus. In fact, more than 500 years ago, Botticelli knew that beauty was 'virtual'. The 15th-century Florentine artist's Venus floats towards you but never reaches you. The painting depicts not her birth but her arrival by seashell at the island of Cythera. Except however hard the wind gods puff, however tenderly an attendant waits to throw a robe around Venus, her feet never touch the shore. She is suspended for ever in this moment, both real and unreal. In our age of virtual beauty, people try more and more to cross the boundary between art and life. Once Oscar Wilde and the aesthetic movement aspired to make their lives as beautiful as art. They did it through pose and poise, as well as poetry and prose. Now we are physically resculpting ourselves to fit the perfect AI illusion of what we might be. The Somerset House show begins with Orlan, the French artist who underwent cosmetic surgery as performance art in the early 1990s. That radical remodelling of her body becomes a pioneering foretaste of an age in which biology is trumped by technology. Thus Filip Ćustić will show pi(x)el, a female silicone sculpture cast from life, her face covered in phone screens, on which other faces and bodies, including people bearing scars or visible disabilities, flow. Body and screen become one. Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion Does this point the way to digital heaven or to hell? The optimistic vision of a new world where people can freely reinvent themselves from device to flesh could be seen as a contemporary restatement of Donna Haraway's famous 1985 essay A Cyborg Manifesto (Sin Wai Kin has had Haraway quotes pinned up in their studio). Perhaps the most consoling interpretation of today's emerging sci-fi reality is that, as Haraway argued, we are all becoming cyborgs – part human, part machine, liberated from the oppressive structures of the past. The stumbling block is, however, that the cyborg itself may be a thing of the past, a vision of the future that is already becoming old. Cyborg dreams assume that however much we change, however completely our bodies are remade or replaced, our minds will always be ours. The human brain will endure, even if it's in a jar with robots doing the dirty work. However, in truth, we may be about to be outdone by other minds, and our bodies will be all we have left. 'You get the sense that some kind of sentience is being nursed into life – but it's happening away from us,' says Mat Collishaw, a digital artist who takes a much less human-centred view than the artists in Virtual Beauty. 'We don't really understand it. Even the guys that are building it, that are training it, don't really know what's happening. When you look into the eyes of a gorilla in the zoo you know there's some sentience in there but it's not ours: it's a very weird feeling.' Although Collishaw started his career as one of the notoriously human Young British Artists of the 1990s, he has been working for several years with AI, and is now so immersed that OpenAI gives him pre-release software to test. His feeling that sentience is evolving in the machine is shared by some of the industry's most respected minds. If you believe Google DeepMind's Demis Hassabis or 'godfather of AI' Geoffrey Hinton, in the next few years, machine learning will lead to artificial general intelligence that rapidly outdoes our feeble human brains. Most jobs will vanish. Humans will no longer invent or discover anything because machines will do it better. In his recent film Aftermaths, Collishaw uses AI to imagine how life might evolve all over again after we destroy ourselves. In the fuselage of a crashed plane and long-abandoned offices beneath the sea, shimmering invertebrates swim, sprouting tentacles and tails, reproducing and mutating, becoming more fishlike, then reptilian, as millions of years of evolution are condensed by his algorithms into a hypnotic vision of DNA's inexhaustible ability to create new forms of life. Collishaw unveiled Aftermaths in his recent exhibition Move 37 – a mysterious title unless you have followed the evolution of AI. In 2016 AlphaGo, an AI system created by Hassabis and his team, played the human Go master Lee Sedol. In their second game, AlphaGo won by playing Move 37 – a truly 'creative' move, says the Google DeepMind website with pride in its clever child, that kindled a belief that inventive 'thinking' machines are possible. Nine years on, Hassabis is among those who think artificial general intelligence is imminent. Collishaw, in all the hours he works intimately with AI, feels the presence of something unnameable. It is, he suggests, a mysterious submarine presence in the current AI systems, 'not dissimilar from what's happening in the dark watery depths in this film'. Something is coming up from the abyss. Is it virtual beauty? Or virtual horror? We are all seduced by the strange beauty of the internet: the speed at which you can see images, their high definition and fantastically vivid colours; there's even the loveliness of the superbly designed devices on which we access this virtual abundance. Maybe the thinking machines, instead of wiping us out, will keep us as pampered pets, manipulating us with our gorgeous screens, insidiously enslaving us with ever new beauty obsessions. If so, the Virtual Beauty exhibition suggests they are well on the way, preparing a future in which we are all hedonist wastrels like the people in JG Ballard's sci-fi story The Cloud-Sculptors of Coral D. Except rather than gliding through the clouds, we will incessantly resculpt ourselves to attain perfect, AI-curated beauty. At least it will be something to do. Virtual Beauty is at Somerset House, London, from 23 July to 28 September.
Yahoo
22-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
CompSecure integrates cold storage wallet with MoneyGram
CompoSecure has integrated its Arculus Cold Storage Wallet with MoneyGram Access, allowing users to conduct cash transactions with the Circle USD Coin (USDC) at MoneyGram locations. This collaboration positions Arculus as the inaugural hardware wallet to offer such a service with MoneyGram Access, enabling the conversion of physical cash into digital currency. The service permits consumers to exchange cash for USDC on the Stellar blockchain and store their digital currency in the Arculus Wallet. The partnership allows users to withdraw cash in local currency at over 440,000 MoneyGram retail sites across more than 200 countries and territories, the remittance firm said in a statement. Additionally, Arculus has received a grant from the Stellar Development Foundation (SDF) to integrate payments from self-custody crypto wallets into traditional payment systems through smart contracts. The grant will also help CompoSecure expand stablecoin payments by developing Soroban smart contracts for Stellar's DeFi Pay system. These contracts will enable payments from self-custody wallets through traditional payment networks like Visa or Mastercard. CompoSecure and Arculus chief product and innovation officer Adam Lowe said: 'This integration enables people to convert physical cash into digital dollars on the highly performant Stellar blockchain and store those digital dollars securely, giving them complete autonomy and control over their assets.' The Stellar network, which the SDF supports, is designed to facilitate the tokenisation and exchange of various forms of value, such as different currencies, to promote global financial interoperability. MoneyGram Access general manager and partnerships head Jon Lira stated: 'At MoneyGram, our vision is to create a world where everyone can thrive without financial borders, creating a future of shared prosperity and opportunities. With MoneyGram Access, we are breaking down barriers by making digital currencies more accessible to everyone—including the hundreds of millions globally who rely on cash.' Earlier this month, MoneyGram partnered with Mastercard to adopt Mastercard Move, an initiative aimed at enhancing the digital transfer of money within the US and internationally. "CompSecure integrates cold storage wallet with MoneyGram " was originally created and published by Electronic Payments International, a GlobalData owned brand. The information on this site has been included in good faith for general informational purposes only. It is not intended to amount to advice on which you should rely, and we give no representation, warranty or guarantee, whether express or implied as to its accuracy or completeness. You must obtain professional or specialist advice before taking, or refraining from, any action on the basis of the content on our site. Sign in to access your portfolio
Yahoo
27-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Tennessee Senate targets school boards, superintendents associations
Sen. Adam Lowe, a Calhoun Republican. (Photo: John Partipilo) Republican senators are putting Tennessee school board and superintendent associations in their cross-hairs after a bruising fight this year over the governor's private-school voucher bill. Sen. Adam Lowe, a Calhoun Republican, is sponsoring Senate Bill 2017, which would prohibit school districts from joining organizations that use public funds or dues to pay lobbyists. The bill, which Lowe postponed Tuesday for discussion until 2026, clearly targets Tennessee's school board and superintendent associations. In addition to the legislation, Republican members of the Senate Education Committee notified the Tennessee School Boards Association last week that it's asking the group to voluntarily provide all communications between the association and its members regarding private-school vouchers by April 5. A letter signed by Senate Education Chairman Dawn White and several other Republican members of the committee on March 19 says the discussion surrounding Gov. Bill Lee's plan 'created a situation where a great deal of information concerning the bill's purpose, provisions, and elements were misrepresented to local communities, boards, councils and commissions… we understand that opinions may vary in these contentious moments, facts do not.' The Republican lawmakers want to know how the association communicated with its members to cut through 'any speculation and misunderstanding that might have occurred during the public discourse' on the bill. The voucher bill narrowly passed the House and Senate during a February special session called by Gov. Bill Lee, enabling the state to set up a program to give $7,000 scholarships to students statewide to enroll in private schools, costing about $220 million annually. Roughly two-thirds of the students who are expected to receive the state money are enrolled in private schools already. Part of the bill, which Lee signed into law a month ago, contains a provision to give teachers a $2,000 bonus. White said Wednesday the school boards association might have told its members wrongly that boards had to approve a resolution saying they support the voucher program to receive the bonus. 'We just want to get to the bottom of this and see what really was told, what wasn't told,' White said. Lowe's companion bill, which is sponsored by Republican Rep. Mary Littleton of Dickson, passed the House Education Committee Tuesday but now is on hold. Lowe said he didn't want associations whose members paid dues using public funds to use 'taxpayer dollars to lobby against taxpayer interests.' 'They're using general fund money paid for by taxpayers, and they'd be lobbying against the interests of the very people who gave them the money,' Lowe said. Lowe denied that his bill targets the school boards association, though he said it was 'apparent' the group opposed the governor's bill. 'I don't think it's punitive at all, but it is revelatory,' he added. Tennessee has dozens of government-affiliated groups that lobby the legislature, ranging from cities that hire their own lobbyists to associations representing mayors and sheriffs. Republicans have long complained about government-affiliated groups using public funds for lobbying, including state departments. But these groups have argued that without the ability to lobby, business interests would have the upper hand in dealing with lawmakers. Lowe said under his bill that the school board and superintendent associations would need private funds or some other 'pot of money' to continue lobbying the legislature. Representatives of the Tennessee School Boards Association and Tennessee Organization of School Superintendents could not be reached for immediate comment Wednesday.
Yahoo
28-02-2025
- Sport
- Yahoo
How to watch the TSSAA Legislative Council one-time transfer proposal decision
The TSSAA Legislative Council will hold a specially called meeting Monday to discuss a proposal that would allow athletes one transfer to another school without loss of eligibility if the move is for reasons unrelated to athletics. The TSSAA's proposal comes as Tennessee legislators consider House Bill 25, which if passed into law would change TSSAA transfer rules to allow athletes one free transfer without eligibility restrictions. Senator Adam Lowe, R-Calhoun, a co-sponsor of the bill, described the TSSAA's new proposal as 'tone deaf.' The discussion highlights the tension between school choice legislation and what some believe to be a fair-play issue in high school sports. More: TSSAA Legislative Council to review new one-time transfer proposal at special meeting Legislators and the TSSAA have communicated for more than a year about the TSSAA's transfer rules, with TSSAA member schools wishing to keep the long-standing bylaw that requires athletes who leave one school for another in a different zone to be ineligible for one calendar year from their last varsity game unless they have a bona fide change of address. Legislators are pushing to make the rule less restrictive. Their interest increased leading up to the Tennessee legislature's approval of a $447 million statewide publicly funded school voucher program. The TSSAA Legislative Council meeting will begin at 10 a.m. on Monday, March 3 and be streamed live by the TSSAA staff in conjunction with the NFHS Network. ● How to watch: TSSAA streaming page. Reach sports writer Tyler Palmateer at tpalmateer@ and on the X platform, formerly Twitter, @tpalmateer83. This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: TSSAA one-time transfer: How to watch Legislative Council meeting vote
