Skrolli Party 2024

This Saturday, I took part in Skrolli Party 2024. I participated in the Wild compo with this graphics piece:

Galactic Liberation

I used a shot from the Milky Way Galaxy set by Jabi Sanz as the background, and had DALL-E3 generate the halo. The buddha is a photo I took. The editing and compositing is done in Gimp.

It placed #5/5. Prints on Redbubble.

I tell you, friend, that it is not possible by traveling to know or see or reach a far end of the cosmos where one does not take birth, age, die, pass away, or reappear. But at the same time, I tell you that there is no making an end of suffering & stress without reaching the end of the cosmos. Yet it is just within this fathom-long body, with its perception & intellect, that I declare that there is the cosmos, the origination of the cosmos, the cessation of the cosmos, and the path of practice leading to the cessation of the cosmos.

                     - The Buddha in AN 4.45 Rohitassa Sutta

In the Diamond Sutra (Red Pine translation), we find: 

What do you think, Subhuti, is the space to the east easy to measure?”

Subhuti replied, “No, it is not, Bhagavan.”

The Buddha said, “Likewise, is the space to the south, to the west, to the north, in between, above, below, or in any of the ten directions easy to measure?”

Subhuti replied, “No, it is not, Bhagavan.”

Space can be thought of as limitless (as in "the dimension of infinite space", one of the meditative states spoken of by the Buddha), because its nature is non-obstruction. Therefore, it does not obstruct any added yardsticks, no matter how far we measure.

 The end of the cosmos is to be found within, in Nibbana:

There is that dimension where there is neither earth, nor water, nor fire, nor wind; neither dimension of the infinitude of space, nor dimension of the infinitude of consciousness, nor dimension of nothingness, nor dimension of neither perception nor non-perception; neither this world, nor the next world, nor sun, nor moon. And there, I say, there is neither coming, nor going, nor stasis; neither passing away nor arising: without stance, without foundation, without support [mental object]. This, just this, is the end of stress.

                     - Ud 8.1 Nibbāna Sutta

I also made this animation, partly at the party (and partly in a parking garage while waiting for the museum I visited before the party to open!):

It was made with Processing, and converted for the Web with processing-p5-convert.

Sailing: Pitkä 2024

 At the end of July, I had the pleasure of sailing with our club, Pii. Here is the map of our route:

Photos from the trip.

I also learned the Ashley stopper knot.

Assembly 2024

 This weekend, I took part in the Assembly 2024 event. "Took part", as in I was there, and entered a graphics piece into the Freestyle GFX compo. Once again, as many times before, it was not qualified to be shown. Here it is, anyway:

Primitive art

I went for a kind of naivistic, rudimentary look, with allusion to times when digital art was in its baby shoes. I was also inspired by "outsider art", which is fitting, as these constant rejections have led to me feeling like an outsider even in the already rather niche context of the demoscene.

The piece is a composite of a photograph, a screenshot, and a scan of a mandala from a mandala coloring set by Agni K. Editing in Gimp. Prints on RedBubble.

Graffathon 2024

This past weekend, I took part in Graffathon 2024. 

I made a quick entry in vvvv. Here is the base graphic that I also made at the party:

The Light of Discernment

Prints on RedBubble.

Here is the simple animation I made with it:

The track is Sad Soul (Chasing a Feeling) by Alex Grohl. 

I entered it into the "Beginner Compo" (instead of "Advanced"), as, even though I have some experience, my skills are definitely "beginner level" at best (there was the guideline that one should enter Advanced if one "works at NVidia"). It placed #10/12. 

"Monks, there are these seven properties. Which seven? The property of light, the property of beauty, the property of the dimension of the infinitude of space, the property of the dimension of the infinitude of consciousness, the property of the dimension of nothingness, the property of the dimension of neither perception nor non-perception, the property of the cessation of feeling & perception. These are the seven properties." [...] 

 "Monk, the property of light is discerned in dependence on darkness. The property of beauty is discerned in dependence on the unattractive. The property of the dimension of the infinitude of space is discerned in dependence on form. The property of the dimension of the infinitude of consciousness is discerned in dependence on the dimension of the infinitude of space. The property of the dimension of nothingness is discerned in dependence on the dimension of the infinitude of consciousness. The property of the dimension of neither perception nor non-perception is discerned in dependence on the dimension of nothingness. The property of the cessation of feeling & perception is discerned in dependence on cessation." 

- Sattadhatu Sutta 

So, properties depend on their opposites, or complements: ☯ (attainments depend on previous levels of attainment). Therefore, we may think that discernment depends on non-discerning; that is, a sharp, diamond-cutter-like intellect that is apt at classifications and such cognition is dependent on a non-dual, holistic awareness. That can be thought to have a visual representation here: the blobs of light, representing "thoughts" in the sense of information packets of this/that dualities reach the Buddha, but bounce off of him - they do not get absorbed into him, he simply receives them, then sends them on their merry way, and why? Because he does not have what he himself called "the root of objectification-classifications": "I am the thinker" (Tuvataka Sutta). At the root of all discriminating cognition is this sense of "self", which brings about its complement, "other-than-self", and from there are built sometimes elaborate constructions of thought (Papañca). 

ATK-Lohja 2024

Last year, I remotely participated in ATK-Lohja. This year, I wanted to actually be present. However, I was barred from attending due to grievances I've time and again tried to reconcile, and hatred I've done all I know to placate. I've offered apologies for any offense; they say "time heals all wounds", well, that's not true in the case that the wound keeps getting picked on, as must be the case here, for without further input on my part, with time, the fires of hate have not died down, they've gotten stronger and more vicious and also been spread further afield. I've offered my bucket of water, that is, forgiveness, but it hasn't been accepted. I don't like to see people in the thrall of hate, anger, and vitriol, but I don't know how else to remedy these. Powder extinguisher? Seems forced. Of course, one shouldn't try to, and ultimately, can't, force forgiveness. Hey, have you ever noticed that the word for "patience, forbearance, forgiveness" is "kshanti", while the word for "peace" is shanti?

This is definitely the first demoparty I know of with an exclusionary, blacklist-enforced policy of admission. I was not given a chance to plead my case (so I'm doing it here); the say-so of a member of the "in-group" was enough for the ban to be levied unconditionally with no chance for appeal. Ah well, I'm not blaming the party organizers - in-group preference is a very strong, natural trait in human beings - this, combined with "acting on orders", and what we have is a quite understandable response. But, it's at least slightly bitter-tasting to receive this treatment from a party whose stated theme is "Koodia ja Empatiaa", that is, "Code and Empathy". Empathy! What more is there to say?

How pitiful beings are we! How small, how petty! 

It is said in the canon: 

"And what is right speech? Abstaining from lying, from divisive speech, from abusive speech, & from idle chatter: This is called right speech.  

Abandoning divisive speech he abstains from divisive speech. What he has heard here he does not tell there to break those people apart from these people here. What he has heard there he does not tell here to break these people apart from those people there. Thus reconciling those who have broken apart or cementing those who are united, he loves concord, delights in concord, enjoys concord, speaks things that create concord."

Here, divisive talebearing brought about a ban on my participation, while my own attempts at words of concord (such as admitting I am sorry, and begging for forgiveness) did not manage to set things right. A curiously selective power in words! By the way, not accepting a plea for forgiveness is one of the 18 root downfalls.

What wretched lives people lead! Incessantly pulling in the pleasant and pushing away the hated - in this case, me - even though this has never worked to create happiness since beginningless time. A wheel of suffering with no end in sight - may we all be swiftly released from this cycle! 

I didn't want to enter these works remotely, as I figure I won't send my work where I'm not welcome myself, but I am releasing them here, just the same.

I would've taken part in two compos: AI Graphics, and the regular Graphics. Here is the AI image:

New Black Polished Chrome

The title is a reference to Emmanuel Top - Turkish Bazar, which in turn samples The Doors. It is made with the mage.space text-to-image AI and outpainting by RunwayML. Prints on Redbubble.

And here is the entry for the Graphics Compo:

Duality of Kamma

I made it using vvvv, a photo I took, and Inkscape. Prints on Redbubble.

“Mendicants, I declare these four kinds of deeds, having realized them with my own insight. What four?

1. There are dark deeds with dark results;
2. bright deeds with bright results;
3. dark and bright deeds with dark and bright results; and
4. neither dark nor bright deeds with neither dark nor bright results, which lead to the ending of deeds.

                         - AN 4.233 Vitthārasutta: Deeds in Detail 

The story I made up after the fact is that, the three Buddhas are like the first three instances on this list, which are still stuck in black and white. There's a whole matrix of kamma (the background), strongly interconnected, and you may radiate as much "good" as you can and want (the halos), but that's still just "bright deeds with bright results", at best. However, there is the transcendent intentional action of the Arahants and maybe other actualized beings, which are "neither dark nor bright deeds with neither dark nor bright results, which lead to the ending of deeds". 

The quartet of kamma types is a prime example of a Catuskoti, or Tetralemma. I find that often in Western thinking, the "both" and "neither" cases are left out, even where they would be possible. This is an unfortunate oversight stemming from too tight, Boolean logic. We need at least two bits, people!

As for the results of actions, I suppose I am currently facing mine, as we all must. But, I must point out what the Vipaka Sutta says:

"Divisive tale-bearing — when indulged in, developed, & pursued — is something that leads to hell, leads to rebirth as a common animal, leads to the realm of the hungry shades. The slightest of all the results coming from divisive tale-bearing is that, when one becomes a human being, it leads to the breaking of one's friendships.

It seems that these friendships have, indeed, been broken, and seemingly for good as there has been "no quarter given" in the way of apologizing or even accepting apologies, but may these people nonetheless be spared the other, harsh consequences of their actions! May this be my final word in the matter: clemency.

Endless scrolling

 I like endless scrolling. A lot of people today like endless scrolling, too, but for me it means texture displacement by wrapping offset, and for them, it means social media feeds!

I recently took part in a weekend meditation retreat, and in the library at the retreat center, found a great, illustrated book on Tibetan art. Here, I've recreated some of the border friezes as endlessly scrolling animations:

At this point, Inkscape user Lazur kindly taught me the sensible way of doing the animations directly in the SVG. Here are some sample animations created by him.

And my first animation with this technique:

This one may remind you of playing Tetris:

Three-fold wheels

Some time ago, I made this SVG representation of a Gankyil in Processing:

Now, I made another three-fold wheel, the World Triad:

As the Gankyil is "the Wheel of Joy", maybe this is the flip side, that is, the three poisons perpetuating? After all, it's "the World Triad", and isn't that the way of the world?

Anyway, I just wanted to write about this to remark that currently, the task of drawing the World Triad is beyond state-of-the-art Artificial Intelligence (Bing Copilot): it was not able to give me the radii or midpoints of the smaller circles. So, I had to do like was suggested in a Github Issue where an AI had "fixed" an issue in the wrong way: use a different kind of AI: Actual Intelligence! So, I grabbed my grid paper and after some basic trigonometry whirl-abouts, I had these figures, which I am providing here, but which the adept should really work out themselves:

float r = R * 1/(1+1/(sqrt(3)/2)); //r is smaller circle's radius, R is larger's
float l = (2/sqrt(3) - 1)*r //from center of larger along radius to circumference of smaller




Edit: I added another, "long-tailed" Gankyil:

 

I was able to draw it largely thanks to this tutorial by Zak Korvin: 

This is what the "guide pattern" looks like, so you can see it's a bit more involved:

Edit 2: Here's a study on another three-fold wheel pattern I've long been interested in: "the Musashi Family Crest". It's just a free-hand approximation; there is no deep geometric understanding, here.

Instanssi 2024

This weekend, I attended the Instanssi 2024 demoparty. I participated in the Graphics Compo with this work:

Cosmic Serenity

It's made using Amberlight, a photo of a Buddha statue I made, DALL-E3 through Bing Copilot (for the halo), Inkscape, and Gimp. It placed #9/13. Prints on RedBubble.

"Monks, whatever in the cosmos — with its devas, Maras, & Brahmas, its generations with their contemplatives & brahmans royalty & common people — is seen, heard, sensed, cognized, attained, sought after, pondered by the intellect: That do I know. Whatever in the cosmos — with its devas, Maras, & Brahmas, its generations with their contemplatives & brahmans, their royalty & common people — is seen, heard, sensed, cognized, attained, sought after, pondered by the intellect: That I directly know. That has been realized by the Tathagata, but in the Tathagata it has not been established.
- AN 4.24 Kalaka Sutta

 Thanissaro Bhikkhu explains "in the Tathagata it has not been established" like this: "the Tathagata hasn't taken a stance on it.". The Middle Way philosopher Nagarjuna has said: "If I had any thesis, I would be at fault. But since I have no thesis, I am not at fault". In the western logical tradition, too, the maker of a positive claim (ie. an affirmation, not a negation) has the burden of proof. So, by avoiding positive positions, and instead taking a negating "Neti neti" (not this, not this) approach, we are spared much unnecessary hardship and strife that would be involved in the necessary defense of our claims, if we had an affirming stance on something. In emptiness, there is no nail to hang your hat on.

I also participated in the Summamutikka (Wild) compo with a music video for a track by our band, Valmet Children:

The name of the song, and thus, the music video for it, is "low frequency". It placed #12/19. 

When he encountered some confounding situation, my grandfather would say something that translates roughly as "Now I am completely in the shortwave!" ("Nyt minä olen aivan ulalla!"). Indeed, when trying to figure out some perplexing thing, it makes sense for our minds to "throttle" themselves into an "overclocked" state - that's exactly what modern CPUs do. So, as clock frequency increases, wavelength (being inversely proportional) shortens, leading us to "the shortwave". Several thinkers, perhaps most notably Nikola Tesla, have likened the brain to a radio transmitter-receiver: our link between the body, which is right here, and the mind, which is "out there" (actually, Bodhidharma said that the mind is neither inner nor outer, but let's leave that for now). So, if a frantic search for understanding of the immediate situation at hand can lead to increased operational frequency ("ultra-short waves"), perhaps the state of "low frequency" is the opposite: a deep, unurgent state of rest and relaxation; stressless, only occasionally rippling with thought, if that; a mind like the pool of water in the Samaññaphala Sutta: "clear, limpid, and unsullied". 

Bodhi Leaf Cards

 In continuation of robotic Buddha drawings (1, 2), I used my AxiDraw to draw these Bodhi Leaf cards:

Bodhi & Wisdom cards

I used them to participate in the 4th Demoscene Card Exchange and the Plot Party 2023 card exchange. I like sending and receiving stuff in the mail, so if you want to send me something (that I won't get in
trouble for), let me know your email address and I will send you my mailing address! 

The original image looks like this, and is made by DALL-E3 through Bing Chat:

Bodhi Leaf by DALL-E3

Comparade 2023

 This past weekend, the Comparade 2023 party was held. I remotely entered the following graphics piece:

Pink Enlightenment

I made it using the Fluid app, DALL-E3 for the Mandelbox halo, a photo of a concrete Buddha statue by me, and Gimp.

Unfortunately, the video stream from the party, described by the web page as "highly unstable", proved worthy of that description, and I did not see the compo or the prize giving, but it placed #6/6.

Prints on RedBubble.

More Robotically Drawn Buddhas

 I previously wrote about having a robot draw Buddhas for me. Well, I wanted to give my AxiDraw some more work, so I used frosting.ai to generate a monochrome Buddha face, which I then edited in Gimp and RunwayML. Then I used the CutRocket halftone generator, which conveniently has output directly as SVG. I edited the SVG further in Inkscape and plotted it from there with the AxiDraw. 

The AI-generated face after editing

Much like in the previous piece, my motivation was to play with the limits of when we still recognize something as "Buddha".

The face after halftone treatment

The first "training print" was done with a Baoke brush pen from AliExpress

The "trial run"

My plan all along was to render it in silver on black. Browsing, I found the Plot Party event, which was set to happen in a week, and had "black paper" as one of the prompts. So, I entered!

The final entry

I ran out of ink in my silver pen, so the final rendition was in gold. Prints available on Etsy.

Under Construction

 Some time ago, I decided to make a modern version of those infamous "under construction" pages - complete with spinning skull animation. As I did say "modern", the animation is VP9 WebM with alpha channel. For this, I needed to first download and install WebM from Fnordware. 

I thought "for sure, AI can already remove the background, no sweat!". I already had a spinning skull on a black background; I just needed the subject isolated and the background made transparent.

So, after trying a few services that wanted me to sign up for a subscription, I found Unscreen, where it's possible to work on a pay-as-you-go basis. I uploaded my clip, looked at the preview, where everything seemed fine - and forked over my €3.33. However, what came back was a noisy matte with a lot of bleeding. So, I initiated a refund under their 14 day money back guarantee, which, to their credit, they honored, and went to work isolating the skull myself.

A great help was the "Magic Wand" preset from Mikey's Effects. Maybe you know the Magic Wand tool from Photoshop - this preset brings that to After Effects. This video will explain:

So, after using this preset, and somewhat haphazardly animating a matte for fine-tuning, I got the end result you can see on the live page.

In conclusion, AI has great potential for this kind of simply definable routine editing work, but it's not there yet. 

Skrolli Party 2023

 This weekend, I attended Skrolli Party 2023. Like last time, I participated in the Wild Compo with a graphics work, shown here:

Nature of Buddha

It features a Buddha statue made by me and some computer graphics and photo elements. The title, "Nature of Buddha", refers to "Buddha Nature", a concept that seems easily misunderstood. Buddhism teaches "emptiness of inherent existence", and this should not be replaced with an idea of "Buddha nature as the inherent character of existence", as pointed out in the article "Freedom from Buddha Nature". Buddhism is concerned with freedom, especially freedom from suffering, and this should not be allowed to be replaced with a rigid self-definition of "Self as Buddha". 

"I have Buddha Nature", or, in other words, "I am of the nature of Buddha", is simply a special case of "the conceit 'I am'". From the Alagaddupama Sutta:

And how is a monk a noble one with banner lowered, burden placed down, unfettered? There is the case where a monk's conceit 'I am' is abandoned, its root destroyed, made like a palmyra stump, deprived of the conditions of development, not destined for future arising. This is how a monk is a noble one with banner lowered, burden placed down, unfettered.

The means of gaining enlightenment are sometimes classified as Jiriki and Tariki, or self-power and other-power, respectively. But, both are mistaken: we think we must get something either through our own power, or with outside help. However, even the earlier expressiong "gaining enlightenment" is wrong, according to the Heart Sutra, which says "no attainment, with nothing to attain". 

Even resting in a state of inaction (wu wei) can become despoiled by the sneaking in of the idea of striving towards some ideal through this inaction; a mental apprehension of natural, effortless inaction as the factual striving towards a goal. 

So, the emptiness of self (ātmaśūnyatā) is not non-existence of self, yet not existence of self, even self as Buddha, either. 

By construing for ourselves an essential nature, and therefore a being, as Buddha or as anything else, is to fall from the peaceful resting beyond being and non-being. Creating a mental object to represent oneself is to move away from the serene emptiness of "No color, no sound, no smell, no taste, no touch, no object of mind". As it says in the Yavalakapi Sutta: 

Anyone who construes is bound by Mara. Anyone who doesn't construe is freed from the Evil One.

So, let us be liberated through lack of construing! 

Prints on RedBubble. I placed #5/7.

Assembly 2023: Nirvana Patterns

 This weekend, I went to Assembly 2023. I had a piece to enter into the Freestyle Graphics Competition, but, for the third time in a row, it was not qualified to be shown. 

Nirvana Patterns

I used MandelBrowser, Gimp, and photos in making this. I also had ChatGPT come up with the name.

Prints on RedBubble.

Sailing in Sweden

I went sailing with our club in the Swedish archipelago.