Bombay Beach Diaries

A photo journal of my time @ bombay beach, CA.

(update 09-2020: It’s happening again in 2021! apply at mars.college)

The Town
Desert Dayz
Links to documentation and projects

The Town

I’m at Bombay Beach for brahman.ai, Gene’s initiative for living and learning in the californian desert. I came here with the intention to write about ml and to build robots.

Bombay Beach is maybe best known by its Biennale, a town-wide art festival with tints of post-apocalyptic aesthetics. The Biennalie’s artifacts resonate really well with the people and landscape here, making BB a crusty, magical-realist, and overall very charming town.

I’d love to give you a little tour here, but that has to wait until I develop & scan my films. For now, here’s a sneak peek.

The last resort!

pirates The yard outside of Pirate’s, one of our bases.

modular Chelley working the modulars at Pirate’s.

drivein The Drive-in

Some artworks at the beach.

ss0 The swing

ss1 The sunken ship

ss2 The cube

ss3 The nothing

birds Birds

Desert Dayz

Feb.8 - metal welding

wire welding Workshop in action. photo by Phil.

Gene wire welding; photo by phil.

A practice piece.

intrinsic dimension experiment 1 The workshop ended with a collective effort of cutting a bed frame and welding the pieces into a unicycle rack.

intrinsic dimension experiment 1 Final product. Photo by Phil.

Finishing the day with a great sunset over the RVs.

Sunset over trailers

Feb.9 - storm-proofing mars

Mars is another Brahman site in the desert east of Bombay Beach. The structures shown below is portal (a glimpse into the building process here), in which we plan to host a party next Saturday.

The evening’s work was to protect the structure and the 48 TVs inside it. The TVs were donated by a hotel in Manhattan after its renovation. These pictures were taken on the second day, as we were rushing to cover as many area possible before sundown.

TV calibration.

full moon.

Feb.10 - 3d printing and network security

The storm alert turned out to be a false alarm, but I nonetheless stayed in and learned to do some 3D printing from Alejandro.

3d-20d Good ol’ d20 with our Tevo Tarantula sofy Malleable cable holder re-purposed by Sofy

Who doesn’t want to learn about network security and incidence response on a Monday night? With the d20s, we played two rounds of b&b.

Feb.11 - norman and sunset spins

norman Breaking news: Norman napped next to me today

At the machine creativity workshop at NeurIPS 2019, the band YACHT recited some lyrics from their new album, Chain Tripping. They worked with Ross Goodwin and used (my guess is) an recurrent neural net to generate the melodies and lyrics, picked and stitched from these materials, and created a production that (well deservedly) received a Grammy nomination. Anyway, these few lines were stuck in my head for the months that followed, and I want to share them with you.

I’m so in love I can feel it in my car
I can feel it in my heart
I can feel it so hard
(…)

Oh, won’t you come, won’t you come
Won’t you work on my head
Be my number nine

To be alive, to be with you, like a weed

I can feel it in my head
Like a dog in bed

The last two lines is striking - it rolls right off the tongue yet the imagery, warm and complex, lingers on. It is so strange yet so familiar that I just cannot turn my thoughts away; this might be my favorite piece of (unironic) neural network literary work to date. Norman reminded me of them again as he peacefully napped, leaning gently on me.

Ben and Sofy practicing fire spinning under sunset

Feb. 12 - the portal

solder fixed some broken LEDs for mars. Thanks Dan and Sofy for teaching me how to solder!

At mars: the ITP crew turned on all the TVs at the portal! The installation, calibration, and power supply all took a lot of effort to be figured out, so it was a triumphant moment for the people who has been working so hard on this project.

tuning Brandon, Roland, and Mai (out of frame) doing some final configurations

pointing Roland and Gene

~ Celebration ~

Meanwhile on another side of the portal, Alsino and Espen are building a bouldering wall.

Gene’s drone flying through the portal

portal by Alsino

Feb. 15-19 - parties and nature

This week went by in a wirlwind of endless celebration & travels.

Alice hangs a disco ball at mars. bread a lady named catherine makes rosemary flat bread live in darkness. fireplace Bonfire! jam slab city jams. photo by dan. salvation mountain nerds vs. hippie powers. photo by dan. plant We found a plant that looks like neurons!

sunrise Sofy and I watch sunrise on rock @ Joshua Tree. photo by phil.

Feb. 22 - neon colors

Today is a day in neon colors.

sheverb Sheverb, the residence band at BBAC this month, plays their new album at ski inn.

Fantastic femme-led instrumental surf rock band who has been at BB to record their new album. Check them out!

After the show, We roamed around the town.

paul *paul at bombay beach estates.

ben (fabulous), inside Randy Polumbo’s angler grove (also fabulous)

Feb. 23 - double feature

Movie screening. Tonight’s theme is Japanese animated sci-fi; we played Ghost in the Shell and Akira.

akira thank you unicyle for being a loyal friend and an great speaker

Feb. 24-25 - mars work station & karaoke of dreams

One day over dinner, Derek, Sofy, and I have came together to decide that we would like to build an AI-generated karaoke booth in the middle of the desert. I will be working on its software for the next couple of days, and you can find the code here.

At sunset I went to mars. As I got to mars I found out that a brand new workspace was built on the side of Pegasus, our shipping container.

outside allunimum sheets FTW

inside Beutiful, shiny, and just the right amount of shade.

inside We even have a kitchen space! Alsino cooking.

Mars is starting to feel like a real hub now, a place we can live and work in.

Maybe even more notable is that Sofy built this majestic tesseract in one day. Is she real?

sofy and the tesseract This tesseract will be housing our desert dream karaoke.

fire spinning The mighty builder also spins fire.

Lode Star Bombay Beach’s skyline.

Feb. 26 - Espen

Espen is leaving us soon. Durring his time here, in addition to being a remarkable human, he trained a VAE on faces and built this lovely installation.

espen The artist examining his creation

bombaydreams morphed faces. picture by espen.

The TVs show Brahmannauts’ portraits being interpreted by a neural network, which applies style transfer to morph the faces into artwokes at Bombay Beach. You can read more about Bombay Dreaming here and here.

It was an honor to be there to celebrate the finish of this piece. I’m familiar with images generated by GANs (and my opinion is that artworks created by them are often unintersting), but it’s cool to see them being given physicality. The fact that they are played on hotel-renovation TVs, lying in hand-crafted frames carved into the middle of a desert is in itself provocative about people’s relationship with technology and the enviornment. (and also, the piece is about people I like and care about…) I think it’s quite clever and lovely.

Espen Thank you espen!

Feb. 29 - collective intellegence lab

I arrived just in time from san diego to be at gene’s collective intellegence lab. High winds on mars cuased a night sandstorm, but in some sense it was the perfect backdrop to learn / hear a pitch about an autonomous AI artist.

martians. picture credit alice

gene gene multiplies.

party I wasn’t at the after party, but this picture is too iconic to be omitted. cr: alsino.

Mar. 1 - unicycle repair

unicycle cracked open a good boy to replace the batteries

In other news, Sofy’s tesseract now has a inner chamber! The smaller one will house the electronics of our AI karaoke machine.

tess sofy is a genius and her creations are majestic

Mar. 2 - windstorm

wind high winds on mars & flying parts

The wind disrupted our plan to work on our computers on mars. Instead, we went into Gene’s RV and he supplied us with delicious omlets and good conversations.

puma Lovely humans: TJ, Cai, and Rachel

Mar. 4 - pallet racks, building the forest, and alice’s soldering workshop

Today marks my favourite day at Brahman so far. When I ask Freeman why he decided to come to bombay beach and start this project, he said, looking back, his happiest times were spent building pallet racks. Through today I think I can start to understand why it is so. We are born to build.

racks choosing a site for the forest racks racks building the forest racks Putting up fastenings solar cleaning and tying down solar panels on top of pegasus puma taking a brake in the shade <3 jonas Jonas

At sunset alice offered her soldering workshop.

solder The opening slide features a stock photo of a lady holding the soldering iron wrong solder ~liquid analogy~ with extremely cute illustrations solder soldering over pink LEDs

Mar. 5 - bouldering workshop

alsino Alsino marking routes on the wall prior to the workshop

Alsino and Paul updated the climbing wall and gave a bouldering workshop. The only record I have of it was during warmup:

warmup servers in a crowded restaurant.

Mar. 6-8 - found object drawing robot

robot my little baby in action 💗

I built a drawing robot with desert wood! The machanism and software is heavily based on BranchioGraph, with a different orientation that required some trignometry to figure out.

robot1 wholesome nighttime activity: super-glueing servos onto sticks

robot3 first run! it was told to draw rectangles; decided to scribble some kindered landscape instead.

robot2 very ad-hoc calibration setup ft. printed protractor and earing

Even after calibration the drawing is still a little… drunk looking, because of the elasticity in the sticks, the looseness of the joints, and inacuracies of servo controls. In some ways, though, these faults add a layer of intermediacy to the drawing (or the act of drawing), which one may see as part of the machine’s touch. Maybe the physicality of the robot is where originality emerges.

vectors drawing A drawing of a vectorized picture of us building pallet racks.

This being said, I will still try to find ways to improve calibration and the control software to make the drawings at least legible. You can find my code for it here.

Some of this work happened at the mars stupid hackathon (held concurrently with stupid hackathon sweden), proposed by jonas and christian. here are some snippits of it.

sh-1 Seva, TJ, and Gene working on networking for the portal

sh-2 Sofy soldering!

sh-3 Christian testing out his arduino alcohol sensor; paul and xander are entertained.

Mar. 9 - 赤壁赋

drawing Vanessa drawing on Pegasus with charcoals found in bonfire

chibifu my humble attempt at mural-ing, ft. Kirby painting an actual mural

Scribed on Pegasus is the Ode on the Red Cliffs by Su Shi (《前赤壁赋》), written in 1082 AD. It’s one of my favourite texts in Chinese, and I think about it often since I’ve been here.

蘇子曰：「客亦知夫水與月乎？逝者如斯，而未嘗往也；盈虛者如彼，而卒莫消長也，蓋將自其變者而觀之，則天地曾不能以一瞬；自其不變者而觀之，則物與我皆無盡也，而又何羨乎？且夫天地之間，物各有主，苟非吾之所有，雖一毫而莫取。惟江上之清風，與山間之明月，耳得之而為聲，目遇之而成色，取之無禁，用之不竭，是造物者之無盡藏也，而吾與子之所共適。」

I can’t translate it well. It is a meditation on nature’s rhythm of change and loss, that it is sublime and infinte and beyond the claim of individuals.

sunset sunset 是造物者之無盡藏也，而吾與子之所共適。

Mar. 5-10, 20 - Desert Fever Dream Karaoke

For consistency, I am abusing the power of non-linear narratives and am consolidating a few checkpoints from the future into this entry. It’s a very crude + sophia-oriented documentation of the project that (hopefully) will be polished in near future.

With the amount of time and computation/finatial resources we have, the realistic solution is to use of-the-shelf models and pre-generate the content. You can find most of the code here, although they are written for a very specific usecase / machine setup.

bonus content: me carrying the small tesseract back to town so we can test the electronics.

unicycle

Mar. 11 - i gave a talk

talk I talked a bit about natural language processing.

karaoke which evolved into an actual karaoke session.

Mar. 13 - wood saw

chop Sofy taught me how to chop wood. thank you sensei!!!

In other news, the desert is moist and green after the rain.

desert

ship a wrecked ship

Mar. 14 - noise and randomness; derek livecoding

sofy Sofy’s randomness and noise talk.

derek Derek Livecoding at the forest. Visuals by Cai

sofy A gorgeous bonfire follows.

Mar. 16 - Quarantine starts.

On the 15th a few friend and I went to the spa, and had dinner at the local bar after we came back.

spa Everyone looking dreamy

In hindsight, this was an irresponsible move as we might become a vector of risk to our community. California has anounced state emergency and our European friends are facing canceled flights and closing borders. In response, an all-hands meeting was called and we discussed where to go from here. Brahman goes into a collective quarantine.

meeting We were told to project as much happiness as possible in this photo