Recent content in Blogs on Michail Rybakov
My playful gradient.horse project went viral - but exploded in different online communities at different moments. This gives us the opportunity to explore how people coming from these communities draw horses. The horses shown here were selected randomly on a day when traffic from each site dominated - with non-horses, empty doodles, and transgressive images removed. Around 4% of all drawings…
So many apps, life coaches and philosophers to save us from mindless browsing, but I see mindless browsing as unavoidable. Not because of some technical or legal thing, but because mindless browsing is a good thing. We need it. Mindless browsing is like a walk through the woods, just looking for what is happening, navigating a huge amount of information that is hardly important at the moment – oh,…
Since gradient.horse went online in January 2026, six months have passed, and more than 700 000 horses (and non-horses) were drawn. There are now more horses on gradient.horse than in the wild. The image model I trained to filter out vandalism works very well, but it also hides a lot of ingenious drawings. You could see them if you’d activate the SHOW NON-HORSES setting, but most people do…
I’ve started designing custom film cameras, and needed tools to understand what kind of tolerances and imperfections can I get away with when guessing focusing distances. And more importantly, what kind of image would a lens create, and how the field of view, depth of field, focal length and aperture would correspond across different film formats. I haven’t really found good tools…
I really hate it when I’m exposed to some horrible news online, and feel powerless. There is nothing I can do, I am not responsible, and yet at the same time I have this feeling “this shouldn’t be happening”. There is a temptation to immediately react – if it was printed, I would crumple up the paper and throw it away – yet, reading pixels on the screen I don’t have…
This image is taken with a (60 year old) Bronica C medium format camera, with a (120 year old) Petzval-type lens. This camera is not only beautiful in a vintage car sort of way, but is also uniquely suited for adapting old lenses on medium format. On a typical camera, the lens houses the helicoid, the mechanical corkscrew-like part that moves the optics closer and further away from the subject…
Sometimes I get tired of the usual composition, of the trained way of seeing. Lately I tried to make photographs that not only depict nothing in particular, but also guide the attention of the viewer around, showing nothing. The colors guide you in one direction, the focus in another one, and the composition a third. Its only value lies in the movement of the viewers eyes, in the choreography of…
These things became annoyingly good at generating visually rich images. They are still bad at guiding attention, but perhaps that’s part of their beauty.
Where do people go, when the whole world seems foreign? Where do they find places for themselves? A space to be and not just react. I find it not easy to fotograph, since I’m aiming to create a portrait of the space, not of the person. More and more they begin to seem inseparable. With big thanks to Laura and Vanny.
As part of the Critical Zones exhibition in ZKM Karlsruhe, Hanna Jurisch and I offered workshops to experience the Critical Zone in a more direct way. We called it “Kritische Zone riechen und sehen”, or, translated, “Seeing and smelling the Critical Zone”. The Critical Zone is all about the processes of living, about living organisms and their entanglements. The difficult…
2007, St.Petersburg, Russia.
Mio asked a few artists and designers to write exercises and interventions that they do when feeling lonely or lost. She got some interesting results . Below is my exercise – Being an octopus – that I enjoy doing when I feel stressed. I recorded it as an audio guide. The German language version is below the fold. Being an Octopus Imagine yourself as an octopus inhabiting the landscape of your…
ZKM, the german media art museum, published my research on Strategies of Arrival , done under guidance of Bruno Latour. It’s made up of three parts: Inhabiting a map How to enter a space and Instruments of reation The first one is the most spectacular I guess, but make sure to check out the others too. And, once the museums reopen, check out my piece at the current ZKM exhibition Critical…
But also, [redacted] , look at this guy. Look at this photo of a bangladeshi guy holding a small basket of starfruits. Fifty thousand people liked it when he posted it on [a social media website] . This guy, Momtaz his name, titled it “Dragon fruits on my rooftop garden”, and was giving respectful replies to all the comments that followed. Saying he doesn’t sell the starfruits…
I used neural networks to recognize and remove human bodies from videos, simultaneously trying to fill the void they left. Why? Well, as we are externalizing not just our bodily actions to tools, but our decision process to all-knowing, all-loving AIs, the traditional, perceivable image of what constitutes a human body has become obsolete. It seems oddly fitting in that case, for disembodied…
Squint your eyes! You’d think an emoji would be a clear and precise representation of an emotion. However the difference in rendering on different devices provides a great potential for miscommunication . But even on the same platform, the kind of emotional reaction you may express is curated through the choice and design of available emojis. Take Facebook for example. The five Facebook…
Looking for ways to visualize machine learning processes. Neural nets are trained to recognized cancerous Ki-67 marked cells in biopsies. Instead of just counting the cells, a neural style process is run to produce infinite zombies in their place.
I was doing some research for an upcoming exhibition and looked into the question of tone in scientific communication, specifically the stylistic influence of visual representations of knowledge. Obviously the style changed over time, became more abstract, less naturalistic, less.. certain. As if the scientists became troubled by the idea of adding some character to the visual language - which is…
Exposition is the process of arriving in a movie, arriving at the characters’ vantage point, arriving in their space. I shot this short film with Mira and Matina in August 2015, and I really like it for its exposition through insignificance . The film starts with unimportant movements, movements that carry no meaning, and since there’s no significance to be ‘understood’,…
Nobody actually wants to use a web browser. It becomes evident the second you open your browser and notice that you don’t have internet connection. What we like about browsers is what they offer on the other side. What they connect us to. In that sense, browsers are transitory spaces - similar to airports, planes and train stations. Most of us have lost our childish curiosity towards these…
The concept of a global village stems from an idealistic view of a shrinking world, connected through electronic media. What is far, comes closer, nothing is out of reach anymore. Maps shape our undestanding of the physical world, so I decided to invert it. To shape the maps according to the understanding of the world - in this case according to the concept of a global village. I shrank the world…
There is a long history of movement notations. Before ubiquitous video capture you had to preserve the developed choreography somehow. Now they are more of a historical curiosity, even though they do look amazing as graphical systems. Of course, you could also provide simple illustrations of positions, as was done in a book by Golena Voyachkova “Movement - the root of woman’s health…
at Bless Home Berlin.
Diseases have always been fashionable. Tuberculosis brought us the fad of looking pale and skinny. Syphilis and it’s symptomatic light sensitivity and rotten noses brought us sunglasses and fake noses that were worn even by those not afflicted by the illness. I won’t go into detail as to why disease becomes fashionable - first, I don’t really know, and then there’s a whole…
In the winter of 2013 I went to Guinea with a few friends. Guinea is one of my favourite destinations, since Silvia, the mother of my friend Christoph, is working there at a medical laboratory. And having nice people on the ground makes travelling to a foreign country much more enjoyable. Guinea is an interesting country to visit. It is rich in natural resources, which leads to wealth being…
Costa Compagnie was preparing the Empire of Oil 360° movie to show at Ballhaus Ost in Berlin. Two days before the premiere:
Mira Hirtz has a good write-up on how abstractions and representations of things become the things they meant to represent . With regards to representations, one phenomenon that I particularly like is what I call interference . It happens when something, through its idiosyncratic existence, leaves traces in the outside world. Traces that show some of the object’s properties in a concise way.…
It is always great fun to try and find patterns in vast amounts of data. Sometimes you find causation, other times just spurious correlation, but it’s a great excercise and the insight you get can be surprising. For a while, I have been wearing a light sensor that measures the surrounding light. The light that is around us, everywhere we go. It’s intensity and color. These graphs below…
My nephew’s laptop is so old, he can’t play fifa. Instead, he animates soccer games in Powerpoint.
I had a simple dream. A dream of embedding videos in a web page without using third party services such as youtube or vimeo. For a while it seemed that I found the solution: using ffmpeg to convert the source videos to highly optimized h264 mp4 files. I wrote about my process before. The drawback is, that you only get one quality setting. Use a high bitrate and the video will load slowly or…
What do we see here? On the left is a papier-mâché box, with a Palekh style miniature on it. It is dated 1961. The style developed after icon painters from the city of Palekh had to find new jobs following the revolution of 1917. The painting on the box depicts the tree stumps on which Vladimir Ilich Lenin used to rest and work. In the distance a foreign delegation looks on. On the right, Fidel…
Christoph, teaching guinean kids the pronounciation of shandwish.
Spam emails try to get through filters by having slightly different content, such as writing “incredible” and “fantastic” interchangeably. For this, a template with all the possibilities is created and processed before sending. But sometimes unprocessed templates get sent instead. The writing is quite {incredible|fantastic|marvelous| outstanding}: {Say|Tell} No To…
In a reddit thread on health inspection violations someone offered a story about a run away cow licking bread in a recreation of a 18th century french bakery. A commenter wrote a poem about the incident: my name is Cow, and wen its nite, or wen the moon is shiyning brite, and all the men haf gon to bed - i stay up late. i lik the bred. It is unclear why it caught on so quickly, but the poem…
There is something magical in such videos - since you are basically making something from nothing. The technique is borrowed from impro theater: you write the screenplay together as a group, with every participant saying one simple sentence on his or her turn. One by one a story is built. Then just film it using the simplest means, and you have a non-trivial movie in a day. I used this technique…
Irgendwo haben sie 100 Zenit-Bälle gefunden.
In Guinea laufen Hühner überall rum, sie sind schmal und schmächtig, leicht und knochig wie Rennradfahrer.
Ходил я по дворам; дворы дрожали. -->
Wer Videos über Vimeo oder youtube publiziert, muss sich mit solchen Fragen nicht beschäftigen. Für die zwei Leute, die selber noch Videos in mp4 konvertieren um sie dann in ihre Webseiten einbinden ist es vieleicht interessant. Also vielleicht interessant zu erfahren, dass ich lange Zeit es falsch gemacht habe mit direkten Exporten aus FinalCut oder MPEGStreamclip. Es geht besser mit ffmpeg.…