Tour of the Sacred Library | Hacker News Reader

Tour of the Sacred Library

moultano.wordpress.com

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Man, what an uncanny trip! I don't mean to say it's any less impressive, but it was uncanny.

The surrealist nature of the piece notwithstanding, I was bothered by some of the artistic decisions made in the pictures. Maybe the lack of (traditional) perspective; but even that I can chalk up to a conscious Escherian aesthetic. I was also slightly bothered that the images were not available in higher resolution. Surely that should go without asking, in a piece going for this kind of artistic subject matter?

My suspicions peaked at https://moultano.files.wordpress.com/2021/07/1626575570_the_... because it really does not look like a cafeteria to me.

And when I got to the coda, it all made sense.

Long-ish PS:

> We believe that every book contains a world. But more than just believe, we know this, because we know that our world is made out of words. The person who created our world thought of words to describe just one of the rooms in our library, then saw it, and was so amazed at its beauty that he described more and more, and saw more and more.

I got chills when I first read this because it's so meta. Then I got to the behind-the-scenes explainer of the methodology and this quote (which, to be clear, I'm aware R. Moulton himself wrote) just reached another level of meta, if that's possible.

Thanks for the tour. I enjoyed it!

I was also confused by the small size of the images, and the small incongruities in them, but I didn't realize they were ML-generated, I thought it was some surreal and elaborate way of illustrating.

The narrative really throws you off because it's clearly human, and I'm glad the small images didn't spoil the trick too soon.

I'd suggest reading it in Firefox's Reader mode. It placed each image before its corresponding text, which led me to believe they were small for that purpose. Really added to the experience, I believe, since I didn't have any doubt as to why the images were the size they were.

Now I'd love to see a full book set in the world of this library, though.

For me the giveaway was https://moultano.files.wordpress.com/2021/07/1626613273_the_... -- that brickwork is classic Deep Dream !

Still I only said to myself 'maybe' because the art seemed so original up to that point. I wonder what the source material looks like? It is perhaps collaging and laundering the original work more than it is generating it.

A sense of awe throughout the whole series. Really captured the sense of wonder that comes from stumbling into a latent space and the story telling is just fantastic. It carries me through a world I don't understand, introduces characters and places.

What a wonderful journey this art piece is.

I wish this library existed! I have been thinking about something like this for the past few years and how it could be accomplished.

Semi-related: https://libraryofbabel.info/

This reminds me a lot of one of the locations in (one of the expansions of?) Pillars of Eternity 2. https://pillarsofeternity.fandom.com/wiki/The_Scriptorium

With so much guidance of the AI toward James Gurney, I'm surprised no dinosaurs snuck in. They would totally fit the world portrayed.

https://moultano.files.wordpress.com/2021/07/1626677928_the_... the clouds look like little t-rex's :)

I really like the author's conclusion after exploring this.

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