Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations' Millennium General Assembly (2021) | Hacker News Reader

Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations' Millennium General Assembly (2021)

americanart.si.edu

48 pointsNaOH18 comments

The embedded video in this post is worthwhile, particularly for the visuals of the artwork, but for those who’d prefer an informative (short) article, there’s one in a previous HN submission about this that got no traction back in 2023.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38683668

> ...and a small book he kept, written primarily in an invented or "asemic" script, meaning it is unreadable or lacking specific semantic content.

Learned something new: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asemic_writing:

> ...asemic writing distinguishes itself among traditions of abstract art is in the asemic author's use of gestural constraint, and the retention of physical characteristics of writing such as lines and symbols.

Basically stuff that looks like writing but actually isn't. Another example is Xu Bing's A Book from the Sky, which is composed of things that look just like Chinese characters to someone who can't read them, but aren't.

Another Western example is Luigi Serafini's Codex Seraphinianus:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codex_Seraphinianus

I wonder if an LLM can "translate" that book into... something. And if so, how faithful to the original is the translation?

> I wonder if an LLM can "translate" that book into... something.

Yes, of course. LLMs are bullshit machines.

> And if so, how faithful to the original is the translation?

Well, as faithful as total bullshit ever is.

What? Can we start banning these kinds of "I wonder if an LLM" comments?

I actually thought it was an interesting thought, if the "bullshitness" will hold between "translations" or if it will hallucinate something which "makes more sense" than the original. Or if it will just refuse because the chinese letters just aren't close enough. I'm probably too bored. :)

You cannot extract a signal that isn't there.

There's also a technical side to that problem - you can't communicate the content of that book to a LLM as text, because it's made up of invented characters. There's no standard way to represent them to a computer.

This was found posthumously in a rented garage. Imagine yourself walking in to a windowless room, turning on the lights, and seeing this.

Wikipedia has more details on the artist and the art:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Hampton_(artist)#Throne_...

I was trying to figure out how large this thing was (I found it hard to tell from the picture). And wow -- a life-size throne. Must go next time I'm in DC (if the government isn't shut down :p).

Considering the religious nature, and the fact that its creator claims to have had a visitation from the divine, it's like TempleOS in a way.

I love outsider art. Love the idea that for some people, it isn’t about the ‘art world’ or about finding a community or an audience… they simply have to go off by themselves somewhere and CREATE

Does anyone know how big this is? Difficult to tell from photos on a phone and the listing just says "dimensions variable".

I've seen it several times at the Smithsonian -- it's life size, as in a person could sit on the central throne, and the side pieces are as large as nightstands.

The Wikipedia piece linked here in the comments says that central throne is seven feet tall.

Yes, if you include the back of the chair

Great, thanks.

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