Waking up inside a new museum every day.

I love going to museums and looking at the artwork and commentary. I think it would be cool if I had a bunch of famous paintings hanging inside my house, and that those paintings change every night so I wake up to new artwork in the morning. I think recent advancements in e-ink technology might make this possible.

Imagine a luxury offering that a home decorator would provide clients by installing these beautiful displays in their home in very nice frames, with the side display set up the way a museum description would be. Then, each night at midnight, the image and caption change to a new beautiful painting. There could be multiple different painting sizes or even sections of the house devoted to certain types of paintings. In fact, you could have your entire house set up where each room in the house had its own digital painting and where each room was analogous to a wing of a museum, cycling through its own style of artwork like Renaissance, abstract, etc.

The artwork displayed could be controlled through a few different ways:

• Determined by votes on a reddit subreddit.
• Cycling through a curated selection of paintings featured on Wikipedia.
• A version that collaborates with an actual museum to determine the paintings and captions.

I think I'll buy a small version of this and try it out!

Some philosophical thoughts on authenticity.

I think our notions of authenticity are garbage. We think of "the original" painting as being more "authentic" than "reproductions", because the author "actually" painted the original wheres the author "didn't paint" the reproduction. I don't like this notion of authenticity because it I think that the original author also authors all reproductions that are made. I think "authorship" should best be seen as a cause-effect relationship. The question to determine authorship then becomes "if you chose to do something differently, would the work in question change?"

One way to build intuition is to turn the situation around: when you are recording a video, you are acutely aware that many others are listening to what you say right now, even though they are in the future.

So, when da Vinci prepares to paint a painting in front of his apprentices, present in that crowd is all the future robotic printers, young painters taking art classes, art professors giving lectures, and every person who ever looks at the painting in a museum. They are all watching. If da Vinci chooses to place the paint one way or another, that is what everyone will see, and it is his hand movements that govern the movements of every printer and robot of the future that recreates or prints his painting. If he moves his hand differently, then all the robots of the future move differently. So when you print an artwork, the original artist reaches through time to control your printer.

So with these museum e-ink paintings, know that the original authors have reached into your house and gifted you with these patterns. They, briefly, control your equipment to bring life to their painting.

From Meet the man on a controversial mission to preserve and digitize your brain, Thor Benson, digitaltrends 2021:

If a robot painted a new version of a classic painting using the exact same brush strokes the original painter made, McIntyre says, then it’s essentially like the artist is controlling the robot from beyond the grave. If he or she had made one different motion, then the robot would have to make the same motion.

During the interview, I sometimes got the feeling I was talking to Doctor Manhattan from the Watchmen comics. He clearly doesn’t want to devalue people caring about authenticity and their connections with the past, but he also doesn’t seem to think they’re as important as we make them out to be. He seems to think we could simply do away with those sentimental things and benefit from doing so.