"AI Aesthetics," new book by Lev Manovich

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  Lev Manovich. AI Aesthetics. Moscow: Strelka Press, 2018.

AI plays a crucial role in global cultural ecosystem. It recommends what we should see, listen to, read, and buy. It determines how many people will see our shared content. It helps us make aesthetic decisions when we create media. In professional cultural production, AI has already been adopted to produce movie trailers, music albums, fashion items, product and web designs, architecture, etc.

In the new book AI Aesthetics (2018), Lev Manovich offers a systematic framework to help us think about cultural uses of AI today and in the future. He challenges existing ideas and gives us new concepts for understanding media, design, and aesthetics in the AI era.

Our new project explores the history of photography magazine Sovetskoe Foto, 1926–1991

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  Sovetskoe Foto covers: October 1927 (left), January 1934 (middle), August–September 1991 (right). View and download full-size images on Flickr.

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  Montage of available Sovetskoe Foto covers published between 1926 and 1991. Visualization by Alise Tifentale, image editing by Lev Manovich. Scroll down to see a larger image in Figure 1. View and download full-size image on Flickr.

Published in Moscow, Russia, from 1926 to 1991, Sovetskoe Foto (Soviet Photography) was the only specialized photography magazine in the Soviet Union, aimed at a broad audience of professional photojournalists and amateur photographers. As such, it is unequaled in representing the official photographic culture of the USSR throughout the history of this country. We explore the digital archive of Sovetskoe Foto to find out what it can tell us about the history of this remarkable magazine and the twentieth-century photography in general.