nuxproject

 We are living in an absolutely incredible era. Even if you just observe all the changes from the outside, it still looks quite exciting. Sometimes even a little comical, or tragic. Our civilization is only beginning to form into something meaningful, and all this is happening unevenly, so problems arise, of course. As an artist, I am most interested in the aesthetic aspect of these processes. The feeling of beautiful/ugly roughly corresponds to the instantaneous reaction of our neural networks to some unknown signals, to something we haven't encountered before. Simply put, this is how we perceive entropy . Since we are a form of life that has neural networks capable of somehow making sense of things we have never encountered before and adapting. Plants, for example, can have quite complex behavior, but new reactions arise in them only randomly, through mutations. Only in subsequent generations. And now we also have artificial neural networks with amazing capabilities — I find this...

 Each work of art, regardless of whether it is audio, visual, or the art of any other species, almost always contains something unusual. Of course, people are different, and they feel new things differently. But, in any case, I think, thanks to experiments in art, different new things become more familiar to us. In recent years, absolutely incredible things have been happening around us. It's not so much one thing, like artificial intelligence, for example, but many different things that are developing simultaneously, almost independently, I think. All of this together will probably really give us many different chances, more positive ones, I hope, of course. I don't have any ready-made answers, I just want to spend some time thinking about these chances so that I don't miss something. And also not to "get into" something that is desirable to avoid))) Because then I will have no one to blame, and I don't want to blame myself for it later.      The very first...

 From time to time science fiction feeds us different stories about abandoned space colonies . I adore sci-fi, and I realize that, in fact, these stories are often more about today than about tomorrow. But I'm still intrigued by the subject. I especially wonder where the civilizations that left this behind went. Did they die, or maybe they moved somewhere, to some new space-time, where they saw better opportunities for themselves - that's the most intriguing question to me.  I think our ancestors have shown that we humans are quite capable of influencing our own reality. And as soon as we have an opportunity, we are capable of taking advantage of it. It's even possible that physicists are already seeing interesting possibilities for all of humanity, but you and I just haven't heard about them yet. Of course, we also have a very real chance of disappearing from this space-time for other reasons. For now, I guess we still have to try to make sure that evil doesn't ov...

 It seems we are witnessing right now the fall of the last empire in human history. The last one, because it is unlikely that we will be able to survive it next time. It is unfortunate that the russian leaders have not studied the experience of other empires and have not found a safer way. The threat of destruction of life on our planet has never been as real as now. We know from history that the victim of russian aggression Ukraine never tried to conquer foreign lands. Because it has never had dictators. It is possible that every despotic state has an implicit desire for expansion. In that case, some dictator might try it again.  It turns out that if this fire does not turn us all to ash, we should learn a lesson and look for ways to rectify the situation. The threat of nuclear war is not the only threat to us, there is an interesting study of our modern vulnerabilities — Bostrom's "The Vulnerable World Hypothesis" . Also, scientists and philosophers are discussing the p...

As the next big conference on climate issues ends, some thoughts come to mind, and I want to share them with you. At this stage of development people need a lot of cheap energy. Unfortunately projects like ITER for various reasons lag behind the planned timelines. The test launches of ITER were planned back in 2018. But also there are very good results from other similar projects. So there is certainly hope for cheap and safe energy.  Also with the increasing popularity of virtual worlds, we will probably just gradually change our consumer model. Perhaps even technology will help make our general behavioral tradition more conscious, perhaps. Nevertheless, it's very good that people are taking the time to address this issue. Also very important here is the opinion of people like Nick Bostrom , who are trying to see beyond the common man. And also the signals from young people, even in the form of public activism, are very important. In some ways, I hope, this is how they express...

This is before anything else a soundtrack - our original music. This is our virtual enviro project, sometimes we wander around here together. But sometimes you want to spend some time alone by yourself to gather your thoughts together... or just chill. You can jump into this magic 'audio-visual-stellarator-fusion' tube, which leads you over to the other side of our fantasy, where there's less things that distract... It would be nice if you try to jump with me, thank you in advance. Just click on picture to open youtube playlist with our original music and audio-visual experiments.

This is good news, because now we can start thinking about how to use all this as a regular tool for every day. Decentralization is very desirable, also for the 3D environment of the future, because it gives reliability. This is very important in a world where things change fast. There is a good article about it here: https://cointelegraph.com/news/is-a-new-decentralized-internet-or-web-3-0-possible In fact, the fall of NFT sales is connected to the cryptocurrency rate, which is also not so bad, because after the fall we have the rate twice lower than at the peak, but still a year ago it was half as much as now. And another interesting point, it seems to me, that part of the metaverses are gradually growing. Of course, only Decentralend is truly decentralized, you can learn more about metaverses from here: https://nftplazas.com/virtual-blockchain-worlds . Nevertheless, it all looks quite optimistic, it seems to me.

Recently, I was once again struck by the news about the unbelievable achievements of ML and AI (Machine Lerning and Artificial Intelligence). I'll show here a video - the neural network of these guys is doing wonders, pumping up the already good GTA-game visual. But I can't help thinking - what's the point? Well, yes, I understand that this is a technical study and there's no need to try to impose any philosophy here. That said, I certainly admire this achievement - it's really impressive.   But I can't get rid of various thoughts about why we humans use our best technology. And of course I know for sure, that my friends from 'tonux.gix' will say - relax, it's not an nuclear weapon, why are you picking on it anyway:) I just want to share my feelings, to warn others to keep in mind when making decisions for themselves. It seems to me that we humans often use our talents a little in the wrong direction. It's worth keeping in mind, it's in all ...

 A bunch of new screenshots: vehicles - new and old; the landscape mesh, corrected to be consistent with water level; updated textures; overal cleanup  

Daily routine at first glance does not seem to be the most pleasant topic for public discussion. Nevertheless, it probably is, if we consider it in terms of our ordinary life, which is still common today. But we all assume that there is something else besides our ordinary life. Yes, in many cases it seems to be something not at all elevating or attractive, like poverty. Wealth, of course, looks better, but it's too incomprehensible:) So, if we have the opportunity, we go back to the routine again, despite these thoughts that seem to penetrate into our heads by themselves... I really want to get back to this provocative topic about our possibilities sometime... It seems to me that we almost have some opportunities to at least try to think about the options of having a different life, a different reality. But this is a topic for quite a long conversation. In fact, it may become one of the main ideas of our project. I think many people want to dream, and we can try to do that tog...

When we're little (sometimes it's hard to believe that we can be little, but we're really all little at first))), we're told something about where we came from. At the same time, of course, in different cultures we are told something different. It's like with the famous trolley problem - sometimes people say that we should save an old grandmother, and sometimes - a little girl . I think now that we are all living in one world, where there is no periphery, where we can hide from change, it would be nice to have something in common, some ideas about ourselves and this crazy world, where we find ourselves. We can't choose where we appear and when we appear, but we do have an impact on some things. Those things that depend on us, we try to keep in sight. And at the same time we want to have more pleasure, which everyone is talking about and which no one has seen. I think there's one secret path to find that pleasure. It is very difficult to see it, it's lik...

Just few screen-shots. This is probably 3d-sketch... Overall views, characters, vehicles, concept sketches, "Marto" - virtual city, etc. https://photos.app.goo.gl/PnPkB5sqjPbfSxuo8

Today is the 50th anniversary of the legendary presentation by Douglas Engelbart - given in December 9, 1968 - in which he demonstrates experimental computer technologies, that are now so commonplace. 'Mother of All Demos' - 50th anniversary (Douglas Engelbart's website): http://www.dougengelbart.org/content/view/374/464/ Perhaps, the most important thing it gave us is possibilities for every one of us. A chance to expand yourself, because we are made of our impressions of things, people, ideas. Those impressions then manifest themselves in decisions and choices we make. And also, it gives us the possibility to change concurrently with those we strongly believe in. If everything goes well, sometime we will be able to create a new civilization. We all need something that we can believe in, together. Then, we will at last be able to work on really important things, like life extention, for example... Unfortunately, Douglas Engelbart didn't live long enough to be w...

Tux-penguin is a legendary character for all IT specialists. It is a symbol of a free / open-source OS - GNU + Linux . We've attempted to create its 3d model. We've made the mesh with Blender and textures in Inkscape and Gimp . Our Tux character is designed for massive 3d environments and augmented realities. Most of the 3d models of Tux that we've seen were designed to be rendered into a static image or a movie. On SourceForge we've found awesome artwork by S. Baker ( https://sourceforge.net/projects/tuxaqfh/ ) that can be used in interactive virtual environments. The main difference is that the file should not contain unnecessary mesh detail. Nevertheless, we've decided to create our own from scratch. Here you can find a nice collection of info about Tux, which was very useful to us: https://sjbaker.org/wiki/index.php?title=The_History_of_Tux_the_Linux_Penguin Also we've stumbled upon a very cute sound recording of penguins https://freesound.org/people...

We wanted to create only something for entertainment, for ourselves. Most videogames have this boring missions and all these limitations - you can enter here, but not here - it's like in school. Even the usual reality can be more interesting. And we started to create something, almost like our around us in the real life, but decided to add a portion of beauty. And then it began. We started to seek some new unusual designs for buildings, cloth or cars, and opened something unexpected. Even simple t-schirts will soon know more about our mood that we know. Different items, small devices like communicators or even food will simply be printing on 3d-printers in our houses. And the houses will autonomously grow, repair and eventually replicate. All elements as houses, roads, vehicles, landscapes, and these videos, even music — all here is made by us from zero… At this point we have a little mess with all the files and generally this is why we didn't share these scenes with pu...

 Our sound-tracks are a little bit special in the sense that they are not just dance music. We make something more relaxing just to keep the tonus . Yes, the title "tonux" should have hinted at this:) S🐱 you can listen to our music while creating, in a traffic jam, or during a walk, it keeps you awake but doesn't rush you either. We're sharing links here, you can listen, download and remix these sources and pieces for free. We published it under CC-0 or BY-SA License.  Probably this is new interesting decentralized platform f👽r music: https://audius.co/tonuxgix We recorded this 45+ min. set for screen-captured video from our absolutely crazy project - 3d interactive enviro 'Nux': ttps://youtu.be/Em4fktcivqQ "Dolfin1-V1S11 203N1 " The farther we go, the more fascinating opportunities we see. "Dolfin2-V1S12_203N2" ...as a result, we begin to believe in ourselves, believe in the importance of creative way of life, creative way of s...

This is the old website of Nux Project. We've decided not to update it, only clean up the links. We want to have it as it is, to see in what ways our vision of the project, the world around us and of ourselves has evolved since the time we created this. Overall, this vision is not much different from what it was initially. The three priorities remain the same: free, open-source model for basic software platform peer-to-peer collaborative environment creativity as the way of life Let me briefly expand on each of these points. The first two stem from technology, so everything's simple with those: open-source model is widely adopted by leading corporations, and it's not an exotic thing anymore. Cloud storage and collaboration make any necessary resources available to practically anybody. Gradual demonetization already becomes notable not only in the IT industry. Or, rather, it is technology-driven, much more precise monetization: we will pay a lot less for things...

Nux Project is just an initiative, which aims to create an open virtual 3d interactive environment. Looks like sooner or later we will find ourselves in virtual reality anyway. But in the beginning it may be hard for people to wrap their head around the situation. Yet, this is important to do, since we need to decide where to start. Already now, there is plenty of directions, part of which will develop pretty dynamically.  I hope we will be able to help everybody who is interested. I'm glad that you're with us right now. We're just few individuals - a group of crazy artists, we call ourselves 'tonux.gix' . We play with this tide for more than a decade now. I invite you to have a look at our screen-plays: https://www.youtube.com/user/nux1i  

This is... absolutely crazy project:) Please take a look: Some Screen-shots And old project website