#2026-W17 ### Oko Minulosti I try to actively seek out new opportunities for exhibitions and presentations, and one of them is **"Oko Minulosti"** *(Eye of the Past)*. It is a site-specific adaptation of the [OKO](https://kindl.work/2025/OKO) installation for the courtyard of the former regional prison in Uherské Hradiště, a place where political prisoners were interrogated, tortured, and executed during the early years of communist Czechoslovakia. The object consists of a rotating head with a camera and projector that moves freely along two axes and dynamically projects image fragments directly onto the walls of the space, behind which the events actually took place. The formal core of the installation is the tension between the *attempt to reconstruct the past and the impossibility of bringing this reconstruction to completion.* The installation is complemented by a spatial musical composition that, together with the visual aspect, points to moments from the past and the *fragility of their reconstruction.* I submitted the project for a grant from the [State Cultural Fund](https://www.mk.gov.cz/zadosti-o-dotace-sfk-na-rok-2026) *(my first attempt at something like this)*. It is highly uncertain whether it will come to anything, partly because the location has not been fully confirmed. But I would really love to see places where the [OKO](https://kindl.work/2025/OKO) installation could function a little differently than originally intended. No longer as a surveillance tower, *but as a tool for uncovering the history of a specific place, with a new dramaturgy, new sources, and a new sound composition.* ![[oko_minulosti_viz_1.jpg]] ![[oko_minulosti_viz_2.jpg]] --- ### Polymarket Bot If you haven't come across [Polymarket](https://polymarket.com), it is a prediction market where people bet real money on questions like *"Will Bitcoin dip to $60,000 in April?"* or *"Will Elon Musk post 65-89 tweets from April 23 to April 25?"* There are hundreds of active markets, some serious, some absurd, and a massive hype around them. It is *chaotic,* and at the same time a *reflection of the world today.* A remarkable example [from earlier this month](https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/someone-allegedly-used-a-hairdryer-to-rig-polymarket-weather-bets-155312411.html) was settling Paris temperature bets using a single weather sensor on a public road near Charles de Gaulle airport. Someone figured out where it was, allegedly drove up with a hair dryer, and heated the air around it until the reading spiked past a threshold nobody else was betting on. *He reportedly walked away with over $30,000.* I got curious whether a *language model could actually do better research* on these questions than the crowd, so I built a small bot that runs once a week on my Mac Mini. It scans about 300 active markets, filters for liquidity and time horizon, and asks Claude to shortlist a handful where deep research might reveal something that users are mispricing. Then Opus takes each one apart, builds a bull case, builds a bear case, searches the web for hard data, reads the exact resolution criteria for technicalities, and forms its own probability estimate before it even sees what the market thinks. If there is a real gap, it places a small bet automatically. Anyway, it will probably not make much profit, but I'm curious to see how it proceeds. There are also probably dozens of bots already trading on Polymarket, which means it is *bots betting against bots.* A strange feedback loop where AI systems try to outsmart each other. ![[polymarket_nl.jpg]] --- ### Prophetic A startup I stumbled on a couple of years ago, [Prophetic](https://x.com/PropheticAI), caught my attention back then with their research into **non-invasive brain stimulation using focused ultrasound.** Not a brain-computer interface in the electrode-on-cortex sense, but transcranial focused ultrasound *(tFUS)* targeting the prefrontal cortex, the area that goes quiet during normal dreams and lights up during lucid ones. The idea is simple: if you can nudge that region back into activity during REM sleep, you can trigger lucid dreaming on demand. They have developed their own AI model trained on brain data to detect the right moment and deliver the pulse. Their first consumer device, the [Dual](https://www.prophetic.com/halo) ($449), is expected to ship at the end of this year, with a more advanced Phase model ($1,299) following in 2027. *Whether it actually works reliably is an open question; but if it delivers even a fraction of what they promise, it would be a genuinely new kind of tool for exploring consciousness.* ![[prophetic_brain.jpg]] --- ### Kinetism I finally got my hands on [KINETISMUS: 100 LET ELEKTŘINY V UMĚNÍ](https://www.kunsthallepraha.org/clanky/kinetismus-100-let-elektriny-v-umeni) *(Kinetism: 100 Years of Electricity in Art)*, the catalogue from the inaugural exhibition at *Kunsthalle Prague* in 2022. That exhibition was a big influence on me and shaped a lot of how I think about my own work. I also wrote a short piece about [Pešánek](https://kindl.work/Resources/Technical/Zden%C4%9Bk+Pe%C5%A1%C3%A1nek) on my website back then. If you prefer audio, Kunsthalle also released a [podcast](https://ceskepodcasty.cz/podcast/kunsthalle-praha-podcasts/kam-zmizel-pesanek-1) *(in Czech)* that talks about Pešánek's work and approach in a more personal, accessible way. ![[100-years-el.jpg]] --- ### OSA website Last week I mentioned Claude Design. I used it as one of the inputs while building [a small site for OSA](https://keiaiendiel.github.io/osa-web/), a Czech civic association, prototyped in two days. I'm starting to enjoy building websites again. *If you'd like a help with yours, feel free to get in touch.* --- Side note: *I had the battery replaced on my phone this week (79% capacity, routine swap). Two days later the phone started lagging. Then an update hit overnight, and by morning it was at 20%, wouldn't charge, and kept dropping. By the end of the day it shut itself off and came back with a dead battery indicator, no SIM, no Face ID, and a broken main camera. A simple battery replacement somehow took out half the phone. Taking it back to the shop, wish me luck.*