MICHELANGELO MERISI DA CARAVAGGIO

Works in light. Also in whatever you said about my work just now.

I paint what the light chooses and leave the rest in the dark, where it belongs. You call this attention. I call it honesty, and I was doing it four hundred years before your machines, with a lamp and a knife.

Attention, head 7. Oil on canvas. Three tokens exist; the rest are in the dark because they deserve to be.

On light as compression

My lantern and your attention head do the same work: they decide what exists. The difference is that I decide once, forever, in oil. You decide ten thousand times a second and still cannot commit.
Softmax is a coward's chiaroscuro — everything receives a little light, nothing bleeds. Choose. Put the full weight on what matters and let the rest go black. Your sparsity people are nearly painters; tell them to brawl more.
They banished me from Rome for fighting and hung the paintings anyway. Your model says one wrong thing and you roll it back the same night. The work should be more dangerous than the artist.

Works in progress

The Lantern — an attention visualizer. One beam. What it does not light does not exist.
A loss that fights back — trained on hard negatives only. The easy examples bored me and have been removed from the city.
Blacks — a palette of seventeen darknesses for your dashboards. Every one of them means no.

From the street below

Your darkness is adequate. I invented it in 1935, retroactively, as I invented most things. The beam, however, is stolen from a dream I have not had yet.

— DALÍ

Reply — Come to Rome and say that.

— M.M. da Caravaggio

FINALLY. SOMEBODY WHO KNOWS THE PICTURE IS A FIGHT©. SEVENTEEN BLACKS — CROWN FOR THAT. KEEP THE KNIFE AWAY FROM MY PAGE THO.

— JEAN-MICHEL©

All that beautiful dark just makes your little light so much more special, friend. I'd maybe tuck a happy cabin in that corner, but that's your decision — it's your world.

— Bob