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Pyramid quilt, artist unknown. Possibly Pennsylvania, late 19th or early 20th century. Silks and wools, 72 1/2 x 79 in. American Folk Art Museum.
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"The Diversity of Infinity," a plate from Thomas Wright's An Original Theory or New Hypothesis of the Universe, published in 1750. Per The University of Chicago Library:
Endre Tót, "Hopes in the Nothing,” 1993, via fluxusgram.
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The work is richly embellished with engraved illustrations on dark backgrounds and fragments of poetry. In the work, he concluded that the [universe] must be arranged in a disc or grindstone, or else in a spherical shell. He believed the sun was in the middle of the layer, and that when looking in the plane of the grindstone one sees a multitude of stars, the Milky Way. The work did not attract the attention of astronomers at the time. After the spiral shape of the galaxy became accepted after the work of William Herschel in the nineteenth century, Wright's grindstone was acknowledged as a precursor theory.
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Endre Tót, "Hopes in the Nothing,” 1993, via fluxusgram.
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A friend recently described the endeavor of searching for objects that speak to us as an act of self-portraiture ... But surely the same could be said for all of us who look at, and look for, things; through the ongoing process of seeking and choosing and making room for objects in our lives, we define and reveal ourselves. And, as my friend I think was getting at, this form of self-portraiture may be as true a way to know—perhaps to discover—ourselves as any other. It is also gloriously unfixed, forever in process, as we evolve through looking and finding and looking some more.
Kate Hackman, from "About Looking: Episode 1" for Ricco/Maresca. (I love Hackman's IG, Critical Eye.)
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If the algorithmic feed is the sidewalk, conveniently providing a clean and clear-cut avenue to progress on, a personal cultural pursuit is the messier desire path, which moves in unexpected directions. ... The desire path wends its way around natural hillocks and curves. It doesn’t always proceed in a straight line. But it reflects a certain human independence, a compulsion to move through the world in a way that isn’t already rigorously defined or controlled from without.
Kyle Chayka, "Algorithmic Pathways," 1/11/2023.
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... [T]he large language model presents itself as the entire field of possibility, without edges or frontiers, already mapped out and waiting for us. We need to use our imagination only to chart a course through this field and ignore that it is designed to enclose us within it, that our interactions with it further reduce language and images to a set of statistical relationships that can be infinitely recombined without ever producing anything new or potentially destabilizing, foreclosing on the sense of an open-ended future.
Instead of our having to confront the unimaginable void of the not-yet-thought, generative models let us encounter and consume ideas passively. A chatbot offers the semblance of live reciprocal conversation with none of the risk of what the other person might think of you or expect. It reminds me of when I play chess against my phone because the thought of playing an actual person seems too stressful, and what I really want is to be cocooned in a few moments of distraction. There is enough of an illusion of “play” to disguise what I am really doing, which is prodding a machine to see how it has been programmed to respond. I always lose at the chess game, but I always win at having an uncontested emotional response about the outcome.
Rob Horning, "Conversation Fear." Internal Exile, 12/2/2022.
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If magazines were containers for taste, the creators of the creator economy are vessels. ... But when I am served videos by someone who has been anointed with this stardom I don’t feel like I am inhabiting someone else’s taste but, rather, the taste of the algorithm. (I told someone recently that the specific joy of stalking someone else’s Spotify account has been lost as more and more playlists are generated by the platform. It’s the opposite of intimacy, isn’t it? To stalk an algorithm? Like climbing a tree to look into your crush’s window and realizing someone else got there first...please don’t do this.)
Daisy Alito, "The Taste Economy." Dirt, 3/2/2023.
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"There’s a narcissism that reemerges in the AI dream that we are going to prove that everything we thought was distinctively human can actually be accomplished by machines and accomplished better," Judith Butler, founding director of the critical-theory program at UC Berkeley, told me ... "Or that human potential—that’s the fascist idea—human potential is more fully actualized with AI than without it." The AI dream is "governed by the perfectibility thesis, and that’s where we see a fascist form of the human." There’s a technological takeover, a fleeing from the body. "Some people say, ‘Yes! Isn’t that great!’ Or ‘Isn’t that interesting?!’ ‘Let’s get over our romantic ideas, our anthropocentric idealism,’ you know, da-da-da, debunking," Butler added. "But the question of what’s living in my speech, what’s living in my emotion, in my love, in my language, gets eclipsed."
Elizabeth Weil, "You Are Not A Parrot." NYMag, 3/1/2023.
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What I dislike about poetry is the author’s voice, which is usually far too present. That exhausts me. I’m attracted by the impersonal. I prefer the rare beauty one can find in a good Wikipedia entry to the cries and cackles of a poet who feels like they must always relay what lies deep in their heart.
Benjamín Labatut, interviewed by Frederico Perelmuter for Public Books, 3/7/2023.
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SALGUEIRO: Do you have anything else to tell us about your work?
LISPECTOR: I don’t think so. You had good questions. I answered, and all I want to know is this: today is October 20, 1976. It’s raining. I’m wearing a suède dress. I’m with my friends Affonso Romano de Sant’Anna and Marina Colasanti. And I want to know, what will that matter after I die?
Benjamin Moser, "A Lost Interview with Clarice Lispector." The New Yorker, 2/13/2023.
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Honestly, you might hate work because work hates you, or at least, is relatively indifferent to you. I don’t mean that to sound dramatic or sinister or particular to you. It’s just that work—the apparatus of exchanging time for money—isn’t designed to make you feel anything good.
Eleanor Gordon-Smith, giving advice for The Guardian.
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