Curating The Week
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Curating the Week: AI Music, AI Book Scanning, The Uses of Criticism
• An essay on AI music. “In music, as elsewhere, curatorial skill may grow more valuable, along with the ability to write a creative A.I. prompt. (If this sounds to you like a musical dystopia, then you can imagine how Sousa would have felt if he’d learned that d.j.s would eventually conquer the world.) Yet… Continue reading
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Curating the Week: Juggling, Music Teachers, Writing, Tacit Knowledge in Research
• An article about the cognitive benefits of juggling. “Juggling can induce neuroplasticity in the brain, resulting in structural changes and adaptations. It can act as a simple calibration system.” “It’s essential to be ‘right on that edge where it’s not quite comfortable.’” • An essay on music teachers. “Grappling with an unruly instrument and… Continue reading
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Curating The Week: Conducting, Thickness In Art, AI Jargon In Speech
• An essay on conducting. “With most kinds of musical performance, the listener can sense, in their heart and their gut, how demanding the musician’s task is. To possess the infinitesimally sensitive fine motor skills required to make a violin sing, or the poise and breath control needed to coax beauty out of a trombone,… Continue reading
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Curating The Week: Creative Mindsets, Perceiving Time, AI’s Effects On Writing
• An essay on creative mindsets. “The three years of solitary work at Montpellier had not been wasted in the least: that intellectual isolation was what had allowed [mathematician Alexander Grothendieck] to access the cognitive space where new ideas arise. He had made himself at home there.” “This might look wasteful if you think what… Continue reading
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Curating The Week: Running And Philosophy, Writing With AI, How To Exist
• A film about running and philosophy (whose soundtrack makes good use of silence). • An essay on why not to write with AI. “The problem with writing with A.I. is that it’s mentally enfeebling — an escalator toward a result when you really need to make a daily habit of taking the stairs. As… Continue reading
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Curating The Week: Making Early Digital Art, Mastering, AI and Ethics
Roy Lichtenstein, Landscape in Fog (1996) • An essay about making early digital art. “It’s 1990, and I still don’t know where the darn tiger comes from. But I do know that there’s no program that will draw one from scratch, any size or pose or color or style, like I want it, without an… Continue reading
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Curating The Week: AI as System, AI’s Didacticism, Vermeer’s Art
• An essay by L.M. Sacasas on how AI is a system, not a tool. “AI is not a tool in this sense, it is an environment which envelops the user and works on us from the inside out while we naively think that we remain unchanged by our use so long as we are… Continue reading
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Curating The Week: AI’s Conversation Deep Fakes, Notre-Dame’s (New) Acoustics, AI and Human Agency, AI and Creativity
• An essay on AI’s conversation deep fakes. “The term deepfake traditionally refers to photos, audio, and video, but when it comes to discussions of consciousness, we need to regard text as a deepfake medium as well. Just as it is vastly easier to generate a realistic video of an astronaut in orbit around Alpha… Continue reading
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Curating The Week: AI’s Tells, AI’s Uses, The Attributes Of Art
• An essay on AI tells in writing. “When writing is hard, it’s often not just because we are tired, underfed, or inefficient but because our mind is trying to tell us crucial things.” • An essay on figuring out AI’s uses. “it’s time to begin the more specific work of figuring out, in a… Continue reading
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Curating The Week: AI Slop Prehistory, Lo-Fi Rebellion Against AI, The Attention Economy And Anxiety
• An essay on the prehistory of AI slop. “text produced by large language models, however remarkable, sophisticated, and even occasionally wondrous, is derivative, average, predictable. It is language without a mind. But is that even language?” “There’s nothing wrong with nonsense. But it’s not always poetry. And mistaking one for the other is another… Continue reading
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