AI
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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: 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: 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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Resonant Thoughts: Cory Doctorow’s “The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI” (2026)
“Art is what happens when an artist has a big, numinous, irreducibly complex feeling in their mind, which they infuse into some artistic medium—a book, a song, a dance, a painting, a photograph, and such—in the hopes of making a facsimile of that big, numinous, irreducibly complex feeling materialize in the minds of people who… 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 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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Curating The Week: Playing Mandolin, Sound Design, AI in Writing, AI’s Impact On Artists, Nature and Attention
• An essay about returning to the mandolin at an older age. “Is domestic music a second-class thing? Discovering this history, I felt strongly what a different phenomenon music is when you make it yourself. You’re inside it, living it, experiencing a pleasure so intense that pleasure is perhaps no longer the word. This surely… Continue reading
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Curating The Week: AI and Human Touch, AI and Writing, AI and Taste
• An essay on AI, music, and the demand for the human touch. “Echoing AI commentary today, some musicians viewed the player piano as not just replicating human playing, but exceeding it. The Russian composer Igor Stravinsky explained that he wrote pieces specifically for the machines because ‘there are tone combinations beyond my ten fingers,’… Continue reading
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