Art
9 entries- Mar 8EssayWorld Machinesnewest The End of Identity: AI, Plasticity, and the Divergence Machine
Over the past year, the Contraptions club has been reading through history—from Giordano Bruno and Montaigne to Spinoza, Adam Smith, and Hume. We are now using using Venkatesh Rao’s Divergence Machine …
4 min - Jan 11EssayWorld Machines The Kernel and the Ark
I. The Wall and the Infinite # It is possible that the history of the modern West hinges on a single, melancholic misreading of Voltaire. When Candide, exhausted by the Lisbon earthquake and the …
12 min
- Dec 26Essay The Deep Dark Terroir of the Soul
This is the third and final part of the Thicket Series: Part 1: Logic of the Thicket and the Unsearchable Web Part 2: The Architecture of Resistance The history of the working subject might be best …
14 min - Dec 8Essay The Tortured Artist Is So Yesterday
41 years ago, Samuel Lipman wrote that an artist’s life is a “constant—and constantly losing—battle” against one’s own limits. That image has lasted because print culture taught us to imagine the …
3 min - Jul 21Poem The Keel