Here are a few things that caught my eye this week (week of October 7, 2024).
1/ Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst continue to push the boundaries on exploring art made with AI. Their latest piece, The Call, is at the Serpentine Gallery and is available until February 2, 2025.
The Hearth, Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst, Serpentine, 2024
The Call, Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst, Serpentine, 2024
This hits all of the right notes (sorry) for me: AI as a creative instrument, music as a coordination technology, data trusts with the choirs who recorded a songbook that contained every phoneme of the English language, collective intelligence, the interplay of rituals and protocols, and more.
When people dismiss AI art a priori, I think they're missing something pretty special. This seems to be one of them.
By the way, Holly's interview with Ezra Klein back in May 2024 is worth revisiting if you haven't checked it out already. She previews The Call and talks more about her approach to AI throughout her work.
In that interview, she mentions the collapse of the production-consumption pipeline, and that line has been rattling in my head ever since.
2/ I've been following Amelia Wattenberger's work for a long time. In her latest essay, Bridging the hard and the soft, she looks to nature for inspiration for how our interfaces should "handle the transition from the hard logic of machines into the soft logic of humans."
3/ Reading Mandy Brown's blog elevates your understanding of craft and of the written word. In an age of increasing slop, her essays cut through with a singular voice that always has something to say.
In a recent note about her approach to syndicating her work, she quotes Anna Tsing who writes:
What if we imagined intellectual life as a peasant woodland, a source of many useful products emerging in unintentional design?
She then goes on to say:
It is something like that peasant woodland that I’m after here: not an abandoned forest, not a re-wilding, but a kind of cultivation. A peasant woodland is one in which human participation and activity help the woods become more productive for humans and wildlife both—not through anything shaped like a plan but rather through a kind of call and response, an improvisation in which all the critters and creatures of the forest are players among us. Underneath this is the assertion that people have a role to play in the woods, that a forest is neither inhospitable nor unwelcoming, not a place to exploit nor a place to retreat from, but a place that is life-giving, in a multiplicity of ways. If what we have here is a ruined landscape, perhaps our time and thoughtful attention can help something new sprout out of the damage.
If you like her post, it's worth reading We Need to Rewild the Internet by Maria Farrell and Robin Berjon and Ways of Being by James Bridle.
4/ Erin Kissane recently launched wreckage/salvage, a studio that explores the "intertidal zone of network history, cultural protocols, and patterns for online life." I am thankful for people like Erin for continuing to make the case as to why the internet - the cozy, indie, weird one - matters. She writes:
We need new networks that genuinely work better, not only for indie-web people or tech people or other outliers, but for all of us working toward collective survival. And I don't think we'll get them by just trying harder—or by swapping in new infrastructure toward the same old ends, or by building reflexively against the cartoon versions of old networks, and definitely not by trying to scold people into make more ethical social networking choices.
In the introductory post, she describes some of the questions that she's interested in exploring:
What even are these systems in which we live and work and—stripping away the ideologies of what corporations and technologies cannot possibly be expected to do—how should they function?
Who’s out there making new plans and trying new things based on hard-earned experience of life and work in the debris of the internet dream? Can their approaches and countermoves jostle us out of lazy assumptions? What are the cultural and social patterns our systems have failed to account for, and which could help steer us right?
If you're interested in these questions, definitely check out her site and support her work.
A few things on my mind:
- Investing Syndicates / Collectives / Networks / Squads / Swarms / Good People
- Intentionally designing a portfolio of projects, collaborations, and experiences
- Digital Deliberation Platforms / Going beyond Twitter clones / Future of Social Networks / Social networks vs. social experiences
- Agrivoltaics / Biochar / finally becoming a solar farmer on this rural island
Ok! That's it for this week. See you soon.