[ recap ] Last week we looked at hidden defaults: Humboldt's drawing of Chimborazo and a kettle in Quito that won't reach temperature. [ thoughts ] On Friday morning Instagram terminated my page @contemporary.blueprint and forty-three thousand followers went with it. Copyright strikes, for clips of Alan Moore's storytelling course for BBC Maestro. Meta had warned me more than once but the warnings went to an email I don't keep up-to-date with, and some of the posts had been up for over a...
12 days ago • 3 min read
[ recap ] Last week we looked at attention: Mollie's map of Las Vegas, Valéry's two ways a work ends, and what happens when nothing is waiting for the thing you're making. [ thoughts ] I have been in Quito a week and the stairs still beat me. At night I have to sleep with Vicks under my nose. The city sits at 2,850 metres (9,350ft). Air pressure here is about 72 kilopascals. At sea level it is 101, so each breath carries about a quarter less oxygen. The equator runs 25 kilometres north of...
19 days ago • 4 min read
[ recap ] Last week we looked at taste: Rick Rubin's judgement and what disappears when a machine removes the learning from making. [ thoughts ] For the past week, I have been putting my apartment into boxes. The living room, the bedroom, my books, art I’ve collected from visiting different countries, all of it into a storage unit, because I am [ temporarily ] moving from NYC to Quito. I stopped posting on social media. There was no time, and there isn’t much to say. In all honesty, I felt...
26 days ago • 4 min read
[ recap ] Last week we looked at the "right to be let alone": Abigail Roberson's face on flour, Meta's Muse Image, and the difference between being seen and being used. [ thoughts ] In January 2023, Anderson Cooper asked Rick Rubin whether he plays instruments. "Barely," Rubin said. "I have no technical ability. And I know nothing about music." What artists pay him for, Rubin explained, is certainty about his own taste and the ability to say what he feels. The clip became a meme, read either...
about 1 month ago • 4 min read
[ recap ] Last week we looked at making the familiar strange: Viktor Shklovsky, the Nacirema, and what living in Nairobi taught me. [ thoughts ] On Tuesday, Meta launched Muse Image, an AI image generator with a feature that let any stranger tag a public Instagram account and use its photos as material for AI-generated images, without account owners being told. Within minutes, activists were publishing opt-out guides, and by Friday the feature was gone, with Meta only saying that "we've heard...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
[ recap ] Last week we looked at originality: Gutenberg's press, James Webb Young on ideas and Massimo Vignelli's pencil. [ thoughts ] In a new city you notice everything: the way doors open, how people queue, what coffee costs, which way to look before crossing. It's not automatic yet, so you notice all of it. Then it fades. Give it a few months and the new street is just the way to the station, the thing you walk through on the phone. I've had that feeling living in three continents, and it...
about 2 months ago • 4 min read
[ recap ] Last week we looked at Keith Haring's questions about who runs the machine and Milieu, a free record-keeping tool. [ thoughts ] Everyone can suddenly make anything, which has a lot of people wondering whether originality is finished too. But originality was never quite what we think. Almost nothing we call original was made from nothing. The proof is the invention that made the modern world: the printing press. Johannes Gutenberg took the screw press that Rhineland farmers used for...
about 2 months ago • 4 min read
[ recap ] Last week we looked at John Cage's 4'33", Ursula K. Le Guin's Carrier Bag Theory, and Graham Wallas' creative process. [ thoughts ] Keith Haring had just turned twenty when he arrived in New York in 1978. He bussed tables at Danceteria at night and studied semiotics by day at the School of Visual Arts, a year or two from the subway drawings. And he kept journals from his teens until he died. Semiotics is the study of how signs come to mean things and who gets to decide what. It was...
2 months ago • 4 min read
[ recap ] Last week we looked at televised essays (Carl Sagan's Cosmos. Kenneth Clark's Civilisation. John Berger's Ways of Seeing) and Michel de Montaigne's thinking. [ thoughts ] I didn't post much this week. By the logic of the algorithm, it means nothing happened. But the feed only knows what has been published. It cannot see the half-finished sentence sitting in a notebook, the image saved without knowing why, pages returned to three times without words added. So it does the simplest...
2 months ago • 4 min read