Generative AI is changing the world but it doesn’t really take much imagination to understand the transformative cultural shift invoked by this new technology is really only the revisitation of what has come before. Creativity in the visual arts has almost exclusively been a process defined by the endless revisitation and recursively self-propagating evolution of […]
Mass hysteria in the age of social media is not any kind of an exception, it is the rule. The endless tesseracts of obsessively narcissistic taxidermy in filtered montage of body and culture may once have adorned our walls and our family photo albums but now populate our mobile devices, our cultures and our #imagination. […]
All media is social media. (It’s long past time to tear that bandaid off.) The degree to which the media consumers can engage with and influence that media has certainly undergone some dramatic revisions in recent years but at heart this all remains a social communications system. It is also worth acknowledging that, while the […]
Artificial Intelligence has no experience of #beauty beyond its exposure to the corpus of training data with which its neural network weights and biases are programmatically refined. Despite this, it can return to us an image which we recognise as being in some way beautiful. The question that occurs to me is that of whether […]
The technologies with which we once aspired to any kind of teleological (or explanatory as aesthetic) closure and epistemological certainty have now proved much more effective in generating the inverse case.
Only the truly insane could ever see some kind of beauty or attraction in violence and war. It is because the tattered flags and broken bodies they invoke make the dark tar of their own hollow souls seem something less haunted, less futile. These are strange mad beasts and many of them are witless fools […]
Observe how we fear the generative mechanisms of our own self-reproduction. Language lives through us just as we do through it and were it not that the developers and the discoveries will unlikely be put back in their genie bottles any time soon, we might successfully regulate the rapidly percolating uncertainties that our own unbounded […]
It is precisely because conflict is a kind of communication that it persists so far beyond the infancy of our species. Artefacts and entities of communication remain in this world for as long as they do through the many ways they endlessly reproduce themselves both through and as us. War, fear and hatred perennially percolate […]
War is a widow, an orphan, a dusty grave and a lonely field of grief and sorrow. Image: stable diffusion.
There is little doubt that our cultural systems are communications networks, albeit of considerably higher dimensionality than (even) the digital telecommunications systems with which we are all now so necessarily well-acquainted. In a spirit of relatively non-specific philosophical reflection, questions quite naturally arise as to the carrying capacity of these cultural networks and of what […]
If virtue was innate or actually worth something beyond an advertising slogan of social merit, would it have to be as performative and theatrical as it so commonly is? It is worth reflecting that anyone who feels compelled to endlessly demonstrate their moral virtue very likely possesses none whatsoever.
When words finally fail us, we might have actually found something worthwhile to say.
Daedelus Kite 