Leslie Liu:

Why and how, ”self-contained?”

There has always been something charming about a self-contained website to me. This desire for the potential of expression made compact, travel-size, extends to other things: sketchbooks, pockets, forms and multipurpose containers of information and thought.

The infinite recomposability of a single HTML file is exciting to me: as I tab through different past site-selves there is something resonant in the ways I am trying to embody something more abstract, something aspirational: if my skeleton could be brutalist, exacting somehow... and there is the tireless rewriting of a self, of this presence, through the familiar tags and syntax, the usual sleight of hand by shoving things into .

Spencer Chang:

This piece [(Yoko Ono’s Bag Piece)] probably had the most pronounced effect on me of all the ones in the show. It changed my agency in a significant way—pushing me to act in a way that I would never have dared to act in a similar setting without it, and my mind feels permanently rewired as a result of it.

Broadly, all participatory art tries to engender some kind of public play. The goal is to create an environment where we feel safe enough to play with actions that we might not normally consider.

When applied at a community scale, we see the compounding effects that these practices can have. Mutual aid fridges make it feel normal to redistribute your extra food to people in need. Little Free Libraries create an environment where it's easy to exchange books with neighbors. Every piece of public participatory art gives us the excuse to try on a new normal.

Shuja Haider:

The increased speed and decreased size of data storage have irrevocably altered the nature of collecting—streaming services like Spotify give us access to a shared archive, that, hypothetically, contains everything. It’s a condition as overwhelming and impersonal as it is exciting. “Even though public collections may be less objectionable socially and more useful academically than private collections,” says Benjamin, “the objects get their due only in the latter.” Can there be collections without objects? Ours is an age of mechanical reproduction even a philosopher of Benjamin’s prescience could not have predicted. If the 20th century eliminated the aura of the object, the 21st has eliminated the object itself.

...

The record collection, you might say, has given way to the playlist. But collections were never just groups of similar objects assembled in the same location. They were clusters of knowledge, unified by a series of contingent events and subjective decisions in the lives of their owners—places traveled, relationships failed, money lost. They proved that we really existed.

Shuja Haider:

Though the compulsion to buy could be self-destructive, its result was divine creation. Immersed in a universe of my own making, I gazed at cover art, pored over liner notes, checked and compared dates. Most of all, I scanned for overlapping credits—a pleasure that reaches its zenith for the jazz collector, given the collaborative nature of the form. “For a true collector,” says Benjamin, “the whole background of an item adds up to a magic encyclopedia whose quintessence is the fate of his object.” Besides furnishing historical detail, these clues facilitate more collecting. There’s an unequaled thrill you get when you cross the line from learning about a subject to knowing it, like when you first get a sense of direction in a new neighborhood. I sought this sensation endlessly. I delved into an unfamiliar genre every time I’d sketched out a crude map of a previous one.

Kazuo Ishiguro:

But the Father kept gazing through the windshield at the yard. ‘I couldn’t explain it to Josie earlier in the cafe,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t explain to her why I hate Capaldi so much. Why I can’t bring myself to be civil towards him. But I’d like to try and explain it to you Klara. If you don’t mind.

His switch of subject was highly unwelcome, but anxious not to lose his good will, I said nothing and waited.

‘I think I hate Capaldi because deep down I suspect he may be right. That what he claims is true. That science has now proved beyond doubt that there’s nothing so unique about my daughter, nothing there our modern tools can’t excavate, copy, transfer. That people have been living with one another all this time, centuries, loving and hating each other, and all on a mistaken premise. A kind of superstition we kept going while we didn’t know better. That’s how Capaldi sees it, and there’s a part of me that fears he’s right. Chrissie, on the other hand, isn’t like me. She may not know it yet, but she’ll never let herself be persuaded. If the moment ever comes, never mind how well you play your part, Klara, never mind how much she wishes it to work, Chrissie just won’t be able to accept it. She’s too … old-fashioned. Even if she knows she’s going against the science and the math, she still won’t be able to do it. She just won’t stretch that far. But I’m different. I have … a kind of coldness inside me she lacks. Perhaps it’s because I’m an expert engineer, as you put it. That is why I find it so hard to be civil around people like Capaldi. When they do what they do, say what they say, it feels like they’re taking from me what I hold most precious in this life. Am I making sense?’

Alexandra Schwartz:

Delany, who projects a prickly, detached persona when asked to discuss his own work, tears up while speaking about teaching. Sillman does him one better; when she was on the faculty at Bard, she says, she considered not only her teaching work but indeed her job as a department co-chair as part of her actual art practice. This sounds both noble and nuts—did Wallace Stevens think of insurance law as part of his poetry? But it makes a kind of sense. You’re gonna have to serve somebody, Bob Dylan sang, and that is what D’Erasmo thinks, too. “Michelangelo had to be able to deal with the pope (which often did not go well),” she writes. “Artists and writers working now have to be able to deal with the dean (which also often does not go well).” Michelangelo may have had it worse. Imagine the dean telling you that you have to paint the ceiling.

At the same time, artists need steel at their core, some essential private self to return to after the department meetings are over and class has let out. You make your living where you can, while, in D’Erasmo’s phrase, cultivating “the deep stamina of the double agent,” working, first and last, for yourself.

[...]

Maybe the practical and the mystical sides of art-making aren’t at such odds. I was amazed to learn, in “The Work of Art,” that Kara Walker’s astonishing sculpture “A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby,” a massive sphinx figure that was installed, in 2014, at the old Domino Sugar Refinery in Williamsburg, had its origins in a PowerPoint presentation that Walker made to the arts organization that was sponsoring the work. It’s hard to get less Romantic than Microsoft Office. (Meanwhile, the revelation that the sculpture should be made from sugar came to Walker not in some quiet moment of private contemplation but while reading on the Q train.)

Walter Benjamin commenting on Georges Duhamel’s low regard towards film:

Let us compare the screen on which a film unfolds with the canvas of a painting. The painting invites the spectator to contemplation; before it the spectator can abandon himself to his associations. Before the movie frame he cannot do so. No sooner has his eye grasped a scene than it is already changed. It cannot be arrested. Duhamel, who detests the film and knows nothing of its significance, though something of its structure, notes this circumstance as follows: “I can no longer think what I want to think. My thoughts have been replaced by moving images.”* The spectator’s process of association in view of these images is indeed interrupted by their sudden, constant change. This constitutes the shock effect of the film, which, like all shocks, should be cushioned by heightened presence of mind.”

[…]

What he objects to most is the kind of participation which the movie elicits from the masses. Duhamel calls the movie “a pastime for helots, a diversion for uneducated, wretched, worn out creatures who are consumed by their worries…, a spectacle which requires no concentration and presupposes no intelligence…, which kindles no light in the heart and awakens no hope other than the ridiculous one of someday becoming a ‘star’ in Los Angeles.” Clearly, this is at the bottom of the same ancient lament that the masses seek distraction whereas art demands concentration from the spectator. That is. a commonplace. The question remains whether it provides a platform for the analysis of film. A closer look is needed here. Distraction and concentration form polar opposites which may be stated as follows: A man who concentrates before a work of art is absorbed by it. He enters into this work of art the way legend tells of the Chinese painter when he viewed his finished painting. In contrast, the distracted mass absorbs the work of art. This is most obvious with regard to buildings. Architecture has always represented the prototype of a work of art the reception of which is consummated by a collectivity in a state of distraction.

* Georges Duhamel, Scènes de la vie future, Paris, 1930, p.52

William James:

But as the sciences have developed farther the notion has gained ground that most, perhaps all, of our laws are only approximations. The laws themselves, moreover, have grown so numerous that there is no counting them; and so many rival formulations are proposed in all the branches of science that investigators have become accustomed to the notion that no theory is absolutely a transcript of reality, but that any one of them may from some point of view be useful. Their great use is to summarize old facts and to lead to new ones. They are only a man-made language, a conceptual shorthand, as some one calls them, in which we write our reports of nature; and languages, as is well known, tolerate much choice of expression and many dialects.

Stanley Cavell:

…the first fact of works of art is that they are meant, meant to be understood. A poem, whatever else it is, is an utterance (outer-ance). It is as true to say of poems that they are physical objects as to say of human actions that they are physical motions (though it is perfectly true that there would not be an action unless somebody moved, did something).

D. Graham Burnett:

I want to suggest that part of what makes the conversation about attention right now oh-so-difficult and so important is that secreted within that term are in fact two very different projects bumping up against each other.

In a laboratory you use instruments. As it turns out, if you use instruments to get at a thing called “attention”, you end up finding an instrumentalized form of attention. Is that form of attention real? Absolutely. In fact, the technologies for making it real are powerful: you can quantify it, you can place it in evidence experimentally... Is it part of what’s in that sort of worker conception of attention that you invoked? Yes as it happens it is, but that other thing that you’re calling in when you talk about meditation, when you talk about awareness, when we invoke the experience of being: the kind of ecstasy that can come with a certain durational flow of immersion in a person, a conversation, a book, the experience of reading an object... That comes from a different place. It’s also in the language of attention and it has its own separate history.

If you want to see both of those operating now, let me give you two recent theorists of attention, both very prominent, whose accounts of what attention is are absolutely contradictory. Perfectly paradoxical, but both interestingly true.

Two biz school theorists, Davenport and Beck, do a book called The Attention Economy, I think in 2001 — they don’t actually coin the phrase, but they’re responsible for its exploding into the collective conversation. How do they define attention in that book? They say: “attention is what triggers–catalyzes–awareness into action”. Attention is what catalyzes awareness into action.

A definition that couldn’t be more different: the recently deceased French philosopher Bernard Stiegler, in a beautiful and difficult book called Taking Care of the Youth and the Generations, centers that book on attention. What does he say attention is? He says attention — playing with the attendre in French — is waiting. The exact opposite of my catalytic triggering–it’s waiting. It’s in fact for him infinite waiting. And what are you waiting on when you attend to an object, wait on it? He says you are waiting on the disclosure of the long webs of connectedness that are in the object. Which long webs of connectedness are a mirroring of the rich, long webs of connectedness that are in you.

So let’s imagine for a second that there was a painting on the wall of this studio, and you and I were looking at it together. We might look at that painting —it might be let’s say a religious icon or something — and you and I would bring to the experience of looking at it what we have: we would notice colors, we would think about other images like it that we might have seen, we would think about the other images that might not be here but could be, or the other symbolic things that are in it... and as we experience that web of things that are in the image, we’d really be seeing a long web of connectedness that’s in ourselves. So for Steigler attention is waiting on the disclosure of those long webs of connectedness which are a mirroring of our own infinitude in the world.

Attention: infinite waiting. Attention: triggering. Sharp contrast.

Tim Crane:

Descartes had the notion of “substance”, and that was his fundamental category. He asked ‘What is substance? What substances are there?’ Actually he really thought that God was in effect the only substance, because God was the only independent thing. But ignoring that, among created things, there was matter and there was mind. Now if we don’t have that question — what is substance, or what is the fundamental nature of all reality — then we’re not led into this position of asking what matter “fundamentally” is. There may be nothing that matter fundamentally is — there’s this kind of matter, there’s that kind of matter, there’s the periodical table of the elements that tells you what all the elements are, how they fit together.

The mistake as I see it is asking the question “what is the fundamental nature of matter”. This was a question they asked in the 17th century. Descartes asked it because he believed in the concept of substance. We don’t believe in the concept of substance now — maybe you do, maybe Philip [Goff] does, but I don’t, and I don’t think we should believe it. I don’t think it’s actually a very workable concept. If we don’t have the concept of substance, then we shouldn’t be asking the question “what is matter _as such_”. We can ask “what is lead”, “what is gold”, “what is an organism”, “what is a tree”, and the totality of that knowledge is the totality of those things. But there’s no further question “what is matter?”

Brian Merchant quoting Koen Vermeir:

The science historian Veirmeer, in his conclusion, notes that the lanterns “could shift from magical contexts to natural philosophy, and sometimes the borderlines are far from clear… They were analogical demonstrations of undemonstrable philosophical principles.”

I love that phrase. Incidentally, it’s a pretty good way to describe how chatbots and image generators function for AI executives and true believers in AGI: as “analogical demonstrations of undemonstrable philosophical principles.” After all, there is no scientifically determined point or threshold at which we will have “reached” or “achieved” AGI — it’s an ambiguous conceit rooted largely in the ideas of technologists, futurists and Silicon Valley operators. These AI-produced images and videos, these interactions with chatbots and text generators, are analogical demonstrations of the future those parties believe, or want to believe, AGI renders inevitable.

Chia Amisola:

The process of domain naming acknowledges our self-made authority to define the environments we inhabit, and thus ourselves. As we settle with language, words determine the visibility of a place's logic. Logic in turn, is just an evaluation of language. Within these dichotomies, naming treads the line between liberation and oppression, illegibility and clarity, obfuscation and identification. 

The secret to construction (of identity, object, or place) has always been in naming. Language and space are interlinked, each mutating our understanding of a world and the possibilities within. Truth is revealed when it is recognized. Names are tools for recognition / memory-making / cognition / meaning-making. Like a collective contract to recognize one color as red, or to dispute for centuries over the name of a land and its authority, names as relations are always embroiled with questions of power.

Thomas Weaver:

Through all these kinds of image references, there seems to be something kind of paradoxical about editing. The conventional view of the editor is one that envisages the editorial mandate as one of shortening; of cutting, of removal and abbreviation. But as these images show, within the figure of editing and the role of the editor, there is simultaneously an opposing process of assemblage, of generating stuff, of collecting writers and images, of acquisition. Editing, then, does two opposite things at exactly the same time.

Casey Newton:

On one level it’s impressive that Spotify can perfectly capture my musical taste in a series of data points, and regurgitate it to me in a series of weekly playlists. But as good as it has gotten, I can’t remember the last time it pointed me to something I never expected I would like, but ultimately fell totally in love with. 

For that you needed someone who could go beyond the data to tell you the story: of the artist, of the genre, of the music they made. For that you needed criticism.

– from Why Pitchfork Died

Agnes Callard on the justification of meritocracy:

You don’t want people to be too happy with who they are, too early in their lives. Like a two-year-old should not be happy to remain a two-year-old. Kids are great! But they haven’t really encountered most of the valuable things in life yet. A really big part of life is coming to care about new things that you didn’t even know were valuable beforehand. We want people to do that, and there’s a problem with how people can do it, because it doesn’t seem valuable to them, so why are they gonna start valuing it. Competition is a really powerful psychological mechanism for that. You see it in schools — people want to get a good grade, and because they want to get a good grade they study, and because they study they’re immersed in a world. We use competition to leverage ourselves out of what would have been an impoverished point of view on value; I think that’s got to be the ultimate justification of meritocracy. But that justification is only a justification of meritocracy as a way to motivate people. It’s not a justification of meritocracy as a way to ultimately assess the value of your life or what you care about. It’s sort of a theory of transition, not a theory of the end point. I think one of the really deep ways in which meritocracy gets corrupted is when people take it to be a theory of the end point. In effect, my view is if you are comparing yourself negatively to someone else — which is I think a perfectly fine thing and a very useful thing to do — you better be in the process of trying to become better.

Agnes Callard’s Socratic framing of knowledge:

I think we’re way too quick to identify ourselves with long-term goals, especially when we’re not in the moment of being tempted. We can say “look, I know how I should really live. I know that I should read those books, and I should not eat the cookies, and I should be less stressed about these things, and I should spend more time with my family—these are things that I know”. And I think the truth is that I do not know any of them. I believe them, and I also believe the opposite. Some of my beliefs are more presentable to other people; so I am more to you if I say, “yeah I know I should spend more time with my kids” than if I say “I have a profound need to escape my kids”. But both of those things are true of me, and I think the violence to the self occurs as long as both are true of you. I think — but this is sort of just me agreeing with Socrates about something — that if you had knowledge, you would not have that conflict. A lot of people have the goal of mastering themselves, which is to say exerting enough violence over themselves to quiet that other voice, because they “know” the other thing. But the truth is the fact that the other voice is there means you don’t know it. The violence over yourself is trying to quiet it when it’s really there. Knowledge would mean that you unanimously and obviously in a very simple way did the thing you thought you should. … Suppose that I feel like having the cookie but I “know” I shouldn’t. I think people are inclined to think of the feeling that you want the cookie as bodily, and the knowing that you shouldn’t as not-bodily, but I think that’s bodily too. That’s just how things look to you in a bodily way when you’re looking from far away. You are somebody who is just trapped in the images of things. And when you look at something like eating a cookie from close-up it looks really good to you, and when you look at it from far away it looks not very good. Those are both bodily judgements— there are just proximate and distant bodily judgements. And what we do when we don’t have knowledge is we just vacillate between these bodily judgements, and we dress one of them up as though it were knowledge, namely the distant one. … The way I am is that I see a bunch of conflicts, and I don’t know how to resolve them, and that’s just my ignorance. If I had knowledge, I would know how to resolve them. But what I at least try to do is not be under the illusion that I have the knowledge already.