Anna Zhang

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on the atlas — 49

highlights — 451

The patient was encouraged not to give too much meaning to the words themselves, which is not to say the words were meaningless. Each word uttered was a clue to decoding the underlying structure of the psyche, even if — or especially if — it was said by accident.
Babel | Issue 40 | n+1 | Meghan O’Gieblyn
Recuperated as AI, Surrealism provides the basis not for liberation but for further entrapment in existing cultural patterns reshuffled in novel ways, but not fundamentally changed. Rather, they are further ingrained. The idea of escaping from the control exercised by reason ends up being a way of fully submitting to a different form of programming, to what a machine learning model can produce and what algorithmic forms of control can induce.
Word Processing: Surrealism and AI – ARTnews.com
But the fact that AI and Surrealism so readily fit together is reason to be suspicious of both. Surrealism was supposed to free minds from bourgeois rationality by subtracting intentionality and tapping into deep levels of mythic experience through randomness and dreams, celebration of “primitivism” and “subjectlessness.” But this experience is readily elicited by AI, the supremely rational application of reductive ideas about how minds work.
Word Processing: Surrealism and AI – ARTnews.com
The flight from agency appears to redeem itself in such acts of aesthetic recognition.
Word Processing: Surrealism and AI – ARTnews.com
How it completes whatever prompt it’s fed can be interpreted as a “social average” response, making it a kind of oblique search engine of the collective consciousness, liberated from any of the contextual social relations that would discipline what it produces.
Word Processing: Surrealism and AI – ARTnews.com
AI cultivates and caters to our passivity, seeming to offer the fruits of creativity and self-examination without the effort and self-doubt.
Word Processing: Surrealism and AI – ARTnews.com
Art, in the eyes of lots of these kinds of futurists, is not a mystery, but a problem to be solved. That the creative act is difficult to perform, difficult to explain, difficult even to understand makes it an uncomfortably irreducible remainder to someone who’s trying, Mrs. Davis–style, to optimize the world. And so, of course, AI’s makers come for it first, seeking at long last to reveal the trick at the center of art, the proof that the idea of romantic genius and inspiration is a glib illusion, a grift meant to shame and embarrass everyone who can’t draw or dance or write a good sentence.
“Mrs. Davis” Is Weirder Than Anything AI Could Dream Up | The New Republic
Threads, by contrast, seeks complacent users who accept the idea that ‘conversation’ is the opposite of conflict and is ultimately no different from commerce.
What Is the Point of Threads, Zuckerberg’s ‘Twitter Killer’? - ArtReview
Labor done in the home—“women’s work”—is a necessary input to capitalist circuits of exchange, producing healthy, socially adept, well-nourished laboring bodies.
The Relevance of “Women’s Work”: Social Reproduction and Immaterial Labor in Digital Media - Kylie Jarrett, 2014
On digital platforms, women invest their emotional energy to engage with and generate content that in turn adds value to branded platforms.
Full article: Emotion work: considering gender in digital labor
In late 2017, with provincial support, Wuhan opened Damara Village, a ‘livestreaming base’ located within a European-themed tourist park, designed to host 100 livestreamers (Kun, 2018).
China’s livestreaming industry: platforms, politics, and precarity - Stuart Cunningham, David Craig, Junyi Lv, 2019
But livestreaming industry conditions have contributed to tensions between female streamers and platforms rooted in the politics of gender, labor, and exploitation.
China’s livestreaming industry: platforms, politics, and precarity - Stuart Cunningham, David Craig, Junyi Lv, 2019
This is how a wanghong converts her knowledge, courage, determination, and her network to money, or economic capital.
Full article: Cultural capitals and creative labour of short video platforms: a study of wanghong on Douyin
Lin (Citation2019) in a study of beauty streamers on Douyin, described female wanghong has to design self-image, do their face work with skills, and over time develop their identity in order to establish a new form of sociality; it is with such social capital that the latter can later attract gifts, or economic capital, from viewers.
Full article: Cultural capitals and creative labour of short video platforms: a study of wanghong on Douyin
One of the most well-known definitions of infrastructure is ‘matter that moves matter’ (Larkin 2013, 238). Infrastructures like roads and railways are tangible material forms that exist in particular places and that people use in their everyday lives. Yet infrastructures are not just material forms that exist in one location, but function precisely because they hold together a range of things—rail tracks, standards, ideas, policies, labour practices. It is this ability to connect that enables things and people to move, and societies to function. Brian Larkin therefore argues that infrastructur…
Infrastructure | Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology
The open-source, free-wheeling culture of data science is often antithetical to the practice of data sovereignty, as is the culture of AI.
A new vision of artificial intelligence for the people | MIT Technology Review
‘What you give us, we’re here as kaitiaki [guardians]. We look after it, but you still own your audio,’” says Te Mihinga. “That’s important. Those values define who we are as Māori.”
A new vision of artificial intelligence for the people | MIT Technology Review
But these models, built by hoovering up large swathes of the internet, are also accelerating language loss, in the same way colonization and assimilation policies did previously.
A new vision of artificial intelligence for the people | MIT Technology Review
Companies have relentlessly mined people for their faces, voices, and behaviors to enrich bottom lines. And models built by averaging data from entire populations have sidelined minority and marginalized communities even as they are disproportionately subjected to the technology’s impacts.
A new vision of artificial intelligence for the people | MIT Technology Review
Julia Child’s cooking show The French Chef, which ran on American TV in the 1960s, marked the first use of captions on TV and the fruits of Deaf advocacy. Child’s captions were open, instead of closed, meaning they could not be turned off. But there was concern that hearing viewers would find the captions off-putting, and eventually they were removed. This moment in history speaks to how ableism is often caught up in aesthetic sensibilities, and thus, the important role that artists can play in making the future more accessible.
Christine Sun Kim and the Deaf artists claiming sound as their subject – Factory International
I always try to ground my fiction in reality. I think that the more speculative the scenarios an author creates, the more they need to integrate details and nuances that can only come from close observation of how strange and unexpected the real world actually is.
Ghostwriter at CCA Prague - Lawrence Lek 陆明龙
This question of opacity is urgent because it is a strategic tool, a form of encryption: a way of mediating how we are seen and asking questions about for whom those images are shown and circulated.
Glitching the Master’s House: Legacy Russell and Momtaza Mehri in Conversation | Frieze
AI can turn us into good content for ourselves, which allows us to believe we might be good content in general, a content that can and will be recirculated, algorithmically recommended, sponsored, and so on. It is a source of validation, of belonging, of perceiving oneself to be normal and accepted as well as exceptional at the same time. It provides the thrill of being seen at a seemingly safe remove from social consequences.
Inspired prompts - by Rob Horning - Internal exile
I tend to read that fear as an inverted wish: We secretly hope that AI will free us from our curiosity and liberate us into a pure passivity that we can never actually attain.
Inspired prompts - by Rob Horning - Internal exile
Models can make an infinite series of stories that are in a sense “based on true events” (actual data processed statistically) but are also specific to the moment of their generation, a kind of reality TV from an alternate universe.
Inspired prompts - by Rob Horning - Internal exile
Dwell in this environment long enough, and it becomes difficult to process the facts of the world through anything except entertainment. We’ve become so accustomed to its heightened atmosphere that the plain old real version of things starts to seem dull by comparison. A weather app recently sent me a push notification offering to tell me about “interesting storms.” I didn’t know I needed my storms to be interesting … Such examples may seem trivial, harmless—brands being brands. But each invitation to be entertained reinforces an impulse: to seek diversion whenever possible, to avoid tedium at…
Inspired prompts - by Rob Horning - Internal exile
In that scenario, branded content from creators can be phased out in favor of content that allows users to experience themselves as a brand of a sort — the specific set of proclivities that conceptually holds together whatever content the machines throw at them.
Inspired prompts - by Rob Horning - Internal exile
Calendars take on a contradictory character in this context. On one hand, they can provide a source of positive identity and a sense of accomplishment. On the other hand, this same recording function routinely sets up personal failure, as lived time rarely matches ideals or intentions. As we know from research on other self-tracking devices, new forms of self-knowledge can normalize and legitimate the need to recalibrate our activities in order to stay in tune with quantified data.
How Silicon Valley sets time - Judy Wajcman, 2019
Within a framework that stresses individual responsibility for self-improvement, calendars perpetuate a promise that an autonomous individual can control the unpredictability of real life that inevitably involves other people and plans (Gregg, 2018). And in doing so, they also perform an affective role, as the title of Leshed and Sengers’s (2011) study of productivity tools indicates, ‘I Lie to Myself that I Have Freedom in My Own Schedule’.
How Silicon Valley sets time - Judy Wajcman, 2019
If we can’t get into the hardware or even the software, then closeness to the metal is about getting into the consequences. It’s about making connections between people’s lives, their bodies, and how computationally built systems have an effect on them.
Close to the Metal — Real Life
We’re building edgeless environments of divergency. Things are added in chaos, then if successful, they expanded further and further out until they collapse and rearrange. This is probably why responsive design feels so relevant, maddening, and divisive: its patterns mimic the larger patterns of technology itself.
Frank Chimero · The Web’s Grain
Using technology to solve the problems it causes is as futile as cleaning a grass stain by rubbing grass on it. More technology only amplifies the problems created by an abundance of it.
Frank Chimero · The Web’s Grain
designing for screens is managing this change over time, and expressing it in clear, communicative, and powerful ways.
Frank Chimero · The Web’s Grain
we eventually work through the naive belief that profundity comes from complication. It simply isn’t so. Things have enough depth and worth on their own terms. No metaphors or analogies are needed for insight, only the willingness to listen to the subject speak for itself, even if it contradicts received wisdom.
Frank Chimero · The Web’s Grain
How did we end up in the Pinterest Singularity of templatized internet experiences that optimize for task completion, rather than exploration?
Wandering Web | SOMEWHERE GOOD
It’s very destination, rather than journey driven.
Wandering Web | SOMEWHERE GOOD
Online, we do not have to occupy any specific place, much less visit repeatedly — and in an environment made of up ever-changing feeds, we frequently can’t return to the same place even when we want to.
Home Screens — Real Life
These people are providing a mission-critical service for their employers.
Content Moderation Is Terrible by Design
There has long been an aspirational idea that we’re going to turn repetitive, disturbing, or unpleasant labor over to machines. Instead, what’s happened with content moderation is that this work has just been pushed out of sight.
Content Moderation Is Terrible by Design
It's an interesting evolutionary paradox when you remember that old-school link collections were created to compensate, through human intervention, for the rough search engine results. In the end both cures delivered the same: a link to an address new to the user; an unknown topic, a surprise, an action, a deep web.
Olia Lialina. A Vernacular web. Links
Ten years ago every web site had a section of external links because people felt it was their personal responsibility to configure the environment and build the infrastructure. The many-to-many principle showed itself in linking strategies as well. A site was not complete without links to other sites.
Olia Lialina. A Vernacular web. Links
If you search for "my collection of web graphics" you can still find a lot of special collections though not necessarily retro ones (btw "my" is a very important key word, leave it out and you'll be sent to commercial pages).
Olia Lialina. A Vernacular web. Free Colections of Web elements
The early web was more about spirit than skills. To distribute was no less important than to create.
Olia Lialina. A Vernacular web. Free Colections of Web elements
a historical feature of the amateur web to prefer expression over structure
Olia Lialina. A Vernacular web. Free Colections of Web elements
"Starry Night" backgrounds reduced proportionately; from being a symbol of the future they were turning into a sign of the web's early years. Its meaning shifted to the opposite: from future to past.
Olia Lialina. A Vernacular web. The Starry Night Background
Neither the "Under Construction" sign nor the idea of permanent construction made it into the professional web. The idea of unfinished business contradicts the traditional concept of professional designer-client relations: fixed terms and finished products.
Olia Lialina. A Vernacular web. Under Construction
"Under Construction" images changed their meaning from a warning to a promise that this page will grow. The symbol became a hybrid of excuse and invitation.
Olia Lialina. A Vernacular web. Under Construction
After all, in philosophy the Greek term “techne” (τέχνη) means the “making of a world.” Techne, philosophically conceived, has much in common with technology, rather than being opposed, as one might expect. “Technology” is vested in the practical, in the work of putting scientific knowledge to practical use. Techne is the art of making things philosophically.
Never-Ending Story — Real Life
Like meal replacements packs, or other tech industry technologies created to enhance focus by reducing distraction, VR automates the labor of feeling. This time, what is being cured is not the body’s need for food, but rather society’s need to feel better about itself by feeling something about racism.
Feeling good about feeling bad: virtuous virtual reality and the automation of racial empathy - Lisa Nakamura, 2020
These and other virtuous VR succeed because they create a sensation in the body that mimics the implied presence of another, not knowledge about another.
Feeling good about feeling bad: virtuous virtual reality and the automation of racial empathy - Lisa Nakamura, 2020