Author: st6n
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The machine removes our easy answers
Cada vez que una máquina aprende a hacer algo que creíamos nuestro, alguien se apresura a decir que eso, en realidad, nunca fue lo importante. Cuando calcularon mejor que nosotros, dijimos que calcular era mecánico. Cuando ganaron al ajedrez, que el ajedrez era solo cálculo con reglas. Cuando empezaron a escribir párrafos correctos, que redactar…
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Eight arcminutes
A comienzos del siglo XVII, Johannes Kepler pasó unos cinco años peleándose con el planeta Marte. Tenía en las manos las mejores observaciones astronómicas jamás tomadas hasta entonces, las de Tycho Brahe, un danés que había medido las posiciones de los planetas a simple vista, sin telescopio, con instrumentos enormes y una obstinación sin igual,…
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Who holds the key
En febrero de 2017 el Metropolitan de Nueva York puso en internet más de trescientas setenta y cinco mil imágenes de su colección para usar, compartir y remezclar sin restricción. Hoy pasan de cuatrocientas noventa mil. El Smithsonian abrió en 2020 con casi tres millones de piezas digitales y hoy supera los cinco millones, en…
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Measured and reserved
Las cifras circulan ya con la seguridad de los hechos. Los centros de datos del mundo consumieron unos 415 teravatios-hora en 2024, cerca del 1,5 % de toda la electricidad del planeta, y podrían acercarse a los 945 en 2030. En Estados Unidos fueron 176 teravatios-hora en 2023, un 4,4 % del consumo nacional. Entrenar…
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The criterion is not in the hand
A study from Columbia University, published in June 2025, quantified what many of us had intuited. A group of individuals were shown identical works, some labelled as human-made and others as generated by artificial intelligence. The latter were rated sixty-two per cent lower than...
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More beautiful
In Kerala, during the Onam festivities, there exists a popular tradition known as Pulikali: men who paint their bodies as tigers and dance through the streets of Thrissur to the rhythm of percussion. It is sustained by neighbourhood groups that spend months preparing the paint, the movements, and the music. This August 2026, an actor...
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The design was the damage
Today, 26 August 2026, Meta has reached a settlement with a coalition of attorneys general from 47 states and several United States territories to conclude the lawsuit accusing it of designing Instagram and Facebook to cultivate dependency in minors. It will pay at least 12.1 billion dollars over ten years, a figure that could reach...
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The artworld in the place of Ideas
There is a question that has permeated the philosophy of art since its first formulation and which is almost never articulated as what it truly is: what renders a work more than the object that sustains it? Why this canvas, and not the one beside it? Why this urinal and not all the others...
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Changing skin
We have been convinced for years, and with good reason, that we rely excessively on a handful of American platforms. That the European public discourse occurs within infrastructure designed in California, governed by its laws and refined by algorithms that reward indignation, constitutes a genuine problem of autonomy and democracy. Hence the impulse, increasingly...
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The security of the name
Anyone working in contemporary art acknowledges, though they rarely state it aloud, that the living artist presents a challenge to the institution, whereas the established artist represents a convenience. Not because anyone holds them in contempt, but due to something colder and more difficult to combat: the logic with which a...