Category: Cuaderno público
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Processes without meaning
On generative art and what humans and machines may share. The first text in this series concluded with an intuition which I marked as an inference, rather than a conclusion. When discussing the work Rain Blooms by Kazuhiro Tanimoto, I suggested that between very distinct entities—a human and a computational system—the common ground...
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The effect of self
On self-relevance as the core of aesthetic judgement and its machine boundary. In the two previous texts of this series, I maintained two points. First, that aesthetic understanding rests upon regimes of relevance, and that misunderstanding—between cultures, between humans and machines—is a misalignment of those regimes. Second, that the divergence between attention...
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Where the machine looks
On the measurable divergence between human attention and model attention. In the previous text of this series, What Matters and What Is Relevant, I maintained that aesthetic misunderstanding—between human cultures and between humans and machines—can be described as a misalignment of regimes of relevance: distinct hierarchies of what counts...
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What matters and what is relevant
Aesthetic subjectivity, regimes of relevance, and the distance between humans and machines. A journalist from WIRED granted an artificial intelligence agent full access to their digital life—email, documents, calendar, history—and requested that it organise a birthday party. The agent, Gemini Spark, performed a remarkable task: it located an actual reservation for...
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Writing once more from home
For a time I published on Substack. It was a useful tool for organising texts, sharing ideas and maintaining contact with those who had approached my work from there. I left it for a matter of editorial policy. A decision in favour of something that matters more and more to me: that my writing, my archive and my…
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The non-marketable remainder
On what the financialisation of art fails to absorb The five previous texts in this series were critical. They examined how digital and cultural infrastructures capture, displace, homogenise and financialise. The last one, Art as an asset, documented how the high-end art market already operates under financial logic and reorganises the field...
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Art as an asset
On the financialisation of the art market as infrastructure A painting of half a square metre, executed with materials whose cost does not exceed forty euros, can be sold for forty million dollars at a New York auction. The difference between the material cost and the final price—ten million euros per square centimetre,...
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Who trains the world
Sobre la asimetría Norte/Sur en la IA generativa como infraestructura cultural Cuando un sistema de IA generativa recibe el encargo de representar «una ciudad» sin más calificativos, lo que produce no es una ciudad genérica: rascacielos de cristal, plazas con fuentes ornamentales, calles asfaltadas con líneas pintadas, mobiliario urbano de estilo europeo o norteamericano. La…
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The price of the model
On cultural work in the generative AI device In 2019, the anthropologist Mary L. Gray formulated a hypothesis that has aged well and poorly at the same time. Her book Ghost Work, written with Siddharth Suri, described the hidden economy of micro-workers who classify images, moderate content and label data so that the...
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When the frame defines the picture
On how the institution and the context produce the artistic experience I recently read a piece of news that does not surprise me and which also does not fail to make me smile. Someone published a real Monet painting—Water Lilies—on a social network, presenting it as an image generated by artificial intelligence, and asked the community to explain why...