Introducing a series on regimes of relevance

Over the past few days, I have published, without prior notice, a series of five texts in this public notebook. I have done so in silence by design: I preferred the sequence to be complete before presenting it, so as to offer the full trajectory rather than five isolated notifications. Here it is, gathered together.

The series was born from a minor scene. A journalist granted an artificial intelligence agent access to their entire digital life and requested that it organise their birthday. The system performed a competent task while, simultaneously, classifying the most important person in their life as a “close friend”. It possessed all the data. It had no concept of what mattered. That misalignment—between what we deem significant and what a system finds relevant—appeared to me as a window into something more substantial than a mere product failure.

The question that permeates these five texts is as follows: comprehending a work, a person, or a world does not depend solely upon sharing a code or possessing more data, but upon concurring on which type of difference proves significant. This I term a regime of relevance. And misunderstanding—between human cultures, and above all between humans and machines—may be described with precision as a misalignment of those regimes. The conclusion I reach is that the distance between the human mode of selecting a world and the machine mode is not one of degree, but of nature.

The series progresses from the conceptual to the technical, and each text stands alone, yet together they articulate something that none states in its entirety. This is the trajectory:

1. What matters and what is relevant. The initial thesis: aesthetic subjectivity as a method of selecting a world, and misunderstanding as a misalignment of relevances.
2. Where the machine looks. The empirical component: when a human and an AI observe the same image, do they observe the same locations? The answer is measurable, and it is no.
3. The self-effect. What causes a work not merely to please us, but to matter to us. Self-relevance as the core of intense aesthetic judgement, and the boundary that a system without a self cannot traverse.
4. Processes without meaning. Generative art as a territory where human and machine do share something: the process, if not the meaning. From Conway to Tanimoto.
5. The box that does not read itself. The conclusion: why a machine's regime of relevance remains opaque even when one has access to all its internal mechanisms.

The sequence remains, for the present, closed in its initial trajectory. Its natural continuation is research, and in time perhaps a more formal work to articulate it. Yet its place of origin is this notebook, and here it shall remain open to any who wish to intervene—from the perspectives of aesthetics, cognitive science, AI studies, or artistic practice.

Thank you for reading.

Juan A. Esteban