An independent research space concerning contemporary issues. This is neither a formal academic publication nor an opinion column: it is analytical work supported by data on topics I consider relevant and worthy of rigorous examination, even when they fall outside specialised academic circuits. Open to co-authorship. Proposals to: hola@juanesteban.art
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Entradas: 88
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The box that does not read itself
On the limits of interpretability and the opacity of the machine regime of relevance. This line of inquiry has maintained a thesis throughout four texts: aesthetic understanding rests upon regimes of relevance, and the regime of relevance of a machine differs from that of a human. I demonstrated that this divergence is measurable (in the...
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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
Sobre lo que la financiarización del arte no consigue absorber Los cinco textos anteriores de esta serie fueron críticos. Examinaron cómo las infraestructuras digitales y culturales capturan, desplazan, homogeneizan y financiarizan. El último, El arte como activo, documentó cómo el mercado del arte de gama alta opera ya bajo lógica financiera y reorganiza el campo…
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Art as an asset
Sobre la financiarización del mercado del arte como infraestructura Una pintura de medio metro cuadrado, ejecutada con materiales cuyo coste no supera los cuarenta euros, puede venderse por cuarenta millones de dólares en una subasta de Nueva York. La diferencia entre el coste material y el precio final —diez millones de euros por centímetro cuadrado,…
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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. Es una ciudad con rasgos arquitectónicos identificables: rascacielos de cristal, plazas con fuentes ornamentales, calles asfaltadas con líneas pintadas, mobiliario…
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The price of the model
Sobre el trabajo cultural en el dispositivo de la IA generativa En 2019, la antropóloga Mary L. Gray formuló una hipótesis que ha envejecido bien y mal a la vez. Su libro Ghost Work, escrito con Siddharth Suri, describía la economía oculta de microtrabajadores que clasifican imágenes, moderan contenido y etiquetan datos para que los…