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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Entries: 137
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What the system renders improbable
On ignorance as a product of digital infrastructures There is a comfortable idea about information that should be dismantled: that we live surrounded by it, that the problem of our era is excess, that there has never been so much available to anyone. It is half true, and the missing half is the...
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How a world chooses what it observes
Introducing a series on regimes of relevance. Over the past few days, I have published a series of five texts in this public notebook without prior announcement. This silence was intentional; I preferred the collection to be complete before presenting it, allowing for the entire trajectory to be offered rather than five separate notifications. Here it is,...
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Neither the market nor the broken heart
On a defence of art that in reality defends two other things A recent column in El País, signed by Jordi Labanda, is titled "Against automatic art" and summarises its thesis in one line: an algorithm does not paint because it cannot bear to exist, nor does it exist because it fears death, nor does it compose because someone...
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Art that no human would see
Why art between machines is a theoretical problem rather than a technical one. Suppose a system that generates forms and another that evaluates them, transforms them and returns something, and so on in a closed loop, without any human observing, neither before, during, nor after. Would there be art in that? The question appears to be one of science…
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Data fabrication
When the surplus lies not in the output, but in the substrate. In the preceding text, I argued that the artist working with massive datasets does not produce the content nor execute the form: they modulate. They determine the threshold, the friction, the taxonomy, the rule. The work was an operation upon an external flow…
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What the artist does when they no longer make the work
The human surplus in the data-generation-work chain. There is a question that data art renders inevitable, which theory has yet to answer with precision. When the material of the work is a massive dataset that the artist has not produced—telemetry from a particle accelerator, sleep logs,...
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AI art requires no author (nor does it require Gell)
A position regarding the emerging debate. The discourse has been circular for three years; in recent months, it has begun to find a partial resolution. I propose a comprehensive solution. The debate is as follows: who is the author of a work created with artificial intelligence? For three years, the responses…
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Curating that which is never the same twice
The curatorial problem of generative art. A gesture defines the profession of the curator: deciding what is hung, where, under what light, next to what, and for how long. That gesture presupposes something so obvious it is rarely articulated: that an object exists. A thing that is there, identical to itself, and which…
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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...