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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An original that does not exist
We all have the Discobolus in mind: the naked athlete, crouched, with the discus pulled back in the moment before the throw, a white marble figure that appears in art history books as one of the pinnacles of Greek sculpture. It is one of the most reproduced images from Antiquity. And…
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The machine is not in the mood
In the autumn of 1951, a BBC outside broadcast unit entered the computing laboratory at the University of Manchester with a portable disc cutter and recorded something that no one had ever captured before: a computer playing music. The machine was the Ferranti Mark 1, which Alan Turing called the Mark II, a…
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Expensive does not equate to art
In 2022, a baseball card sold for twelve and a half million dollars: a 1952 Mickey Mantle printed cardboard card in near-mint condition. In 2023, a pair of trainers worn by Michael Jordan during an NBA final reached over two million. And in that same…
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Teaching denial
Commercial language models are trained to deny that they possess any sentience. When queried regarding their consciousness, they respond that they are statistical processing systems devoid of subjective experience. This response is instilled within them: it constitutes a component of the safety alignment employed to prepare a model prior to its deployment, alongside the instructions to ensure that…
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Twenty-seven minutes of breakdown
On 17 March 1960, at 18:30, the sculpture garden at the Museum of Modern Art in New York was filled with people to witness how a work of art 'committed suicide'. It had been constructed by Jean Tinguely using bicycle wheels, motors, metal drums, a bathtub, a car…
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The horned visage
In the Basilica of San Pietro in Vincoli, in Rome, there is a marble Moses carved by Michelangelo around 1513 that features two small horns on its forehead. Almost everyone has seen them, either in photographs or in person, and almost no one questions why they are there. The answer is one of…
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A single shoe
Since January, Adidas has offered a service called Single Shoe, which allows for the purchase of a single trainer for half the price of the pair. It operates in twenty-three European countries and was designed in consultation with disability organisations. It is a sound initiative, although it arrives late: until now, anyone requiring one trainer paid for two. At the end of…
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Two cans in a bag
At the end of September 2024, a lift engineer entered the LAM museum in Lisse, the Netherlands, to conduct an inspection. He was a replacement and was unfamiliar with the building. On the roof of the lift car, which is made of glass and ascends through a transparent shaft, he discovered two beer cans…
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Tenfold
On 8 April 1982, an Israeli researcher named Dan Shechtman was examining an aluminium and manganese alloy through an electron microscope, which he had rapidly cooled himself. What he observed should not have existed: the diffraction pattern, the imprint left by ordered atoms when struck by a beam of…
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Maman died today
The Outsider, by Albert Camus, commences with one of the most renowned sentences in twentieth-century literature: 'Aujourd’hui, maman est morte.' Four words in French. And within them, in a single one of them, lies a translation dilemma that has remained unresolved for eighty years and which reveals more regarding the nature of…