“Delicacies” is my incoherent, irregular, unpredictable collection of interesting sparks I came across online. Handpicked by a human, no robots, no AI. A form of tripping, wandering, dérivé, with some loosely undefined theme holding them together. Delicacies have no fixed frequency: I hit the publish button when there is enough material. That can be after a week, or after 3 months. No pressure, literally.
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The very best
About Universal Basic Agency - by Matt Webb
“So rather than Universal Basic Income we should pursue Universal Basic Agency.”
About “The Great Flattening” and why the Apple ad DID hit the mark for 100%. Excellent insight by Ben Thompson
About the prelude to an unprecedented digital exodus. Great post by Alberto Romero
“Now the real world is the escape. It’s where we go to find calm.”
Data & Society
“The Hexagonal Hive – which premieres at Sheffield DocFest on June 13th – has the floating, freewheeling atmosphere of a dream. It collects ideas about neuroscience, education and the world of work, and creates a sensory collage that includes footage from Scotland, Bangladesh and west Africa, gnomic captions such as: “What a machine the world is – how to work its gears?””
Innovation
“I can’t do this anymore” about the pace of the Internet. By
“What if people started to produce content when they had actually something to say, rather than coming up with something to say in order to fill another slot?”
FinTech, crypto and other distortions
Andrew Hessel minted a synthetic organism and is ambitious to create a market for organisms and biocreators.
“To summarize, the fusion of synthetic genomics and NFTs represents a potentially transformative leap for the bioeconomy, offering enhanced economic opportunities, accelerated R&D, streamlined intellectual property management, new revenue models for biocreators, and strengthened biosecurity. By embracing this innovative approach, we pave the way for a more dynamic and secure future in synthetic biology.”
AI, Robots, Algorithms
About Microsoft’s AI Recall feature. Gary Marcus is deeply disappointed
AI didn’t *have* to go down such a shitty path of enabling and accelerating surveillance capitalism, misinformation, nonconsensual deepfake porn, IP theft, etc.
It could have focused its energies more on science, education and medicine (hats off to Demis Hassabis and others for still pursuing that dream).
But the science has been corrupted by money.
Another great post by Matt Webb. This time he takes inspiration from Muybridge's camera principle and applies it to text. The whole reasoning reminds me of Gordon Pask’s entailment meshes from the 60ies.
Physical Reality
About The Kaiserpanorama. The device was made in 1905 and was then a modern machine, an 'automaton', intended to bring a photographic spectacle in 3D to a mass audience. 25 people can sit on the stools around the viewing box at the same time to enjoy the magic of three-dimensional images.
Superior Reality
Ana Brzezińska is the curator of the Tribeca Immersive 2024. No more VR/AR show but about immersive spaces. Very well written, so enjoyable. Via Kent Bye.
“I believe that before we start seeking hope — which I expect to become a major theme in many upcoming art events — we need space for reflection and respite that allows for a radical suspension of judgment.”
New New Babylon
One of my inspirations for the New New Babylon: with David Sim, architect Jan Gehl dedicated his life to Urban Planning: first life, then spaces, then buildings.
Art related
The world lost a giant: Frank Stella dies aged 87
The Artist’s Playbook: the practices of Bethel professor Kenneth Steinbach
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fb8e8a579-0719-4e4a-a12d-af36385a07d1_700x1074.jpeg)
Good overview of the text-to-video capabilities of LUMA. By Merzmench.
Aesthetics
Christopher Butler is keeping a visual journal. On paper. They are beautiful.
Music/Sound/Dance
About Walter Murch from Acopalyps Now
So the weakness of present-day cinema is paradoxically its strength of representation: it doesn’t automatically possess the built-in escape valves of ambiguity that painting, music, literature, black-and-white silent film, and radio have simply by virtue of their sensory incompleteness—an incompleteness that automatically engages the imagination of the viewer/listener as compensation for what can only be suggested by the artist. In film, therefore, we go to considerable lengths to achieve what comes naturally to radio and the other arts: the space to evoke and inspire, rather than to overwhelm and crush, the imagination of the audience.
A visit to Brian Eno’s cave and studio
The young piano Andrey Gugnin plays Edvard Grieg, “the figurehead of Norwegian classics, with the clear lines of Scandinavian design, the silent horror of Nordic Noir and the fairytale of age-old fairy tales into shiny sound bubbles.”
Karen Willems is a Flemish drummer. Expressions of vulnerability. In “Terre Sol Foure”, she is “scaffolding” ;-)
Performance
A new Petervan performance lecture “Claim Your Cybernetic Word” is in the making, to be delivered 100% remotely during the 60th anniversary of the American Society for Cybernetics in mid-June 2024.
Books/Publication
I am enjoying this “gnarly” book by Rudy Rucker, a thesis, antithesis, and synthesis of computations. He is more known for his Sci-Fi books, but here he is in the company of Stephen Wolfram and Cellular Automata. From 2005, almost 25 years ago! I always get a smile on my face when I read or hear him.
“What if everything is a computation? Does this mean that the world is dull? Far from it. The naturally occurring computations that surround us are richly complex. A tree's growth, the changes in the weather, the flow of daily news, a person's ever-changing moods — all of these computations share the crucial property of being gnarly. Although lawlike and deterministic, gnarly computations are — and this is a key point — inherently unpredictable. We live, in other words, amid splendor beyond our control. Who would will it otherwise?”
and
“Practically speaking, digital computers have no hope of feasibly emulating the full richness of the physical world in real-time. But we can be consoled by the fact that we already have the world, and it’s already a computation.”
BTW: that 2011 edition of TEDxBrussels was quite a thing! I believe it was curated by Walter De Brouwer and his lovely wife Samia. The anecdote is that I shared offices with Walter around 2000.
Smile
Students with exam stress can pick up a free novena candle with half-naked patron saints in St. Peter's Abbey in Ghent. The translation of the domain name reads “heavenly assistance”. Only in Belgium