Petervan Delicacies #182
Nov 2025 - Jan 2026
“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, or 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.
The very best
The abolition of friction is the abolition of life itself. Great essay by Matt Klein and Ruby Justice Thelot.
“Overcoming barriers is the point. Not eliminating them.
Today, the perfect experience, based on the logic of seamlessness, is one where we are alone and speaking to a digital mirror. Hyper-convenience where everyone atomized in their self-driving cars is no society.
Because to crash is to be alive, it is to be human.”
Chia Amisola describes her practice as involving relations between ambience (condition/enclosure), agency (action), and apparition (traces/aftermaths). There is also a link to a more detailed articulation of what she calls ambience. Here is a quote about agency (my highlights):
Agency as in a capacity to act, misbehave, be redirected; the distributed / networked / infrastructural forms of agency and belief that exist across system / decentering agency, exploring autonomous components and the emergence that might arise form agency; a polyphonic form of meaning-making; as in misdirection, surprise, subversion, deception, scamming; lagging/glitching/leaking/clicking/reading; as in my density
About stopping to cut corners. Great essay as inspiration for whatever you do in the new year
“Even when the work becomes difficult, that difficulty takes on a different meaning. You begin to see it as something that advances the work rather than challenges its legitimacy. From that perspective, the struggle stops being a signal to stop and becomes part of the process itself.”
Innovation
About creating a new category or being a category follower - discovered via Simon Wardley (obviously, as Stijn and Bert are preaching the Wardley Maps Gospel ;-)
AI, Robots, Algorithms
About the European air defence simulator. Via Jan Chipchase
Bruce Schneier about humans as a security feature
“I have long maintained that smart contracts are a dumb idea: that a human process is actually a security feature.”
Oh man, this is so good: the ultimate guidance for studio critique
And one more from Michael Wagner
“What has collapsed is not reality itself but our unreflective confidence in our ability to perceive it directly.”
A deep reflection about agentic machines stopping being external forces. By Reuven Cohen.
“Once machines participate in stability, designers can no longer pretend they are neutral. Timing, restraint, and refusal become ethical design choices, not technical quirks. That discomfort is not fear of sentience. It is recognition that we are building systems that sit closer to life than we are used to admitting.”
Art related
About Luc Tuymans’ insights into making individual paintings, or paintings that are part of a narrative
“And what struck me was that after the show is done, and the works are sold and scattered, this vital structure disappears forever. The paintings are set adrift, left on their own.”
“Most of all, in the current poetic environment, ethics are in flux, they are a sea of possibilities that the acute operator swims in. One can learn to swim, to navigate, but the currents are ever changing and the rocks are dangerous. Today’s ethics are tomorrows clichés, laughing stock and soon boardroom tragedy. Tomorrow’s ethics sprout from the meetings, ideas and inspirations of those who are open to them. There are no inherent ethical structures and guidelines—just look to nature—the rules are that there are no rules.”
Dance by Ballet BC Vancouver
Music/Sound/Film
Once more, David Claerbout about his work.
And I asked ChatGPT to take the auto-transcript of this video, clean it up, and make a fluent text out of it. Here is a sentence from that GPT-text:
“I’ve always been fascinated by what happens when you let go of narrative film—when you let go of talkies, psychological realism, and story, and instead go with time, with duration, with the flicker of the images. Could I make a very minimalist film where I use the least possible narrative and still generate narrative inside the heads of the visitors?”
A deep dive into the kick - by Bahadırhan Koçer - this is very well done - use headphones to fully enjoy
More David Byrne
Books/Publications
The question remains: what separates lived experience from clever, automated execution? Scientific paper on what differentiates human consciousness. In other words, what makes us human. Via Mickey McManus.
“we argue that current digital systems fundamentally diverge from evolved, biological systems in two key ways that are core to computation in biological systems, and that these divergences may help explain why artificial consciousness, with AI’s current trajectory, would remain unrealised”
Recap
A recap of some of my posts of the last couple of weeks:
The Weak Image Speaks: an AI treatment of David Claerbout’s talks
Airplanes are like Perfect Arrows of Time: transcript of David Claerbout’s latest talk in Nanjing.
We are all Argonauts again: down the rabbithole of Designed Conspiracy
Smile
Safe executive language translations. By the author.
“Regarding your last question, R.U., there’s no way, as I’ve been saying, that any “computer simulation” can hold a candle to the physical world. At least not in the current meaning of the word “computer,” which is some chips in a box. That’s no match for a trillion galaxies of physical matter! Why be stingy? The universe has a big budget! It’s a rich world, and we’re lucky to live it in, even if it’s only for a little while. But we’ll always have last year.”
