Petervan Delicacies #185
May - July 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
Beyond the Machine: very interesting post by Frank Chimero (from Oct 2025). Made me discover the 7-tape animation based on Brian Eno’s Music for Airports. See also under the section Recap at the end of this newsletter
“In the Rubin vibe arrangement, you’re under the machine and dependent on it. Without skills, the model’s limits become your own, no different from anyone else typing wishes into a text box. Take what the AI gives without question and you’re not producing, you’re consuming. Eventually, that passivity gets used against you. We’ve seen it before: streaming services flattened art into algorithmic averages and background noise, newsfeeds rewired attention toward outrage because engagement meant growth. Each time, the machine attracted us with individual customization while quietly taking control of the terms. The same will happen with AI if used for passive consumption, even if that consumption is dressed up as execution.”
Midjourney is announcing a medical full-body scan and spa centres around the world > via Sentiers
Absolutely massive post by René Walter about the film Backrooms. With a specific focus on Soft Yellow, Mark Fisher and Artificial Paradises in the Labyrinths of Neoliberalism. Very very good
“This is a horror movie about the erasure of wage dependency from collective consciousness through all-encompassing neoliberal ideology and its aesthetic of “forced coziness”, on display in soft yellow painted walls and the shiny happy challenges of a “Work Hard, Play Hard”-culture. The film shows us the terror of the resulting cognitive distortions, internalized guilt and alienations from our dreams.
Backrooms, including its unlikely success story, is itself a portal, to make visible that entrapment, to step outside of it and have a look — and to crack open the possibility of dreaming up unknown, yet unimagined futures.”
Data & Society
About robotic hands - by Brian Roemmele
“The deeper narrative is intelligence through interaction. As one observer noted, dexterity isn’t just finger movement—l it’s adaptive organizational coordination: sensing, timing, force management, and environmental negotiation all in harmony. These hands don’t just execute commands; they provide rich data back to the “brain,” enabling learning in the physical world.”
In the slipstream of Douglas Rushkoff’s “Program of be Programmed”, Chris Perry signals the transition to information mediated by machines. About boxes and nodes.
“In the network, the box becomes a node. A node is a piece of information that a machine can read without guessing. It lives in the connections that carry a story, not the page that once held it. A node is how you surface and interact in the network.
Building for nodes rather than boxes is a new discipline, and it has a name: machine-readable communication. The work starts before a word of copy, in how you structure your information so a machine can read it, hold it, and carry it without distorting it.”
About future scarcity in an AI-driven commodity world. Long complex essay by Alex Imas. Via Hamilton Ray.
“The durable jobs of the future won’t be about monitoring AI systems or prompt engineering. Those are transitional roles in the automated sector. The durable jobs will be in the relational sector, where the human element is the product itself.”
American Being Prosecuted for Wiping His Phone Before Handing It Over to Border Officials - Via Bruce Schneier - more detailed TechCrunch article here.
“I have not seen this before, though I’ve discussed the potential scenario with activists and journalists over the years,” said Sandvik. “I think this case serves as a reminder that authorities may argue you knowingly destroyed data, so it’s better to not have that data on you when you cross certain borders.”
“With a little planning ahead of time, you can always download the data you need once you get to where you’re going,” said Sandvik.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has guides on how to protect your data and security at the U.S. border, and explains what rights you have.
AI, Robots, Algorithms
A good analysis of The Claude Delusion - by Jurgen Gravestein. Also check the interesting comments.
“At the end of the day, the question you have to ask yourself is this: is a chatbot that is trained to behave like a human being actually a human being? Is a simulation of a fruit fly (and yes, that is a real thing) that runs on your laptop the same as an actual fruit fly? The functionalist will tell you: yes, they are. The biological naturalist will tell you that is absurd.”
Mark Pesce calls it the Turing Police
The different levels of how Claude thinks > They call its unconscious a J-space > Great Anthropic research paper “A global workspace in language models” > Via Kevin Kelly
Internet Culture
About AgentWorld, a new research initiative from Antikythera > this will be interesting > call for papers
“Agentworld is a research initiative investigating new frameworks for understanding, modeling, and composing the medium-term future of hybrid human-AI societies.”
Digital Ethics
About the New Presentism Activism: an unusually long post by Douglas Rushkoff with plenty of philosophical anchor points arguing for team human and a rebellion against the effective altruism religion of some major tech companies.
“Becoming human again starts with the absolute refusal to treat the person in front of you as a casualty for a hypothetical tomorrow.”
Virtual Worlds
About a collaboration between Moment Factory and Google Deepmind to solve the challenge of scaling AI video, allowing creators to orchestrate high-fidelity, ultra-crisp AI content across massive architectural canvases. Discover the journey this collaboration opened up for location-based entertainment in this video.
New New Babylon
I have been working on a proposal repitching the New New Babylon project as a City of Play for a major theme park. Did not land, but Moment Factory did something similar for IKEA Montreal.
Art related
About Dries Van Noten’s latest show > stunning beauty
Steve McQueen’s Bass immersive installation (2025 in Schaulager Basel - first version was at Dia’s Beacon in 2024)
Continuation of the “Something Has Dissipated” project. Using Metahuman Creator in Unreal Engine 5.8 and the audio-driven lip-sync feature of Metahuman Animator.
Aesthetics
About Backrooms
Music/Sound/Film
Ishkur's Guide to Electronic Music > amazing! Fully clickable map of electronic music genres. Discovered via the awesome online workshops of Side Brain.
Stretched Madonna: Confessions II 800% time-stretched. It runs 8.5 hours. By Paul Soulellis. Via Greg Allen
Styled Rhythm Generator for Ableton Live 12.4.5 (currently beta) by Side Brain. This is very cool. I can also imagine it as an impressive live DJ performance tool, not “just” a “generator”.
Brainmelt
I am in the rabbit hole of Carl Jung’s Red Book and discovered Radiolara…
Recap
Short trailer for my video installation “Clothesline”. A call for attention to the non-event and slowness.
And then I discovered Tero Parviainen, who created in 2017 an audiovisual primer on generative music, called How Generative Music Works, including this animation of Brian Eno’s “Music for Airports”.
Smile/Cynicism
The Arch is Done. Via Greg Allen.
