there are 4 posts from March 2024
r.i.p. richard serra
Richard Serra died this week. Coverage: Artsy, Artnet, NYT (Kimmelman), NYT (Smith).
Here’s Kimmelman on experiencing Serra’s “elliptical mazes of twisted Cor-Ten steel.”
I always found them to be serious fun. They concentrate the mind, stirring fear and anticipation, changing inch by inch, step by step. Serra magically transforms folded, tilting walls of rolled steel into what can almost resemble planes of melted wax. Passages, like caves or canyons, narrow and looming, suddenly open onto clearings.
Google Photos is getting pretty good – here’s a screenshot of the first bit of search results from all the Serras I’ve snapped over the years…
The experience of disappearing into his mazes turned Serra’s sculptures into something remarkably human, almost in spite of their materials, their scale. This short piece from SFMOMA about the installation of his piece Sequence is a great reminder of how Serra’s sculptures bumped up against notions of time, decay, civic infrastructure, personal boundaries and visual perception.
Three things of sporting note: death, machinery, words.
Iditarod musher Dallas Seavey kills moose to protect his dogs during race.
According to Iditarod Rule 34, if an edible big game animal — like a moose, caribou or buffalo — is killed in defense of life or property, the musher is required to gut the animal and report it to race officials at the next checkpoint. Mushers who follow must help gut the animal when possible and no teams may pass until the animal is gutted and the musher gutting the animal has proceeded.
Behind F1’s Velvet Curtain. Linked everywhere, because it was unceremoniously unpublished from Road & Track’s website, but obviously worth reading. (Version linked here is my highlighted read on Readwise.)
When we got into the garage, Lewis’s car was naked, its insides visible for all to see. I think this was the moment where my respect for the sport as it exists really made itself clear. It is hard to describe what I felt looking at that car. The closest phrase I have at my disposal is the technological sublime. I pictured a living, breathing animal of extraterrestrial origin, hooked up to a thousand arcane sensors that delivered messages in little pulses. All the tubes and sculpted carbon-fiber parts and the endless net of wires all working in service to the godhead engine, formed something totally incomprehensible to me, a feat of engineering so vast it breached the realm of magic.
The Tournament of Books Play-in Match. The Auburn Conference v. The Bee Sting v. The Librarianist.
As is well known, the Tournament of Books is an elaborate prank played on those who think they are capable of making aesthetic judgements.
Didn’t have this on my 2024 bingo card: Taylor Swift Beau Travis Kelce Will Help Finance a Basquiat Documentary.
WITI: The Saddle Stitch Edition. I loved the Hermès episode of Acquired; Why is this Interesting digs into the saddle stitch. “The craft and process is antithetical to mass-produced goods and is a good representation of what actual luxury is: based on effort, rare, and made to last.”
Via The Browser, this 13 year old, 3200 word piece on the Pilot Precise V5 Rolling Ball Extra Fine.
We care about what our words look like because we somewhere believe that this says something about who we are beyond font or scrawl. We think we can detect gender and personality, childhood traumas, future ambitions deep-seated hang-ups, sophistication and intelligence from the way a person’s hand puts ink to paper.
Greg.org on Richard Prince’s photographs of Milton Berle’s file cabinets of jokes:
When I first saw these images, I figured that their elongated, portrait-style dimensions reflected a decade of Prince using an iPhone as a studio. But they also simultaneously read as landscapes, with joke mesas extending to a cropped out horizon, a western desert begging for a cowboy. Then I saw the file cabinets, and realized these images also map to their subject, and the experience of living with these physical objects made over decades from words, ideas and language.
While I think the headline of the piece is overblown, John Herrman gets to the heart of the challenges Google and OpenAI are facing with LLM personification:
With Gemini, incredibly, Google assigned itself a literal voice, spoken by a leader-employee-assistant-naïf character pulled in so many different directions that it doesn’t act like a human at all and whose core competency is generating infinite grievances in users who were already skeptical of the company, if not outright hostile to it.
Herrman doesn’t use the word “personification” in his piece, but I just keep coming back to that word when I think about the personalities of LLMs. (A reminder from Wikipedia: “Personification is the representation of a thing or abstraction as a person.”)
Herrman, without explicitly naming it, gets to an interesting “jobs to be done” framing of what users are hiring Chat GPT or Gemini to do, vs how the narrower “job” that users are hiring specialized AI applications or even Custom GPTs for makes the personification problem easier.
Specialized AI represents real products and an aggregate situation in which questions about AI bias, training data, and ideology at least feel less salient to customers and users. The “characters” performed by scoped, purpose-built AI are performing joblike roles with employeelike personae. They don’t need to have an opinion on Hitler or Elon Musk because the customers aren’t looking for one, and the bosses won’t let it have one, and that makes perfect sense to everyone in the contexts in which they’re being deployed. They’re expected to be careful about what they say and to avoid subjects that aren’t germane to the task for which they’ve been “hired.” In contrast, general-purpose public chatbots like ChatGPT and Gemini are practically begging to be asked about Hitler. After all, they’re open text boxes on the internet.