On breaking the algorithm's picture of you
Once the algorithm knows you, how do you break its picture of you? How do you meet the things that might interest a future version of you, instead of feeding the one you already are?
Open tabs.
What I am reading, watching and find myself interested in. If you are thinking about any of the same things, or you have something I should read, please send it over!
Click any tab or subject to open it. Drag to rearrange.
The threads cross because the interests do. Every tab is also in the plain list below.
01 · Visibility and erasure
Who gets rendered and who gets left out, and why that is usually a procedure rather than a decision.
Absence
Han asks why we are exhausted by so much freedom. I keep circling a version of the same shape. Why do we feel so unseen while being so surveilled? And why does being unseen feel offensive?
Alongside Conditional
Imprints of a city
Psychogeography says the city presses itself onto you. Reversed, the systems in a city take an imprint of you without asking. Mendieta pressed her body against glass and photographed what the pressure did. The imprint is shaped by the force, not the body.
Face embeddings, run backwards
A face embeds as a list of numbers, a fingerprint rather than a photo. So running the numbers in reverse should grow a face close to yours. This is the third time it has come back, so I have started building it.
Alongside Conditional
My Little Piece of Privacy
A curtain that follows people as they pass, so the act of hiding is what draws the eye.
The AI Doc, or How I Became an Apocaloptimist
I liked the ending, which lands on agency and on being able to do something about the dread rather than only holding it.
02 · Memory and fabrication
The composite self, built from other people's images and other people's accounts of you.
Stranger Visions
Portraits grown from DNA left behind on the street. A face assembled from someone without their knowing.
03 · Attention without recognition
Being detected is not the same as being known. Machines that orient toward you without seeing you.
Can't Help Myself
A machine that cannot stop containing itself.
Robots that turn toward you
Small machines that orient toward the nearest warm body. The attention is real and the recognition is hollow. Being witnessed without being known.
Alongside Conditional
04 · Image systems
How pictures are made, who they serve, and the decade I spent inside the machine that makes them.
Humanæ
Skin matched to a Pantone chip, one person at a time.
On putting work out before it is ready
oh the agony of putting out imperfect work into the world, but if i never put it out, i can never improve from it
On only having large ideas
Every idea I have arrives ambitious and large-scale, and it means I make fewer things. I would like to be able to make small ones.
05 · Sentience beyond the human
Plants, animals, and the possibility that awareness was never ours alone. Also how differently other things hold time.
Greenland sharks, and how a bird moves when you slow it down
A bird pecking looks random until you slow it down, and then it looks thoughtful. Plants look like they are dancing when you speed them up. Greenland sharks process time slowly in the deep cold and live a long while, so a long life must feel even longer to them.
An awe piece, not a guilt piece
If people can feel awe at the possibility that a plant is aware, that changes the relationship to the world more than guilt does. I do not know yet what it looks like.
Recognise any of this? If you have a book, a work, or a thread I should be reading, send it over. I read everything that arrives.