The film camera could take you to any place, any time, real or imagined. Whether you call cinema a time machine, a teleportation machine, or an immersion machine, at the core of film’s appeal is its ability to replicate, to simulate, to fabricate the experience of actuality, the feeling that you are there. Every trick in the language of cinema —... See more

The early Lumière films, academically termed “actualities,” weren’t so much a precursor to documentaries as a manifestation of the raw, foundational nature of cinema: Movement in time — presence, life, actuality — captured and then played back.

Just as manipulating actuality is the soul of cinema, playing with subjectivity is the soul of AI as an artistic medium.

AI is a machine that captures and projects subjectivities, a “noematograph.”

a medium cannot succeed by imitating existing mediums; it must invent its own language, evolve its own genres, discover the kind of stories that only it can tell.

The question that matters here isn’t “Which translation is most accurate?” but “Taken together, do these translations make the poem more interesting?” And the answer to that is a resounding yes.

All meaning-making requires subjectivity, not just translation. Every reader must first inundate a text with their subjectivity before meaning can be extracted

Of the many possible translations derivable from a single text, the classicist Emily Wilson had this to say: “The real question for a translator isn’t do you want to tell the truth or do you want to lie ... it’s which truths to tell. There are many true facts about any original text, not all of which could ever be conveyed in another language.”