why curation...

While social platforms are proving effective at pressure testing and gauging the customer response for new ideas, sometimes the general public isn’t the best curator for what’s next. It’s not just about the critical mass (how many people like something), it’s also about the credible mass ( who likes something). As algorithms mature, I suspect... See more

This begs the question: What might it mean to reimagine the form of these datasets in a world unconstrained by pressures like speed, scale, and universality? By looking to artists like Anna Ridler and others for their rejection of “off-the-shelf” datasets, we can imagine what it would be like to curate datasets with much deeper intention and... See more

You can use algorithms to surface new things. But algorithms are not nearly as good as human curators yet. Whatever pattern matching is going on inside the mind of Werner Herzog when he recommends books and films is yet superior to YouTube’s recommendation engine. Going from Herzog to Kapuściński and from Kapuściński to Mandelstam and Mandelstam to... See more

we’ve always been influenced in what we find beautiful or valuable or important, of course, but what’s new is the speed at which one is inundated with things to desire, to value, to find beautiful.