Nina Goodheart

Lists of destroyed buildings posted by the L.A. Conservancy and USModernist offer a ghost map of a past that extends far beyond living memory.

Any griever, or any student of history, knows that relationships don’t end neatly with death; memories, imaginings, questions and answers continue to churn in the minds of the living, aided by artefacts and shared community. The secular space where we allow this reality to flourish is the arts.

Arnold Aronson blames it all on the introduction of the chair to the stage. Once you put a chair on the stage, we sit down and have a chat. You know, “Mrs. Tesman, let’s have a little chat.”

I think in the geography of our lives there are these blank or foggy spaces, little absences left behind from the people that have moved in and out of our lives. I think of parks, and imprints left behind by people in grass; footprints, or the long flat indents left over by bodies when they’re sprawled out on the ground. When a person stands up... See more

That is, they understand the purpose of chatbots and generative models to be the ability to force other people to see a particular version of reality. It is a tool of power that masquerades as a tool of knowledge.