nicolas cevallos

The creative recession is fueled both by diminishing demand for creative work as well as diminishing the margins that once made that work viable. The distance between creation and consumption has been compressed: discovery is automated, and the legacy hallmark of creatives, producing difference,

To see what’s really there in an enchanted world, you need to see beyond or through the surface. You need to discover what’s hidden, what’s concealed, by the merely material form, and that requires something more than sensory perception. It requires extrasensory perception. In this framing, the contemplative gaze is not just unlocking what lies... See more

In “Against Interpretation,” the 1964 essay that made her name as a critic, Susan Sontag railed against the digging of “meanings” out of works of art. She felt that interpretation, by turning art into “content” that can be parsed intellectually, drains it of its wild, unruly vitality, makes it “manageable, conformable.” Interpretation “is the... See more

Challenge is to capture the mood while it’s happening. To be able to get something to resonate with the the vibe of the moment, we should look at contradictions, inversions, oddities, and coincidences in our culture, economy, and society.

Brooklyn-based art collective MSCHF describes this phenomenon:

"No one talks about the future anymore. Instead, everything accelerates the present to a fever pitch, intensifying and weirding the dysfunctions of the current moment. There’s a hole where the future used to be, and all that remains is the increasingly spicy present."

Every day an internet ad shows me a way that A.I. can predict my lecture, transcribe my lecture while a student presumably does something other than listen, annotate the lecture, anticipate essay prompts, research questions, test questions and then, finally, write an assigned paper. How can professors out-teach an exponentially generative... See more

The problem is that asking the right questions requires the opposite of having zero education. You can’t just learn how to craft a prompt for an A.I. chatbot without first having the experience, exposure and, yes, education to know what the heck you are doing. The reality — and the science — is clear that learning is a messy, nonlinear human... See more

In the 1990s or 2000s someone created a social network designed to make it possible to tell that you were about to take a flight with someone with whom you have something in common. The idea was you could reach out to them and spend flight time in conversation with someone who might become a friend or at least a useful contact.

And it starts with a simple truth: To invent the future, you have to subvert the present. And the present is shaped by an invisible force few are trained to see: the monoculture.