nicolas cevallos

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 predictio... 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 develo... 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.

But even in this era, patronage was conditional. Artists served the ideological aims of those who paid. The church demanded piety. The state demanded civic glory. The Medici demanded immortality. As a model, patronship has always involved a tension between creative expression and institutional ambition. The artist received funding but also instruct... See more

We discussed it a year ago: the internet isn't eternal. 38% of web pages from 2013 are now inaccessible. Consequently, 54% of Wikipedia pages contain at least one reference link pointing to non-existent pages.

“But museums also choose what to display, what to let rest in the dark, and what to reveal again under new light.

They’re not mausoleums — they are spaces of loss and rebirth. Alive, even in silence.

We are like that too.

Full of rooms. Piled-up memories. Crookedly hung frames.

Ideas that need to come out of storage.”