Severin Matusek

Held at the Bradbury Building and the historic Hearst Estate, the Imaginative Assemblies used blindfolded deep-listening, tactile modeling, and facilitated dialogue to probe this central question. This process collected 30 hours of audio (18GB), 4,500+ photos (16GB), and 60+ hours of film (6.7TB) across all sessions. The resultant report documents... See more

Unfortunately, advertising has been ingrained into the internet as the basic model for so long and to such an extent that it’s hard to envision online life without the systematic manipulation of attention and all its evils. So we’re bound to wind up here, at the bitter end of “content.” Which is a good excuse to withdraw deeper into books, movies,... See more

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, has been flattened into an infinite scroll of... See more

The ‘90s version of not selling out meant refusing to play certain spaces or not letting your song be in a beer commercial. The ‘20s version of selling out means making things in limited quantities to play against mass culture. Though different, the responses come from a similar place. They’re both sensing a culture where, to quote Claire L. Evans... See more

Has the use of AI tools allowed her to speed through the tedious parts of her work, freeing up time to focus on the more stimulating aspects? “Speed isn’t really the point,” she replies. “That discourse usually comes from people who don’t really use the tools in interesting or meaningful ways. There’s so much clickbait content, like: ‘How I set up... See more

Speculators, in turn, look to charismatic leaders as “social proof” that their risk-taking is warranted, and likely to be rewarded. The ritualism of meme coin culture might be described as what Victor Turner called a kind of “communitas”: a social condition in which individuals, connected by a collective suspension of normative hierarchies, adopt... See more

But I’m into the new kids who are trying to make the internet how they want it, like Zane with Silk. The future has to look like something, after all...