Severin Matusek

What kind of memetic monsters evolve in a primordial stew made of fractalized identities, multipolar geopolitics and viral media? Conspiracy theories, of course.

Spawning is different. Instead of lifting fragments, you train a model on an artist’s entire body of work and generate new material in their style. Clear lineage, but fuzzy origins. Sampling dealt in citation. Spawning touches the DNA. This distinction matters because spawning raises the stakes in ways that sampling never did. When your work trains... See more

If everyone can cheat their way to mastery, wealth, or beauty, they will see it as a giant permission slip to create new ways of finding meaning.

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

“It seems like Gen Z is getting really tired of presentation culture, as you might call it,” Zeke, a 21-year-old biologist and frequent Discord chatter, told me. “The idea that everything you do has to be a representation of your personal identity.”

Participation. The token gives me permission to participate in the project and/or its culture, in whatever way that may be defined.