Severin Matusek

While recent albums from Dua Lipa, Grande and Lorde treated self-care and introspection as a kind of therapeutic salvation, Charli shifted hard into goblin mode, unfurling a litany of barely euphemistic drug references and proudly owning her messiest contradictions. (

So a lot of the scenarios in my projects that seem to hinge ludicrously across dystopia and utopia—another set of unproductive binaries we’ve created—are actually machine-generated.

“How do you exhibit that? Does that create a new economy for artists? Does that require new governance structures between the institution and the artists exhibiting that work? How do we show people how exciting this is?”

In 2023, we launched an editorial series about AI called Shades of Intelligence. We learnt a lot about the way creatives were beginning to work with this new tech, harnessing it for tasks ranging from creative direction to project rollout. Since then, the needs have shifted. After two years of rapid change, Light and Shade focuses on the wider... See more

This is a chance to bring warmth and fun into an increasingly lonely and isolated world.

Maybe there isn’t much we can do about legislation or swaying big tech shareholder decisions, but there’s a lot of fun to be had on the feed. The feed is not safe, but posting has not been taken away from us yet.

The thousand true fans thesis builds on the original ideals of the internet: users and creators globally connected, unconstrained by intermediaries, sharing ideas and economic upside. Incumbent social media platforms sidetracked this vision by locking creators into a bundle of distribution and monetization. There are, correspondingly, two ways to... See more

As cultural researcher Victoria Buchanan points out, perhaps this is reflective of the much larger shift in the “junk-ification of our information.