Writing

Fifteen Exercises for the Lightning Field

A menu of strategies for moving through a monumental installation in the New Mexico desert, illustrated with an interactive simulation and diagrams of the installation's intricate geometries.
  ·   21 min read

On sprawl and connectedness in notetaking

Manifesto for the value of connectedness in notetaking combined with a tutorial on how to pursue it.
  ·   21 min read

Computer Art with a Human Touch

An exhibition of early computer art shows that artists working with early-stage technologies make their best work by combining old and new techniques.
  ·   Hyperallergic   ·   4 min read

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Optimization

A personal meditation on optimization culture.
  ·   21 min read

Life Story

Illustrated short story about a mother who explores Conway's Game of Life while mourning her daughter's death.
  ·   21 min read

Inventory of Perception

Clive McCarthy's generative painting slows the mechanisms of everyday visual perception and exposes them to conscious attention.
  ·   Squarecylinder   ·   14 min read

I, Robot / You, Robot: Alan Rath and the Choreography of Consciousness

With extreme economy of movement, gesture, and form, Alan Rath conveys the development of consciousness through a choreographed encounter between two robot arms.
  ·   18 min read

Dog's Breakfast

A conversation with gallerist Todd Hosfelt about the frontiers of contemporary drawing.
  ·   Squarecylinder   ·   13 min read

Golems, Masks, and Artificial Intelligence

A conversation with Dr. Suzanne Livingston, curator of the Barbican exhibition "AI: More than Human."
  ·   Artists + Machine Intelligence   ·   9 min read

Grotesque Beauty

Patricia Piccinini's imagined ecology demonstrates an aesthetic sensibility in harmony with radical genetic engineering.
  ·   Squarecylinder   ·   7 min read

Frankenstein's Birthday Party

Grotesquely beautiful objects offer opportunities to practice compassion and disgust.
  ·   Squarecylinder   ·   8 min read

Ragnar Kjartansson's Virtual Reality

A video installation of people making music throughout the rooms of an old house creates a hybrid virtual-physical soundspace which blurs the boundaries between experience and representation.
  ·   Squarecylinder   ·   11 min read

Internet Archaeology

Jeremiah Jenkins memorializes the internet while Jenny Odell remembers the moment when humans became computers.
  ·   Artists + Machine Intelligence   ·   9 min read

Skepticism and Despair in The Infinity Engine

White-coated chemists with shadowed faces fabricate artificial body parts while society debates the promises and dangers of genetic engineering.
  ·   6 min read

Surface Tension

Camille Utterback offers a critique of the universal and transparent digital screen with a collection of glass surfaces whose form is intertwined with the content projected upon them.
  ·   6 min read

I Have No Memory of This Place

Sohei Nishino's visual/spatial memories trouble the apparent truthfulness of maps and photographs.
  ·   7 min read

Culture and Spatial Perception in the Art of teamLab

teamLab's utopian vision for nonhierarchical spatial representation fails to acknowledge the centrality of linear perspective within Western visual culture and perception.
  ·   15 min read

Three Excursions in Artificial Existence

Sympathetic machines by Alan Rath and Paolo Salvagione.
  ·   6 min read

The Death and Life of Dante-Harper Townhomes

Although Theaster Gates' artworks hang in prestigious museums around the world, his most important legacy is the infrastructure he has created to support Black artists on the South Side of Chicago.
  ·   9 min read

A Sunroom of One's Own

Two familiar styles of Chicago dwellings show how changing public perception of the perils of city life shaped domestic architecture over the half-century between 1910 and 1960.
  ·   Grey City   ·   12 min read

Permanence and Program: Farewell to the American Folk Art Museum

The American Folk Art Museum Building contained the seeds of its own destruction.
  ·   6 min read

Light Makes Wright: James Turrell at the Guggenheim

James Turell's intervention at the Guggenheim challenges and accentuates the most radical aspects of Frank Lloyd Wright's design.
  ·   8 min read

Studio Gang's Diagonals Reshape Dorm Life

Studio Gang's proposal for a dormitory at the University of Chicago responds thoughtfully to student and neighborhood needs.
  ·   5 min read

Patient-Centered Design in the Foreground at Viñoly's New Hospital

Spaces of quiet twilight in the middle of a hulking hospital.
  ·   5 min read