july

creating and destroying; built flying cars & autonomous vehicles, now building /faust, more here: /july, web: july.rocks

Can you share more about why you prefer human to AI curation?

I think more because great curation is an art. And as Walter Benjamin in the “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility” points out - the artistic aura of a work of art matters, the context of the locale and culture it is embedded into matters. The time and space in which it exists matters. 

It really means that the directness of the experience matters. Somewhere even the knowledge of owning an original painting knowing the artist painted it versus it was produced mechanically in a repetitive manner changes the mood of how one feels towards the work

creating and destroying; built flying cars & autonomous vehicles, now building roc.camera, writings: july.rocks

Meaningful means that the creator understood the assignment - got a sense for the context of the culture, the relationship and made the thing in that context. The object alone would be thrusting a copy into a foreign context that didn’t understand the context. The full context, and that is in a way worth its weight in gold 

I think technically the work that was once art today, tomorrow or in the future will become reproducible. But at that point the context and the future will have a different culture and provide different places to embed that work of art into. So I don’t worry about art ever not existing.

I feel like this is going to matter even more in the age of AI, being thoughtful and making things that matter both intrinsically and contextually (locale and culture) - I am optimistic about things that have “aura” as Benjamin puts it - having a renaissance

Why is it that — when I receive a handwritten letter - it is somehow is much more meaningful than receiving an email with the exact same message. The fact that someone used their time for me, is amazing. Not that one is better than the other, just different context and different understanding of the locale that the work was embedded into

it’s entirely possible that some folks around here don’t realize that people go to school to study curating, it’s a vocation adjacent and not dissimilar to artistic production itself. usually that means expertise in assembling and displaying artworks in a physical gallery but can also extend to monographs, catalogue raisonné, all sorts of publications.

so, imo makes sense to prefer this type of curation in the same way that you would likely buy a painting by a human painter vs. making something on Midjourney to hang on your wall.

A huge part for me is the emotional and tactile or general sensual experience that adds to the cultural or intellectual experience and that is often very different from person to person. It can only be emulated or simulated by an AI.