Belonging and Understanding Through Context, AI Art, & Modern Art Critique

Also: NFT Time Capsules, Attached Garages, and Positive Masculinity

A common conversation played itself out in a pocket of Twitter this week. A neo-trad account took another swing at modern art.

How can this be art? Sand in buckets falling down? My kid did that in the playground this weekend? And then, more pile-ins by folks documenting a pile of bricks in an art museum. How can this be art?!

And then, all the art people are like: “you were in a museum. just read and ask people to understand.”

This conversation has happened a lot, and what the artists recommend is true, but it’s also somewhat missing the forest for the trees. We’re living in a world where context and complexity inexorably rises like entropy.

The full context is so massive that to truly understand it is so much more than what’s present in front of you, what’s said on the card, and what an expert tries to share about the artwork.

As complexity and resulting niche has increased in society, we’ve experienced more more context gain AND context loss. Context gained for some is also confusion and context loss for others.

When there’s more history and context necessary to “get it”, the response and feeling can be more acute and meaningful. A man in the museum can have a euphoric reaction to the falling sand because he understood the context. But, to get there, requires a long history of context shifts: being interested in art, knowing the artist, knowing the movement, knowing the scenes, knowing the works, etc. It’s deep context and thus deep connection.

Another variation where this sometimes happens, is niche music scenes/genres.

Take Deafheaven’s Dream House:

You could’ve gotten to this sound and found it euphoric by traversing through black metal, shoegaze, post-rock, and even ambient music. But, giving this track to someone who hasn’t traversed any of these genres and they would be turned off by the wall of sound. If I meet someone who loves Deafheaven, we immediately connect.

Thus, when we have increases in complexity and niche-ness, we see deeper connections at the edges. BUT, we also see another trend play out: a push back and desire towards a time where context diving was more shallow and thus more people understood it. This is neo-trad. But, it also manifests more subtly and a bit less worrisome: we just gravitate towards big culture. MCU, Taylor Swift, Soccer.

Inside all of us is a desire to feel like we belong (shallow context + broad understanding), but we also have a desire to be understood (deep context + niche). What matters to each person: whether they want to belong or be understood, differs.

To me, belonging and understanding is a venn diagram. They are both premised on the desire to connect without discussion. However:

Belonging is a group desire for a less uncertain future. It’s forward looking and about one’s affiliation to a group and the ease and comfort it brings when we share similarities.

Understanding is an individual desire to have one’s past be known. It’s backwards looking and it’s about sharing a past with specific people. It’s about feelings and lived experiences and the inability for language to convey them.

We’re already living in a world of context acceleration, and with AI Art, it’s just going to increase.

With the MCU dabbling in AI Art for its latest series (Secret Invasion), I get why there’s pushback.

As I’ve said a few times before (and I actually enjoy hammering away at this point every time I have, sorry), AI Art isn’t an order of magnitude “new” in this sense. Mass distribution and context complexity already ensured that that train left the station a long time ago. Context is everything and there’s lot of everything now.

The fear feels like it is currently placed at the wrong axis. There’s a fear that AI Art will become what we enjoy to belong. A fear that it will replace big culture: to a new MCU without a cohort of creators involved in making it happen.

But, what’s far more likely, is that because it’s so much easier to express oneself through AI Art, that it will be used to express ever increasing niche desires to be understood. A form of expression to allow people to connect with others that have shared the same past.

This might seem paradoxical to previous points I’ve made: that AI Art will result in big media becoming even bigger. As we’ve seen with variations of Harry Potter and Wes Andersonification, it’s because people have a shared past of engaging with this media. And the result of what they create/remix is niche to their cohort. Fan fiction is this already. It’s just more fan fiction of everything, putting themselves (emotionally and actually, sometimes, physically) into it.

Another example of this that I enjoy is matsysdesign that explores unique architecture and the context of space/texture. A niche exploration of design.

There’s millions and millions of AI art being generated, but only a handful really permeates the mainstream.

The question of ensuring artists get paid is still an important issue, but for the sake of this newsletter, I wanted to hammer away that AI Art isn’t *that* new based on what we already have: context complexity with mass distribution. More people will be confused, but paradoxically, there’s a lot of understanding at the end of it, too.

It’s obviously a bit scary. Going forward means likely more context, and that will create more confusion alongside deeper connections. Going backwards can make you fall into the belief that the only things that are supposed to be beautiful is a marble statue from Ancient Greece. We don’t have to go backwards. It’s not the tools that define the work.

PS: Matt’s recent article shared a lot of similar thinking surrounding our current era of mass distribution + the algorithm. Well worth reading: The Person Who Listens to Everything: Notes on Sonic Tyranny and the Vibification of the Future.

It is to seek solidarity without similarity. It is something that so many go looking for online and off. It is what you hope to get from a good mix CD or a good club night. After all, there is surely some strained crossover between the aux-cord tyrant and the respected DJ, even though their contexts may differ wildly. As a point of curation and subjection, there is power to be found in affirming the culturally minor against the homogeneity of your infinitely generated chilled-beats playlist.

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Bonus Content!

3 Body Problem Teaser

I *really* enjoyed the book trilogy. One of my favourite book series in a long while. Even though I’m aware of the Chinese TV adaptations (which I hadn’t watched), I’m optimistic about this. The Game of Thrones showrunners were really impeccable when they had source material to work with (and it’s all already written).

Have you read it? Are you excited for this adaptation?

Why Rabbits?

I really enjoyed this article from

Noah Smith

, talking about his love for rabbits and particularly, Cinnamon, who passed away. What’s striking is how he weaves it into his political ideology.

A number of my blog readers have been asking me to lay out my broad moral framework. Usually I resist this impulse. As David Hume wrote, humans decide on right and wrong based on a confusing and often mutually contradictory jumble of moral instincts, and attempts to fit those instincts into a rigid, internally consistent moral code are generally an exercise in futility. But if I do have one consistent, bedrock principle about the way the world ought to work, it’s this — the strong should protect and uplift the weak.

In addition to our natural endowments of power, we must gather to ourselves what additional power we can, and use it to protect and uplift those who have less of it. To some, that means helping the poor; to others, fighting for democracy or civil rights; to others, it simply means taking good care of their kids, or of a pet rabbit. But always, it means rolling the stone uphill, opposing the natural hierarchies of the world, fighting to reify an imaginary world where the strong exercise no dominion over the weak.

RIP Cinnamon.

Rwanda and Singapore

It’s been interesting to watch the rise of Rwanda in the past few years. I think the comparisons to Singapore is apt: a somewhat cult of personality around a leader with questionable restrictions of certain liberties, but still has yet ushered in an economic boom amid ethnic tensions. There’s some overlap and this video gives a good overview of the successes and challenges that Rwanda will face.

I hope to visit one day. I’ve been in Tanzania and Kenya nearby, but not yet to Rwanda.

Lightning Detection

Have you ever looked at lightning detection maps and wondered how they actually detect them?

No? Just me? Well, here’s an interesting brief overview from NOAA anyway. Enjoy! 😅

Teens Stealing NFTs to Buy Roblox Skins

This is pretty cyberpunk: a headline that would not have made any sense 10 years ago.

So much about this is very WTF.

“95% of them are kids below the age of 18 and they’re still in high school,” said a pseudonymous security researcher known as Plum, who works on the trust and safety team at NFT marketplace OpenSea, adding that this is why the number of attacks tends to increase during the Summer holidays.

You know, I’m never really one to say “kids these days”, but this is wild.

“They'll buy a laptop, some phones, shoes and spend vast amounts of money on Roblox. They all play Roblox for the most part. So they'll buy the coolest gear for their Roblox avatar, video games, skins and things like that,” said Plum.

Plum added that they often also buy gift cards with crypto on gift card marketplace Bitrefill, spend thousands of dollars on Uber Eats, buy designer clothes, pay people to do their homework for them and even buy cars that they can’t drive yet. And they also gamble. 

“They’ll bet $40,000 a pop on an online poker game and stream it to all the other hitters in a Discord call. Everyone will watch this person play this poker game,” they said.

Stay safe out there.

Attached Garages

You know, there’s a lot about urbanism that I feel passionate about. But, I haven’t thought deeply about attached garages. But this rant felt cathartic to read, if only for its passion.

Thoughts on attached garages? 😅

2053 NFT Time Capsule

I LOVE it when crypto projects play with time. 2053.fun is a digital time capsule of 2053 NFTs that can only be withdrawn by 2053. Thirty years from now. Just really cool.

ht Nichanan

X Ambassadors, Medium Build - Friend For Life

Damn, I love this. There’s something so joyful about the positive masculinity in this. It’s about old friends and what they meant to us when we were figuring out the world. There’s so many friends I deeply love. Only a handful of you will understand. ;)

Thanks for the setting that bar so high. I miss you.

Never thought I'd ever let go, There’s pieces of me only you know, And you know I love you, That ain't going nowhere.

Thanks for reading, friends. Enjoy a sunset!

See you next week.