The Retreat to Analog: When Digital Tools Stop Feeling Like Progress
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When a cutting-edge digital musician retreats to his acoustic guitar for therapy rather than production, you know something profound is shifting in how we relate to technology and creativity. This week on The Intersect, we explore why artists are questioning whether easier always means better, and what happens when the tools meant to liberate us start feeling like cages.
Episode Highlights
- The Cost of Convenience: Sedat Anar's provocative claim that technology "buries alternatives in darkness" sparks a conversation about Morton Feldman's prescient warnings and why one digital music pioneer now finds solace only in acoustic strings.
- Spotify's AI Partnerships: Major labels celebrate new "responsible" AI partnerships while 75 million "spammy" tracks get removed—but are the economic incentives really changing, or just the rhetoric?
- Cultural Narratives and Economic Reality: Miranda Johnson reveals how New Zealand's biculturalism narrative obscures a century of Māori economic development, offering unexpected parallels to our own oversimplified histories.
- The Billion-Image Question: A coalition of 100,000+ visual artists demands retrospective payments for AI training data, but history's lessons about unwinding technological appropriation aren't encouraging.
- Photography's Reality Crisis: Paris Photo embraces AI-generated work as evolution, not disruption, while photographers grapple with a medium that once represented truth but now questions what "real" even means.
- Hybrid Images at Milan's Viasaterna: Nine artists merge traditional photography with sculpture, painting, and generative AI, proving that creative friction around new tools is nothing new.
- Defining "Slop": Sean Monahan argues that the real distinction isn't human versus machine but generative versus creative—because AI can't choose, only react.
About The Intersect
The Intersect is your weekly audio companion to our newsletter, examining the dynamic relationship between art and technology. We explore how computational tools shape creative work and how artistic practices inform technological development, offering nuanced analysis without polarization.
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35 episodes