Aggressive, disproportionate, excessive policing … still, in 2026.
Category: language
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it still means something to be human.
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Talk to It, James Gleick (New York Review)
Sherry Turkle, the MIT sociologist who has chronicled our tumultuous relationship with computers across more than forty years, sees “a long-standing fantasy, shared by science fiction and engineers, that AI will offer a perfect companion that knows everything about you. It will be there for you and ask nothing in return.” Her wise new book, Artificial Intimacy, expands on themes she began developing in The Second Self (1984) and sounds an alarm: “We are on a path to forgetting what it is to be human.”
[…]
… it still means something to be human. We have knowledge and feelings that come from experiences in a physical world and interactions with our fellow creatures. We engage with reality in a way that an algorithm cannot. The distinction between real and virtual still matters:
When people talk about how relaxing it is to talk to a chatbot, it’s because the real slips away. To act in the world, you need to deal with its friction: almost everything takes conflict, negotiation, compromise, and time.
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wonderful dark explorations for which he was to be their guide
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there was a need, a specific request, and so he stepped forward.
wonderful dark explorations for which he was to be their guide.
It was the measurement of the time which had gotten away from them.
(AP)
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AG2024u-2a or nothing folds easily
I believe nothing folds easily,
but that time will crease—
retrain the mind.
…
What I Believe, Kimberly Blaeser
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wandering without return …
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living in ellipsis as a structure of dissociated continuity loosely bound to symbolization
Elliptical life then emerges in the place where what’s known meets what’s unknowable and what goes without saying meets what fails to reach meaning.
wandering without return
(LB)
… wayward!
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An openness to the world
Roberto Tejeda on Zoe Leonard’s Al río / To the River at Chinati Foundation (Newsletter Volume 30)
Pages 14 -15. photo by Tina Rivera; pp. 4–29: installation images, The Chinati Foundation, photos by Alex Marks; works © Zoe Leonard, courtesy the artist, Galerie Gisela Capitain, and Hauser & Wirth For [George] Baker, Leonard’s determination to re-enchant the analog image con- firmed a technological “lateness” that in turn inaugurated an affective and corporeal “openness” to the world. Baker writes of this photography understood, in light of the A n a l o g u e series, “as inherently relational— affective and loving—its operations not just the indexical fixative of the double or the trace, but the unending (desiring) quest for similarity, comparison, connection, and analogy.” That is, Baker aligns “openness” in a system that relates reception to displacement, to endlessly mutable forms, to connectedness, enclosure, and layers of reflection in the interplay of likeness and desire. “To receive, for Leonard, is to want to bring the new object close, almost to draw it into the void of one’s camera—to incorporate the image, again, like one internalizes a lost object. And in the photo- graphs, we feel this drive everywhere enacted: physically, corporeally, psychically,” he stated.
[…]
In a lens perspective that has no particular purchase on a heightened sense of eventfulness, nor on a relation of detachment to the “man-altered land- scape” specified by exponents of the New Topographics, for instance, so many of the images in Al río / To the River render the middle distance from a standpoint, a certainty “in person,” so to speak. In this sense, active viewership resembles a form of embodied hesitation at the intervals—now unambiguous, now indiscernible—that open up between the built world, the natural landscape, and social processes along the border zone.
Zoe Leonard, “Out of Time,” artist questionnaire by George Baker, O c t o b e r , no. 100 (Spring 2002): 89, 95.
George Baker, Lateness and Longing: On the Afterlife of Photography (University of Chicago Press, 2023), 56, 57.
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What potion of forgetting pleases
reason that by neglect of its duty
so toils against itself for satisfaction?
But my affliction seeks solace, measure
of the desire to be remedied and
the desire to overcome it love’s remedy[When from my counted days], Roberto Tejada
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Only to my doubt can I appeal
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How to Stay Alive as a Small Art Institution, Jenny Wu. Philanthropy Today/ArtReview.
hatred glosses
and evidence belies.
ourselves but ourselves.That fire in the garden’s an illusion—
the double of the fire that cheers this room.
Now standing at the window in between them,
I watch the spiked montbretia suddenly bloom
and guess the glass is telling me a lie.
But no, the flames are there. I can’t deny
the evidence presented to my eye.
Only to my doubt can I appeal
for news of what is false and what is real.On Reflection, Anne Stevenson
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AG2024_1133874a inhabits it, as a plce
“But what’s extraordinary to me is that Zoe doesn’t illustrate the border. She quietly inhabits it. She listens to it. And in doing so, with her strategy of repetition of various scenes and takes, she shows us how to see it–not as a curving line, but as a place.”
José Esparza Chong Cuy on Zoe Leonard’s Al río / To the River in Chinati Foundation Newsletter Volume 31.