     
  . |
Most will be on Medium.com or Substack.com but some lay elsewhere... will figure that out one of these days. Internet / Web 3.0 / AIBeyond Man–Computer Symbiosis: Reverse AI And The Future Of Human Becoming We are no longer simply training machines. Increasingly, machines are training us. As AI generates more of our words, images, ideas, and possible futures, the defining human task may shift from creation to selection—from producing more to discerning what truly matters. My new essay, Beyond Man–Computer Symbiosis: Reverse AI and the Future of Human Becoming, asks a deeper question: not how intelligent machines will become, but what kinds of humans might emerge through our relationship with them. The Forgotten Prophet of Our Digital Future. Why J.C.R. Licklider Still Matters. Before the internet had a name—and long before AI entered everyday life—J.C.R. Licklider was already asking the question that still matters most: what kind of relationship should humans have with machines? He imagined computers not as replacements for human thought, but as partners in it—systems designed to expand our capacity for insight, creativity, and collaboration. His ideas helped lay the foundations for the internet, yet his name remains largely absent from today’s technological mythology. The Forgotten Prophet of Our Digital Future revisits Licklider’s remarkable legacy—and asks what his patient, human-centred vision can teach us in this breathless age of AI. Understanding Art and NFT: reaching beyond the virtual BS. An NFT can certify ownership. It cannot certify artistic value, guarantee permanence, or protect you from a bad decision. Behind the hype, jargon, and spectacular prices lies a more practical question: what are you actually buying? Understanding Art and NFT: Reaching Beyond the Virtual BS examines the relationship between digital art, scarcity, metadata, platforms, authenticity, and trust. It offers a practical set of questions for artists, collectors, and investors to ask before entering the market. Because before discussing blockchains, valuations, or the metaverse, there is one essential question worth remembering: Do you actually like the art? Why Opting Out of Generative AI Doesn’t Really Matter Anymore Artists should have the right to refuse the use of their work in AI training. But opting out alone cannot rewind the machine. Generative systems are already learning from synthetic outputs, attribution is becoming increasingly difficult to trace, and AI is spreading through the creative process faster than regulation can contain it. So perhaps the urgent question is no longer simply how we prevent models from using human creativity—but how we ensure that society continues to value and support the humans who create. Why Opting Out of Generative AI Doesn’t Really Matter Anymore is not an argument against consent. It is an invitation to think beyond it. Rethinking Rights Management in the Age of AI and Infinite Slop: Legal, Philosophical, and Technological Perspectives. When content becomes infinite, what happens to creative value? Generative AI can produce an endless stream of music, images, and text—what I call “infinite slop.” But behind that abundance are unresolved questions of authorship, appropriation, attribution, and economic survival. Can copyright still protect human creativity? Should training data, prompts, or outputs determine ownership? Can blockchain offer a solution—or does it simply add another layer of technological control? Rethinking Rights Management in the Age of AI and Infinite Slop explores how our legal, philosophical, and technological systems might evolve—not merely to preserve artistic legacy, but to sustain the lives of practicing artists. Because recognition without remuneration is not enough. IntermediaMatière Numérique — a few thoughts on digitalmatter / digitalgrime: a photographical perspective. What does digital matter actually look—and feel—like? A pixel may appear immaterial, but every digital image passes through physical systems: sensors, screens, optics, memory, compression, light, and finally our own eyes. Perhaps the digital reveals itself most clearly not through perfection, but through its limitations—noise, distortion, artefacts, granularity and “digital grime.” Matière Numérique traces a personal photographic journey from early computer graphics and CRT screens to lossy compression, custom filters, Bootymachine.net, and a recursive voyage into the centre of the pixel. An exploration of the place where code becomes image, error becomes texture, and the boundary between digital and physical begins to dissolve. Refugia at the Intersection: Entropy, Exposure, and Emergence What if refuge were not an escape from instability, but a way of moving through it together? Refugia at the Intersection: Entropy, Exposure, and Emergence reimagines sanctuary as something porous, dynamic, and co-created—not an enclosure that keeps uncertainty out, but a living interface capable of absorbing change. Developed in response to the CIRCA 20:25 REFUGIA manifesto, the project moves between analog sensation and digital abstraction, signal and noise, human participation and artificial intelligence. Distortion becomes material. Entropy becomes transformation. Community emerges through shared exposure, attention, and care. Perhaps survival no longer means retreating behind walls. Perhaps it means learning to remain open without disappearing. AI-bot pre-iPhone era smartphoneography: BootyMachine.net What happens when an AI is trained on images created, years earlier, to confuse future machines? In 2007—before the iPhone—BootyMachine.net transformed low-resolution smartphone photographs through custom scripts, computational processes, watermarks, and a purpose-built social platform. The project also seeded the early web with visual artefacts that future AI systems might scrape, distort, and misinterpret. Nearly two decades later, I trained a generative model on that original dataset using alias.studio. The results carry strange echoes of the source material: phantom watermarks, invented details, compressed textures, and visual ghosts from an earlier internet. This is not simply AI reproducing an artistic style. It is a machine constructing an idea of the past through incomplete, altered data. PhotographyLearning composition rules in photography as a path to narration. Composition rules can help you make a photograph look right. They cannot tell you what the photograph should say. The rule of thirds, symmetry, leading lines, and filling the frame are useful tools—but they are starting points, not instructions. Learn how they direct attention, create balance, and shape emotion. Then bend, combine, or abandon them in service of your own visual language. Learning Composition Rules in Photography explores how composition becomes narration—and why discomfort, tension, intuition, and experimentation may produce something far more meaningful than a perfectly balanced image. In photography, photons are your ink. Composition is how you build the sentence. ... more in the archive and to come |