On September 19, 1986, exactly one year after Italo Calvino’s untimely death, the following essay, prefaced by the renowned Italianist Vittore Branca, was published in the Corriere della sera. In it, the great writer reflects on the prospects for and effects of automatic writing. Right before he fell ill, Calvino had agreed to give the inaugural lecture for the 27th International Seminar on Advanced Culture at the Fondazione Cini on the topic of “Fantastic Universes.”…
 
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Two shifts in relationship between culture and technology inform my thinking about the contemporary state of imagination and trust at the ground level. Both involve the ever more intimate co-mingling of humans with machines. The first is the emergence of cobotics as a pivot point within conventional robotics, particularly as robots move out into the built environment and become entangled with our everyday lives. For millennia humans have imagined the robotic according to a substitution…
 
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First conceived in 2018, largely carried out during 2019, repeatedly delayed and reimagined due to the covid-19 pandemic, metaLAB (at) Harvard’s exhibition Curatorial A(i)gents is closing this weekend after a 2.5 month run at the Harvard Art Museum. The exhibition was composed of eleven separate experiments:   Not all of the above were part of the original design. But all shared a common experimentalist ethos and a commitment to explore the use of AI-based techniques…
 
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