Front Cover
Rebecca Jinxiu Han, Reflective Thinking on Digital Self-Expression, 2024. Courtesy of the artist.
Special Issue on AI
Generative AI in the Context of the Arts and Humanities
The task ahead may not simply be to create frameworks for the integration of generative AI into higher learning, but the extent to which AI will require a fundamental rethinking of higher education.
AI: A Studio Approach
Rather than replacing traditional modes of authorship, AI prompts iterative exploration that fuels artistic growth.
Thinking the Human(ities) in the Age of AI
AI’s capacity to engage in logical reasoning may not encompass the meaning of rationality for the human being, who, according to Aristotle, is also an “animal”—a being with literal skin in the game, irrevocably shaped by mortality.
What is an Intelligence?
The notion of RSI’s near-future creation of a human-destroying superintelligence is hyperbole, not to mention that we already live in a technofeudalism in which many of us are indentured serfs.
From Bach to Bots
Many students were simultaneously impressed and disappointed in the results of AI generated music; most indicated that they are unlikely to use it again.
Authored Intelligence
As if to underscore that we find duplicity with respect to authorial identity more unsettling than a willful assault on the possibility of establishing a social reality, Xun’s publication apparently violated European AI laws, while Trump’s and Musk’s behavior has, so far, survived legal challenge and has been politically rewarded.
Literary Lives
Inventing Britain
Holinshed’s Chronicles married localism with universalism, a mythographer’s attraction to legend with a humanist’s attention to empirical detail so as to produce, create, and even invent the very idea of what would be a Great Britain.
Simultaneous/Sequential
Sze wants to encompass as much as Whitman—perhaps more, since he lives in a time when “America” would be a limiting term and not an expansive one, and therefore he ignores national boundaries whether geographic or ideological—but he does so without conjuring an image of the poet who ties it all together.
Two Versions of Dystopia
Dream Hotel foregrounds our willingness to sacrifice privacy, considerable sums of money, and the well-being of the less fortunate for our own immediate comfort.
Three Books About Life and Death
Lear explores the fundamental contradiction between the quite extraordinary state of science and medicine—our highly developed understanding of how the body works and how to fix it when it goes wrong—and our lack of knowledge about the hidden nature of consciousness itself, or how the body and soul combine to make what we call life.
Art Worlds
Venice Interpreted Anew
Every tourist discovers immediately how unusual is Venice, the only major Italian city entirely on water.
A Closer Look: Murillo at the Meadows
Murillo (1617-1682) painted the scene at the peak of his career in a soothing, gauzy style. He deftly combines genre and landscape features in a picture that, at fourteen feet wide, seems cinematic.
Poetry
Ovid, The Art of Loving
Translated and Introduced by Aaron Poochigian
Download a PDF copy of the folio.