Thinkers about photography sometimes work on the problem of whether a photograph is experienced in the way it was intended by the image maker. In some contexts, a mismatch is deemed a failure, but in others it is simply another dimension of experience in communications. The image may have what we often call "its own life" independently of the imagist, with no presumed value judgement of being good or bad. But implicit in viewing is that there will be a reaction to what is see

Imagination is an operational mental ability. We know that mental functions rely on other deeper factors, mainly an intact biological organization. But imagination isn’t like hunger; it is like breathing. In practice, the ability to imagine has no essential requirement other than to pretend -- to pretend that something IS, CAN BE, DOES or CAN DO.  It carries no requirement for proving feasibility or plausibility. And outside of some need to influence a relationship between se

Artificial Intelligence works on some things that are so fundamental to creating information artifacts that in some ways it represents the only thing other than the internet that matured the true importance of digital computing. Anything that an electron can provoke can be presented through the brute effectiveness of an on/off switch, and computers can manage that at microscopic levels at the speed of light. Visualization, then, is simply a matter of how hard the computer can

As relayed to me by a colleague, there was a guest essay in the Opinion section of the New York Times , March 8, 2023, by Noam Chomsky, Ian Roberts and Jeffrey Watumull. (As noted by the Times "Dr. Chomsky and Dr. Roberts are professors of linguistics. Dr. Watumull is a director of artificial intelligence at a science and technology company.") Noam Chomsky: The False Promise of ChatGPT (The link is to a "gift" copy of the article which should be accessible to those who do

Why do we think that we can know with confidence when something is or is not an "art" work? What is the unifying idea underlying our belief? And what if we see something that we decide is not art -- what other meaningful experience do we expect from the way it presents visual stimulation? Those questions lead me to one special question above all: how does a photograph, my primary medium, design its content such that its content designs the experience of seeing it? I. I've bee

Elitism in art is the enemy of my thinking, doing, and holding of art. It tries in advance to dictate what matters. We don't allow that here