Juergen Berkessel - The Intersect of Art and Technology

I ditched my DSLR for an iPhone. The wide angles were perfect. But I kept missing telephoto reach for landscapes. A pocket Sony with 200mm zoom was my answer. The real problem? Smartphones traded framing ability for ultra-wide specs. https://jb9.me/sjXbV7

When the outrage starts before the event happens, you're watching manufactured politics. Bad Bunny, Pixar, military parades—same playbook. Political operatives prime the anger, then watch it spread. What does it mean when culture becomes the battleground? https://jb9.me/wPcFc4

The Met's new VR experiences for Temple of Dendur and Oceanic art are free and ambitious. But I wonder—are museums building for how we actually want to experience culture, or how they think we should? https://jb9.me/YKCXs1

SoundCloud's new deal: artists keep 100% of royalties from Spotify, Apple, YouTube, plus direct fan donations. It’s great for creators, but the timing suggests a strategic move by a platform trying to stay relevant in a Spotify-dominated market. https://jb9.me/HCZmNJ

Grace Weston's miniature sets rewrite art history's worst narratives about women. Dolls, props, a camera—and suddenly Venus has agency, Magritte's man becomes absurd. Morgan Laurens interviews her for Not Real Art. Worth reading. https://jb9.me/Ag0kA2

Those intricate zigzag patterns spiders weave? Not random. They're precision tools controlling vibrations to signal prey location. Art with sinister purpose. Read more at theintersect.art

A new VR app in Florence shows David emerging from marble with AI Michelangelo narrating. Historians validated it. Does experiencing art this way bring us closer to the creator's vision or distract from the sculpture? https://jb9.me/DuURyS

tmpmztwxa5a.jpg

Classic gaming films like Tron taught cinema a visual language for code. But I keep asking: when gaming's influence leads to more combat stories on screen, are we expanding storytelling or just repackaging familiar power fantasies? Read more: https://jb9.me/axZrgF

Here's what I didn't expect: PG-13 as intellectual property. But the MPA's cease-and-desist against Meta makes total sense. Borrowing trust you don't have erodes someone else's credibility. https://jb9.me/o4GYSB

TruTru Haptic recreates textures through haptic feedback—smooth stone, falling rain—targeting anxiety and ADHD. Thoughtful design, but I wonder: can ergonomics go too far? When we buffer every discomfort with technology, what do we lose? https://jb9.me/gzyQ33

Montreal sound artist Nicola Di Croce created a city soundscape without cars. No traffic roar—just voices and nature. Interesting: city dwellers sometimes find urban noise soothing. What would your city sound like? https://jb9.me/qJ2rIi

New survey: 81% of designers think AI dulls creativity, yet 94% of creatives use AI in their work. This gap between fear and practice is telling. Maybe we need to rethink how we ask the question. https://jb9.me/kThxzq

Cattelan's 18-karat gold toilet—*America*—hits auction at $10M. The title carries the entire critique; no fancy explanation needed. The name itself is the satire. https://jb9.me/kThxzq

The NFT hype cycle burned everyone. The infrastructure survived. Now digital collectibles quietly power real use cases—gaming, ownership, provenance. But will swapping the acronym actually restore trust after the scandals? https://jb9.me/kThxzq

Kapwing analyzed Midjourney prompts and found Alphonse Mucha is the most-used artist—230k times. It's a leaderboard of unwilling AI training participants. Art Nouveau dominates across disciplines. The consent and copyright issues? Very real. https://jb9.me/kThxzq

Marble puffer jackets carved by robots. Server fans woven into paintings. Analia Saban's work shows how textile arts have inspired computational thinking from the Jacquard loom to Babbage's computers. https://jb9.me/kThxzq

The ZWO Astronomy Photographer winners are out. These images are genuinely stunning—the kind that make you respect the equipment, knowledge, and patience required. Definitely not AI. Worth your time. https://jb9.me/kThxzq

Western art institutions worry about AI. China's Hangzhou Art & Technology Biennale? Celebrates art-tech fusion without anxiety. 160+ artists from 20 countries. Same tech, different cultural views. Realpolitik or different philosophy? https://jb9.me/kThxzq

This is the kind of creative resistance I can't stop thinking about. Indigenous artists used AR to overlay their stories onto colonial paintings at the Met—no permission, just reclamation. What happens when artists build their own reality? https://jb9.me/YEa8io

We've spent decades pushing resolution beyond human perception. Now we're there. And immediately retrograding our perfect captures with Kodak grain filters. There's something absurd about building displays that exceed what we can see, then choosing to make them look analog. https://jb9.me/Zh3k9q

Elise Swopes created surreal Chicago waterfalls with painstaking manual work. Now AI makes similar images instantly. Does technical skill matter when creation's barrier collapses? https://jb9.me/QAs73z

The AI product cycle is wild. Caira is a physical iPhone camera add-on that does what software already does. Building hardware to fix problems that don’t exist. Will it end up in the AI Pin gadget graveyard? https://jb9.me/2m2yq0

The art world's real horrors aren't supernatural—they're censorship, natural disaster, and jealousy. Scott Power's Art World Horror Stories podcast explores three chilling true tales. Read our take: https://jb9.me/HKgrGE

Photo Oxford's new theme asks: how does photography reveal and obscure truth? Michael Christopher Brown's work shows one answer—using AI not to replace cameras, but to protect those in front of it. A strong case for generative AI in journalism. https://jb9.me/qj5ZU6

Del Toro's making a valid point about generative AI—but I think the conversation needs nuance. Generative video replacing creativity? Hard no. AI-assisted editing tools? Already everywhere. The real question isn't whether to use AI, but which tools serve your vision. https://jb9.me/OLRXvu

Motion capture dots, compression shorts, and a 1929 Disney skeleton dance. Sounds absurd. This researcher's performance helps solve back pain for millions. Creativity in the lab. https://jb9.me/GRy4if

Over 100,000 visual artists demand AI firms pay for using their copyrighted images without consent in training models. They want compensation and transparency. Details: https://jb9.me/2tz66S

Miranda Johnson's essay reveals tension in New Zealand's biculturalism: it praises cultural recognition but overlooks a century of Māori economic growth. The Māori economy controls billions. What does it mean when progressive stories erase their agency? https://jb9.me/DUKxaG

Tech makes music easier to create and consume, but what about the slow, deliberate practices that once mattered? Feldman and Bailey predicted this shift. Something worth reflecting on. https://jb9.me/jEmgS0

What's "slop"? Sean Monahan says it's the media format that feels most dynamic now. We defend binaries—human vs. machine, authentic vs. fake—because change unsettles us. Even OpenAI knows the game: Sora premiered at an LA theater. Legit still matters.
https://jb9.me/6jlmjd