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There are always three sections: Story, Art, and Design.
STORY
Sequoia held a conference on AI where I presented my take on the current moment to 100 or so of the best minds working in AI today. Marvelous people, brilliant conversations. I did my best to give the audience a provocative, and inspirational take on the future of AI and art. The basic premise was that AI will not kill art, because art cannot be killed… and that AI should not be thought of as Artificial Intelligence, but Augmented Imagination. I transcribed the speech and posted it on Medium. As you read it, imagine me speaking with a stirring, hopeful, and slightly theatrical voice. Augmented Imagination. (11 min read)
ART
Here’s a watercolor of a dancer on the pyramid at the Louvre. Painting it required more patience than usual. Each little window became a meditation on what we think we know and what is really there… what we see and what is obscured. I love the shift in scale of the dancer… like a demigod… larger than our bodies, smaller than our hopes. Instagram link.
Design
I’m designing a toolkit for the Stanford Business School that takes on the strange combination of beauty, sustainability, and business. The combination is both vexing and marvelous. On the surface, business and beauty seem about as far apart as you can get: beauty transports us past the realm of the practical while a business must embody practicality to survive. Yet dip beneath the surface even the smallest bit and beauty and business reveal themselves to be inextricably linked. It’s been wonderful to explore this topic while thinking through the implications—what role does beauty play in our lives (even when we pretend it has no place)? And how does any of this connect to a new urgency for sustainability in our lives and industries? I purposely stayed away from the normal canon of business-y writers to instead spend time with my favorite fantasy-dinner-party-podcast-of-literary-theory-trouble-makers: Barthes, Lacan, Plato, Mulvey, Saussure, and Eco… all chatting away in my mind about how beauty operates, especially in places where we deny it exists.