Emails from Nathan
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email from Nathan (Item 24, Recently,)
I’m building an app for EHFM, if you’re interested in app development and/or online community radio then I could use some beta testers to help locate issues on different devices. You can get releases and log issues on Github. Managed to catch a chunk of the work at Sonica 2024 on its very last day…
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email from Nathan (Item 23, On the creation of consensus)
These are some notes triggered both by the past two weeks I spent in the US, one of the most fascinating and disturbing political arenas in the world, and by the insipid vacuum of a 13-hour journey back to Glasgow. I’ve no real interest in discussing the actual politics here as there’s precious little I…
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email from Nathan (Item 22, I’m here)
Stating the obvious, it’s a minute since I sent anything. Only three days after my last message back in May, Rishi Sunak announced a general election in the UK, an event that most of us expected wouldn’t happen til around October or November. For the rest of May I scrambled to finish both what I…
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email from Nathan (Item 21)
Recently: It’s so long since I wrote about anything I’m consuming so I’m not sure where to start. I unfortunately swore off basically everything except the 2004 version of Battlestar Galactica for a while, convincing myself that it’s worth watching because I can put it on in the background (lol). Honestly, I’m no media critic…
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email from Nathan (Item 20)
A cute example of poisoning the well In Max Read’s piece, he also cites a funny example of Google’s attempts at factual and useful AI interactions rather than entertaining ones, by asking it for food names ending with “um.” Gemini returns fruit names creatively appended with “um”, like Tomatum, ignores the existence of plums altogether,…
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email from Nathan (Item 19)
Writing like a chatbot I’ve done an audio recording of this text to make it a bit more accessible, and also because reading it out loud was a good way to proofread it. I know a lot of people don’t enjoy being given big long paragraphs to read so if you appreciate this please let…
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email from Nathan (Item 18)
Searching for Justice Revisiting some writing I did for a rough experimental bit of group work a couple of months ago, I felt there was more to learn from it so I’m going to extract, rephrase and abridge some of the justification I put together for it at the time. The work itself was a…
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email from Nathan (Item 17)
We’re back! ~1500 words you never asked for! But first a reminder that I’m exhibiting work in London this weekend (4th – 6th May) at Brompton Cemetery Chapel. Opening afternoon is on Saturday the 4th til 6pm, I’ve heard that there will be tea and cake and I’m showing a new semi-AI-influenced interactive sculpture work…
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email from Nathan (Item 16)
Important notes about Small Alterations Small Alterations exhibits some unanswered questions which could lead to ethical complications if unresolved. The work is perhaps best expressed as an interactive installation piece rather than as openly distributed software. There are concerns in enabling a user to mechanically rewrite news articles; even though the operation occurs entirely on…
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email from Nathan (Item 15)
In this email I’m just sending you what I wrote up recently for a work I made called Small Alterations. I hope it makes sense, if it doesn’t and you’re interested in the work just let me know and I’ll try to make it clearer! In other news, next week on Thursday 22nd February I’ll…
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email from Nathan (Item 14)
recently Great writing from Rachel O’Dwyer on The cruelty of crypto in its promise to revive the American dream. I can’t remember when or why I suddenly started listening to this one 2017 Kraftwerk live album obsessively but 3-D The Catalogue has scratched an itch the past few weeks. Something’s gone wrong in my head…
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email from Nathan (Item 13)
here’s why (the looming threat of AI) There’s a bunch of elections this year. The stat that’s been doing the rounds is that over 50% of the world’s population will be eligible to vote, although I can’t find a reliable source for that number and it looks like a more reasonable statistic is something like…
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email from Nathan (Item 12)
When I first started writing I was expecting to send this to you in January, so a lot of the below has an awkward air of looking forward to the year ahead. I might not send another email for a while because I’ve really failed to do much reading recently but let’s see! I’ve got…
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email from Nathan (Item 11)
Recently, Obsessed with Susumu Yokota’s Song of the Sleeping Forest, which I heard on this great radio show on Radio Vilnius. That’s me in the comments asking what the song is. I’m sure I should have read it a long time ago but I just read Ursula K Le Guin’s 1986 essay The Carrier Bag…
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email from Nathan (Item 10)
On Substack drama This bit of writing will relate closely to the last, but after finishing that long-winded tome with a neatly punctuating quote and getting all hyped up to smash that send button, I saw that Casey Newton of the excellent Platformer has just announced he’s moving the entire newsletter away from Substack to…
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email from Nathan (Item 9)
Happy new year! I switched my entire mind off for over three weeks. I began writing the below item in October but I’ve bumped it from every email since then because it was a mess. I need to move on to the things I should actually be studying (which I’ll tell you about in the…
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email from Nathan (Item 8)
Recently, I (finally) saw the UVA show Synchronicity at 180 Strand last night. It’s extremely well-made work, thick with immersive atmosphere and perhaps pleasingly thin on unsubtle narratives like we’ve just talked about. That said, holistically the works don’t congeal into the Jungian thesis that it claims to embody; the show’s claim to exhibit “meaningful…
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email from Nathan (Item 7)
Reassessment One criticism I’ve received of the work is that it’s perhaps too committed to the façade of an objective observation, and I’ll admit, especially without exposition like the above, it does in part conceal my opinions on AI. This is an instinct, I try not to allow too much colour into my voice, that…
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email from Nathan (Item 6)
I’m writing up notes in order to present the project I sent in the last email, I’m having a hard time linking them together into something cohesive, so I’m going to dump an attempt below. Honestly here we’re scraping the barrel of what energy I have left to mentally engage with anything before performing some…
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email from Nathan (Item 5)
For this email I’m just sending through a video and my writing around a recent piece of work I put together called Sparring Partners. You can view a video of the performance here, and below is some written justification. I’ve got another piece of writing discussing the timeline and processes of putting it together that…
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email from Nathan (Item 4)
Before we get started: if you’re in London then I’m doing a live performance of a new semi-improvised AI-adjacent work called Sparring Partners this Tuesday (21st November) at Iklectik, from 7.30pm. It’s free but you need to register for a ticket! Why have I emailed you There’s absolutely nothing in this item that is groundbreaking…
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email from Nathan (Item 3)
Recently: I read Cory Doctorow’s The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation which is incomplete (perhaps by nature) in its proposed solutions but very clear and eloquent in its belligerences. I watched Wargames, which is still great. I was interested by how wildly crammed the final conflict and resolution is. For example…
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email from Nathan (Item 1)
Why have I emailed you I’m coming across a lot of information all at once, which is good, I’m enjoying it, we love the information. It’s always tough to process lots of information though, organise it, put it in a useful space in context with all the other information (which is why we’re trying to…
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First commit
Searching for uses of the internet more worthwhile than I’ve experienced over the last ~5 years. Maybe a stab in the dark but trying out a blog format with activitypub integration, and the use of this dumb domain (which I like) for something.