I brought AI to class today. We'd spent the better part of an hour parsing two academic texts which addressed questions of intersectionality in France, focusing on French Muslims. The research and arguments were congruent but addressed different audiences and debates; one was addressed to political scientists whose analyses of "intersectionality" did not address religion but, the author argued, should. The other was part of a forum defending methodologies like "intersectionality" from critics on the French right who thought them unwelcome North American imports. We had a good time reconstructing the research, the different audiences and contexts, why the two sources were trustworthy - and how one might engage, critique, or go beyond the proffered research.

Then I showed the class a PowerPoint which Notebook LM had generated for me from the two articles. (This took a few minutes, but no specific prompts from me at all.) The slick presentation glommed the two articles together with striking visuals, making a monolithic assertion out of different arguments and interpretations - an aggregated argument neither of our authors had made. The names of the two researchers appeared only once, in tiny print at the bottom of the title slide; their quite different forms of research, reasoning and argumentative contexts - and the openings for engagement and critique - all washed away. 

I didn't spend long on it, though I pointed out various distortions and absurdities in the visualizations. (It gets a lot right, too, of course.) What did I hope the students learned? I told them that Notebook LM is very helpful opening up a single text, but that the work of critical engagement, weighing different sources, was beyond it. That's where you come in! In a week dedicated to the meaning and gift of plural perspectives and experiences, I hope they saw the threat in AI's mindless amalgamation.

Flash bang

A building across Broadway from us caught fire last night. The FDNY was there within minutes and managed to put it out quickly. I don't know how they got inside the apartment that was on fire with their hoses, but they did, thank goodness. The neighborhood flashed like a disco for much longer.

Caption contest

This is a snapshot from one exhibition at the Met that I'm going to let do double duty for another, and for broader issues too. From the crowded "Musical Bodies" exhibition, which closes in a few week, here's a "Cycladian female figure (ca. 3200-2700 BCE)." In the vitrine behind is a Stradivarius. The caption: 

Cycladian figures are some of the earliest representations of the human body. Tied to beliefs about life, death, and the divine, they likely had ritual and symbolic uses. Although the objects predate the violin by around four thousand years, the resemblance between the two is so striking that scholars refer to the statues as "violin-shaped figurines" - a comparison that also underscores the instrument's evocation of the human form. 

Say what? Do they have objects that look like iPhones too? It's harmless for specialists to notice the violin-like shape but for those unacquainted with mysterious Cycladic art it's irrelevant and distracting. If visitors find their way to the collection of Cycladic work currently on loan to the Met (this exhibition might have told them how to find it) they'll be at best disappointed by the absence of violins. If they engage a little more with the world of the Cycladian they might feel, as I did, that placing one of these objects together even with a Stradivarius is a little, well, disrespectful.

The rest of "Musical Bodies" isn't quite as forced, though the exhibition ransacks the whole museum for objects which make sound and evoke human forms. But there's a whole other exhibition not too far away which is composed almost entirely of jarring juxtapositions like this. 

Yes, I finally made it to "Costume Art," the first show of the Costume Institute in its new digs on the ground floor (where the gift shop used to be). Here some two hundred works of couture, most quite recent, are paired with works from the Met's seventeen other departments, in aid of the claim the "the dressed body" is an important participant in the history of art and culture as a whole. The method is explained:

Pairings between fashions and artworks will present a spectrum of connections and experiences: from the formal to the conceptual, the aesthetic to the political, the individual to the universal, the illustrative to the symbolic, and the playful to the profound.

The actual pairings are sometimes thought-provoking, sometimes witty, sometimes silly, sometimes obvious, sometimes sacriligious. I think a dozen such juxtapositions might have made for an engaging celebration of fashion's arrival at the Met, but two hundred feels not only forced but heavy-handed. The non-garments - many of them treasures - feel like loot. Mostly they are in display cases beneath (and usually dwarfed by) the garments and most, so far as I can tell, are gritting their teeth waiting for their command performance to end. 

I don't begrudge fashion a place at the Met (we've already got a whole hall devoted to arms and armor after all), and I've worked with enough fashion students to know that this is the way fashion designers make use of the past through "moodboards." ("Moodboards and museums" would make a great topic for an exhibition, actually.) But with the actual treasures pressed into what feels like supporting roles here, it feels like a hostile takeover. Sure, a curious viewer might be inspired to learn more about the non-garments but, as with the person who might seek more "violin-shaped figurines" among the Cycladic art, they'll hardly know what they're seeing or why.

Did I say there was a broader issue this might evoke too? Only the plight of the liberal arts at a university dedicated to designing the new...  

Drawing out

Another week of "Religion of Trees" class drawings. Above are efforts to convey one of the "13 ways of observing a tree" we read about in an essay by David Macauley, drawn in the courtyard. Below are drawings of a human and a tree inspired by Sumana Roy's How I became a tree.

God help them

Thousands of people repeated these words, hand raised. "I pledge to the greatest president in the history of the United States, that loves us so much he can’t even breathe, that I will go out with my family, my friends. I don’t care if I’m registered or not. I’m going to try and cheat like hell, like they do. So help me God." Is it worse if they think words mean something or if they don't? How is this whole scene not demonic?

Every branch of the NYPL

 

I love the New York Public Library for connecting me to worlds of books! The research division allowed me to read the Indian-published work of Nandalal Bose, discussed in Sumana Roy's How I Became a Tree.

But NYPL affords access to more than academic titles. Delivered conveniently to my nearest neighborhood branch I can check out books no university library would stock, from children's books like Sylvaine 

 

Jaoui and Anne Crahay's I'm like a tree and a tree's like me (with clever holes in its pages) to comic books like Jeff Lemire and Phil Hester's rather darker Family Tree, where some humans become trees.

Mayday

The President of the United States is a mad menace to the whole world.

Isometric NYC

When I learned that someone had used AI to generate an "isometric" representation of NYC to look like something from animation or a video game, I had to check out the neighborhoods I've lived in and live in.

A fun feature is that you can click a button and it's suddenly winter! (Try it for yourself - the snow blows by in gusts and flurries.)

The real world

Just one UN member state voted against today's General Assembly motion to switch from using the Mercator world map to the Equal Earth map. Mercator exaggerates the size of the global north; it makes Greenland and Africa look about the same size, when Africa is in fact 14 times bigger! Equal Earth is one of several alternative mappings which offer a more accurate representation of the true relative size of continents and seas, though still imperfect. Who could object? 

9/11: This map - not sure its provenance - shows northern northern hemisphere countries cut down to size from Mercator inflation.

Ringing in a new year

Have I told you "Religion of Trees" drawing is back? Tree rings, boababs!

The war on universities

The New School has, perhaps, made it out of the fiscal woods, painfully reducing a structural deficit. But new threats keep coming. 

Last week I was sure that the government's ever more aggressive limits on visas and especially on being able to work a year after getting a degree (the F1 OPT) would decimate our international student body, coming on top of the outrageous $103,000 fee for hiring someone on an H1-B visa. 

In the last few days, it was that health insurance costs are going up next year, the steepest increase in decades, challenging for any organization but especially for non-profits who do labor-intensive work like teaching and research. 

Now comes this. I think this is what's called a "hostile work environment."

Comfort/Consume (Me)

Reprise, in a new year in a new room, of the first alum visit to "DIY Religion," complete with their fabulous room-filling artwork. A new crop of students asked new questions, but the artist and artwork have changed in the last year too (including the work's title). And a surprise: when we suspended it from the ceiling in a nearby room, parallel to the window rather than perpendicular to it, the two sides looked completely different, the blurred edges, loopy shapes and gentle Disney colors replaced by jagged silhouettes, bold colors and what looked like abstract expressionist brush strokes. Even more beguiling/disturbing than last year ... I was happily upstaged!