A startling vision of the present rendered from the chaotic noise of recent technological advancements.
A techno-environmentalist warning shot for the digital landscape’s impending doom.
In 11 searing essays, filmmaker and new media scholar Steyerl (Duty Free Art: Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War, 2017, etc.) discusses cutting-edge advancements in AI and art and outlines the ripple of damage caused by competing tech companies. “The more one tries to preempt the future,” she writes, “the more the present gets out of hand.” Many generative AI programs use images scrubbed from the internet, regardless of copyright protections. A 2023 Hollywood strike protested against the use of AI likenesses in film. “The recent history of these apps,” Steyerl explains, “can be written succinctly through the different protests against them.” She positions seemingly harmless image-generation programs on the same spectrum as “warfare, marketing and surveillance” by detailing the harmful impact this boom has on marginalized communities around the world. One essay discusses how compromised immigrant populations are exploited as “a new, invisible global underclass of data proletariats.” In Kosovo, the region’s electricity is sapped by the crypto mining frenzy. In Kenya and Sudan, the cryptocurrency Worldcoin collects biometric data from underinformed volunteers via retinal scans. These unnerving texts are steeped in technical jargon that will challenge many readers but reward those who endure by offering a blistering new perspective. Steyerl uses thermodynamic terminology to explain image generation: “a detailed, intelligible image is seen as being ‘cool’, then is diffused into ‘hotter’, less organized articulations, and ultimately into random noise. Image generation proceeds by reversing this process of entropy and recovering, or ‘restoring’, an image from noise.” Later, this lingo leads to another dark observation: “workers in digital industries take on the role of noise particles, being burnt out, dispersed and moving about randomly, making them vulnerable to exploitation.” By highlighting a system of global damage incurred at the expense of new technology, Steyerl paints a rotten digital landscape on the brink of something terrible.
A startling vision of the present rendered from the chaotic noise of recent technological advancements.Pub Date: May 20, 2025
ISBN: 9781804298022
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Verso
Review Posted Online: March 8, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2025
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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