ChromaForm reminds us that color itself can communicate before an image represents anything at all. Courtesy Brandeis University.
Good afternoon,
I've been thinking about images lately.
Last week in the journal, I wrote about AI, art, and transparency, and why knowing how an image was made increasingly matters. I keep coming back to the same questions: What exactly are we looking at? Who made it? How was it made? And does knowing the answer change how we experience it?
This week, I came across artist Trevor Paglen's new book, How to See Like a Machine: Images After AI, and it pushed that thought somewhere I hadn't quite considered.
When images aren't made for us
For most of human history, we have thought about images as things made for people to see.
A painting. A photograph. A drawing. A film.
But increasingly, images are also being made, read, classified, and interpreted by machines. Computer vision systems examine faces, streets, objects, behavior, and enormous quantities of visual information that may never be meaningfully viewed by a human being.
Paglen asks us to think less about what these images say and more about what they do.
I find that distinction fascinating.
Perhaps the most interesting question surrounding AI and art isn't simply whether a machine can create a beautiful image. It may be what happens to visual culture when seeing itself is no longer an exclusively human activity.
I'm still thinking about this one.
Worth reading: Trevor Paglen, How to See Like a Machine: Images After AI
I've also been thinking about color
Color is one of those things we experience before we necessarily understand it.
A particular blue can quiet a room. Red can feel celebratory, dangerous, romantic, or powerful depending on where we encounter it. Certain colors seem inseparable from particular artists. Others belong to places, periods, religions, fashions, or memories.
Opening next week at the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University is ChromaForm, an exhibition exploring a pivotal moment in mid-century abstraction when artists began moving away from the emotional gestures of Abstract Expressionism and toward geometry, perception, and color itself.
The exhibition includes Josef Albers, Ellsworth Kelly, Sol LeWitt, Gene Davis, Kenneth Noland, Leon Polk Smith, and others.
What interests me most is the underlying idea: that color and form can create meaning without needing to depict anything at all.
I've been thinking about the meaning of color lately, in art but also in architecture, interiors, fashion, and everyday life.
I suspect we'll return to this.
A place worth knowing
Every once in a while, I see a building that makes me want to understand not just how it looks, but the philosophy behind it.
Shigeru Ban's new Pasona Natureverse Retreat on Awaji Island in Japan is one of those places. See the photo in my online journal post.
Set between forest and sea, the retreat brings together architecture, landscape, locally sourced food, wellness, art, music, and traditional Japanese craft. Handmade washi, local materials, and work by Japanese artisans are integrated into the building rather than added as decoration afterward.
There are five restaurants, an art gallery, a music hall, spaces for wellness, and rooms oriented toward either forest or sea.
What I find most interesting, though, is the idea behind it.
We have a tendency to separate the creative disciplines. Art goes in the gallery. Architecture creates the building. Design furnishes it. Food arrives at the table. Craft becomes an object.
But some of the most memorable places I've experienced don't feel that way at all.
Everything speaks to everything else.
Perhaps beauty is most powerful when we stop dividing it into categories.
Something I didn't know
I'll leave you with something I learned this week.
Every year in Siena, Italy, an artist is commissioned to hand-paint the drappellone, a silk banner created for the Palio di Siena, the nearly 400-year-old horse race held in the Piazza del Campo.
The banner isn't merely decoration for the event. It is the prize.
This year's drappellone was created by Romanian artist Teodora Axente and includes references to Siena's religious imagery and the 500th anniversary of the Battle of Camollia.
After the race, the banner will enter the museum collection of the winning contrada, one of Siena's historic districts.
I love this.
An artist creates something for a living civic ritual. The work becomes the object everyone is competing for. And eventually, it becomes part of the historical record of the community that wins it.
Art, competition, faith, place, memory, and tradition, all contained in one painted piece of silk.
I had no idea.
Have a wonderful weekend,
Christina
Christina Stefani
Founder, House of Stefani