From the Archives:

Hauntings

AI and the Myth of the Author Genius

“The First Novel Written by AI is Here,” an article proclaimed in 2018. The author doubted AI tools could ever write a good novel but nevertheless conceded that one “might just see fragments of meaning thrown into a neural network…

The Venice Biennale: A Fable

The 61st Venice Biennale, “In Minor Keys,” cites One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez as one of its inspirations—the story of Macondo, the town where the novel unfolds. A fragment that never made…

Star Spangled Bangers: Aaron Cobbett’s Textile Politics

In the 1990s and early 2000s, Aaron Cobbett’s analog camera immortalized queer nightlife in Manhattan’s East Village through fabulous photo shoots that both rivaled contemporary fashion editorials and rejected the fashion world’s unattainable beauty ideals. Most…

Infrastructures at a Crisis Point in Devin Wilson’s Whale Oil

Oil circulates crisis. Paying forty bucks at the gas pump bankrolls war crimes; occupations abroad top off gas tanks at home. Speculation made in crude oil stocks monetizes occupation, and plunder finances endless consumption. Infrastructure’s deadly…

Unmade Town: Will Rawls and the Choreogeographies of Los Angeles

Los Angeles is the kind of place that drives people—artists, writers, filmmakers—not just to understand it but to reckon with it, to publicly parse its ungraspable multiplicity. Such is the task handed to the rotating curators of the Hammer…