"The soul in paraphrase"

Stag with Herb Branch Mounted as a Ring

Date: c. 1550 - c. 1600 (stag), mounted on later ring

Artist: German or French

Medium: Gold, enamel, ruby, opals, and pearls

Dimensions: Diam.: 2.2 cm (13/16 in.)

WIP.

1599 Nicholas Hilliard - Sir Thomas Griffin

The sun at home warms better than the sun elsewhere.

We are pleased to share a significant milestone: JSTOR is now available free of charge in 1,000 correctional facilities worldwide, benefiting more than 500,000 incarcerated individuals. This accomplishment, made achievable through the generous backing of the Mellon Foundation, highlights JSTOR's steadfast dedication to promoting inclusive education.

Specters of Marx – Are you shitting me? It's a lock. If you form a band and call it this I will design all your merch for free.

Archive Fever – If I could sing/write music/play an instrument this would be my band's name and we'd be a krautrock-inspired open ended performance collective and you'd hate our guts

Limited Inc – Sort of an 80s-90s vibe to this one but also has some star power. Like, shit, I'd buy their t-shirt.

The Animal That Therefore I Am – Perfect for like a female-fronted shoegaze project or something

Spurs – A good hardcore band name

Force de Loi – I get "Portland-based aughties indie sleaze with a cult following" vibes from this

Of Grammatology – Ranked lower because I think this is one where you can't get away with calling your band this unless you actually enjoy Derrida and have read his writing extensively, since Of Grammatology is arguably his best known work

Différance – See above, also unless you're in France get ready for people to mispronounce the shit out of your band name

Acts of Religion – Goth rock/glam metal vibes for this one I think

Margins of Philosophy/Right to Philosophy – A tie between these two as they're very similar. I think they're also kind of 80s-90s flavored and a little clunky, but if the music was really good, I'd be down for it

Of Spirit – Post-hardcore or emo band but in the Rites of Spring vein would be perfect for this

The Truth in Painting – I think this sounds potentially cool as some kind of moody early 2000s prog or noise project, once again if the music was good I'd be into it

The Gift of Death – Sounds cool but I can't imagine this as anything other than an overly macho black metal effort which is not my speed

Theory & Practice – Your band would have to make REALLY good music for this not to be annoying unless you were some kind of hot PhD student making beats alone in her room

Image of a manuscript, generated in MidJourney by Suzette van Haaren

(a few words originally posted on Twitter on March 27, 2023 and then on my blog. It’s resonating there so I thought I would post it here too.)

I’ve been trying all morning to figure out what bothers me about these Mid journey-generated manuscripts without simply sounding like a Luddite, and I think I finally have it.

It’s because my interest in manuscripts is almost entirely about the humanity behind them. Who made them? Who used them and why? What happened to them after they were made? Where are they now? What did they mean in the past and what do they mean now?

A computer generated book doesn’t have any of that context. I’ve talked about the uncanny valley with regard to digitized manuscripts, and this is that, one step further. It’s one thing to digitize a manuscript in a way that elides its materiality, and a whole other thing to create manuscripts that don’t exist materially at all.

I think there are potentially interesting ways to use AI in my work. I’m interested in structure, and have been part of a project, VisColl, to develop models and software to build models of manuscripts. Could AI be used to combine structural models and digital images to create photorealistic imagery of existing manuscripts? Imagine an AI reconstruction of manuscripts cut apart and distributed by Otto Ege. Could it even generate pages that are lost as semi-realistic placeholders?

Just a few thoughts. I’m less interested in generating realistic looking manuscripts than in the potential to leverage the technology to help us understand the use and history of manuscripts that exist in the real world.