Louis Elton

I think it all might be more exciting than that. let me try: in my reading, the Bauhaus emerged primarily from Muthesius and the Deutscher Werk Bund. Behrens was an early example of the kind of work the DWB had made conceptually and institutionally possible. this matters because the birthplace of the idea that new aesthetic (and philosophical) forms are needed wasn't a company. it was a sort of movement that emerged from the arts, broadly speaking: an extremely small, and in some ways heretical, group of people who suggested that the arts embrace industrial materials and modes of production: as opportunities to render the arts and the human central to the new age. AEG was simply an early proof point. worth remembering: almost all contemporary artists and artisans disliked them. I try to link this to my work in SV and the civilization-scale rupture provoked by AI: yes, I think we need to do for AI what the Bauhaus tried to do for industrial materials and production. and yes, I think it requires us to break with the Bauhaus aesthetic. on to SV: sure, one large part of SV is caught up in the automation paradigm. the only form of technology they can imagine is the classical industrial machine. they might all see that we live through a civilization-scale event. but they can't see what philosophy or art would have to do with it. to them, it is civilization scale because we soon reach total automation. I regret this. tried to change it for ten years. modest success at best. on the other hand, there is now (and this is new and exciting, I think) a small group in SV that has a different take: they see that we live through a civilization-scale event AND they think that the only way to navigate such events successfully is to combine philosophical research, the search for new aesthetic forms, and technology development. @patrickc and @tylercowen are of huge significance here. the New Aesthetics grants and Stripe are positive examples. and there is also the work @collision is doing with artists like @john__gerrard. there is also the spectacular Abbye Churchill and, alongside her, @laurenepowell, building CASA this group, small but mighty, knows that AI has rendered insufficient the forms we inherited from the classical modern period (the Bauhaus!). they may even have convinced some frontier labs to take this seriously. but the frontier labs, in my experience, understand the question in terms of the product they build: let AI do it. the effect, as both @LouisElton96 and I have argued time and again, is slop. that is, the exact opposite of new aesthetic and philosophical forms. but to be fair, the number of artists who participated in slop production as a cultural moment is not small! to me, though, all of this means we live at a good moment in time: the above opens up the possibility for alternative approaches and places. places where one can combine philosophical research, the search for new aesthetic forms, and technology development. where one can empirically ask why the old forms no longer work. and where one can ask, experimentally, what has become possible that wasn't possible before. and how one could render these new possibilities aesthetically available. this likely means some version of continuity across change. and I think it should (a rupture is always a rupture with respect to something –– something one wishes to partly render relevant). do we want the frontier labs to actually be the place where the search for new forms happens? we might want them involved, but not in the lead? like AEG? that is, just as Muthesius and the Deutscher Werkbund created a possibility, we have to create possibilities today. Behrens was nice. but what Muthesius, Schlemmer, Gropius, Klee, Kandinsky, Itten, and Breuer opened up and enabled was much more profound and significant: Gestaltung as a legitimate artistic field in the machine age. as we leave the machine age and enter the AI age, we need independent sites for research, education, and innovation where we can come up with new aesthetic (and philosophical) forms. sites like Stella Matutina. or an Artisanal Intelligence Lab (which hopefully will be at Stella). or CASA. personally, I love the idea that this is a particularly fruitful field for Europe: philosophy + art + technology = Europe at its very best. and maybe @patrickc, as a European in SV, has been one of the door openers for all of that? 🎈