Tag: Culture

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The Algorithmic Turn: Emergent Processes and the Reformation of Knowledge

This is a meditation on the shifting agency of algorithms—once confined to calculation, they have emerged as active forces in the generation of knowledge. It reflects on how this transformation unsettles conventional ideas of authorship, intention, and understanding, inviting us to reconsider the delicate interplay between human thought and machine influence in shaping our reality. A continuation of my earlier post Abstracted Intelligence: AI, Intellectual Labour, and Berkeley’s Legacy in Public Policy. A reading list is below.

The algorithm has quietly evolved from a tool of calculation into a generative force shaping the very terrain of knowledge. No longer confined to precise computation alone, it now participates actively in structuring how we understand, interpret, and create. As Wendy Chun demonstrates, these systems do more than process inputs—they habituate us, embedding themselves deeply into our cognitive and social rhythms. This evolution signals a fundamental reconfiguration of knowledge itself: no longer solely the product of human cognition or systematic observation, knowledge emerges through recursive, machine-driven processes that entwine human and computational agency.

At the heart of the algorithm lies a set of rules designed to produce outcomes, but its function has expanded far beyond problem-solving. Luciana Parisi’s insight into algorithmic speculation captures how these processes generate novelty and reshape aesthetic and epistemic landscapes rather than simply calculate or represent. Algorithms now inhabit artistic, cultural, and social realms where they do not merely answer questions but frame the very logic through which questions arise. As Alexander Galloway emphasizes, the algorithm operates at the level of interface—a mediator where legibility is constructed and constrained, and where meaning becomes both possible and limited. This shift subtly relocates authority: from human hands to encoded processes, from fixed categories to contingent and often opaque patterns.

The consequences of this shift are profound. Tarleton Gillespie’s work reveals the infrastructural labour behind these systems, which govern visibility and legitimacy in ways frequently invisible to those governed by them. Algorithms do not simply replace human decisions; they reconfigure the conditions of decision-making itself, often beneath the surface. Their generative capacity introduces complexity and opacity, producing outcomes that exceed the understanding of their creators. These recursive patterns complicate verification and accountability, exposing a form of epistemic vulnerability that challenges traditional frameworks for knowledge and governance.

Expanding this perspective, Benjamin Bratton situates algorithms within a planetary computational architecture that transcends local or institutional boundaries, reconfiguring sovereignty, cognition, and identity at a global scale. This shift implicates knowledge production in a vast technical stack that governs infrastructures of power and information flow across geographies and societies. Kate Crawford grounds these theoretical insights in material realities, illustrating how AI and algorithmic systems are embedded in extractive economies, labor conditions, and environmental costs. What may appear as immaterial knowledge production is inseparable from physical and political infrastructures that shape and constrain the possibilities of computation.

Viewed through this lens, algorithmic processes resemble dynamic narratives unfolding through layers of input, context, and recombination. Like storytellers without fixed authorship, these systems orchestrate data flows and conditional operations to produce forms that exceed their components. The outputs are not passive reflections but active interventions that reorient our relationship with knowledge—from stable transmission toward real-time interpretation and negotiation. This dynamism signals both power and precariousness, demanding ongoing reassessment of assumptions and a willingness to confront the shifting locus of interpretive authority.

The visual arts offer a vivid example of this transformation. Generative algorithms produce imagery that moves beyond imitation to invention, collaborating with human creators while introducing unpredictability and chance. This interplay opens new aesthetic spaces but carries risks: the flattening of complexity, amplification of bias, and erosion of clear boundaries between authorship, intention, and effect. The algorithm becomes a co-creator and gatekeeper, shaping the field of possibility even as it expands it.

This transformation reflects a deeper epistemological turn. Knowledge no longer appears as fixed or discrete but emerges within dynamic, recursive systems that resist containment or full comprehension. Algorithms function as agents in the production of meaning, their agency demanding reflection on not only what they enable but also what they obscure or distort. In both artistic and intellectual practice, the tension between human intention and algorithmic variation generates new possibilities while compelling vigilance. When opacity deepens and systemic influences become normalized, the risks extend beyond creativity into the realm of knowledge itself.

This challenge recalls earlier philosophical critiques of abstraction and the limits of knowledge that I have talked about before. The eighteenth-century philosopher George Berkeley, for instance, challenged the legitimacy of abstract mathematical entities—infinitesimals—that lacked direct empirical manifestation. Such critiques resonate today as we grapple with algorithmic processes that often operate as “ghostly inferences,” producing outcomes whose internal workings and assumptions remain intangible or obscured. Like Berkeley’s warning against unmoored abstractions, this calls us to critically examine the epistemic foundations and consequences of the algorithmic turn. See my post on Berkeley for more here.

Emerging from this shift is a new epistemic condition: knowledge as emergent, relational, and mediated through evolving systems. In this environment, we become not only interpreters but stewards—charged with critical engagement and ethical responsibility for the infrastructures of meaning that shape our world. This requires embracing process over product, contingency over fixity, and acknowledging the redistribution of agency from cognition to computation, from conscious intent to iterative dynamics. The challenge moving forward is to interrogate not only what these systems make possible but to ask persistently under what assumptions, for whose benefit, and at what cost.

Machine art from an exhibition a few years back.

A short reading list from sources that I have read over the last few years on this topic.

Taken together, these six works form a conceptual constellation that reframes the algorithm not as a neutral instrument, but as an active participant in the production of knowledge, culture, and power. Wendy Chun foregrounds how algorithms habituate us, not just through interface but through repetition and memory, revealing the affective and social dimensions of computation. Luciana Parisi pushes further, showing that algorithms speculate—they generate rather than merely calculate—thus altering aesthetic and epistemic landscapes. Galloway’s analysis of the interface illuminates the algorithm as a mediator of meaning, a site where legibility is constructed and constrained. Tarleton Gillespie turns to the infrastructural labour behind algorithmic systems, exposing how platforms subtly police visibility and legitimacy under the guise of neutrality. Benjamin Bratton scales this transformation globally, mapping a planetary computational architecture that reconfigures sovereignty and cognition alike. And Kate Crawford grounds these abstractions in the material and political, revealing how AI and algorithmic systems are inseparable from extractive practices, labour exploitation, and environmental cost. As a group, these texts chart a shift in thought: from seeing algorithms as tools of control to understanding them as environments—generative, recursive, and contested—within which control, creativity, and understanding are continuously renegotiated.

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Liminal Visibility: Migration, Data, and the Politics of Boundaries

The first reading of Canada’s Bill C-2 signals a significant expansion of digital surveillance and data collection powers within immigration enforcement, including enhanced capabilities for electronic monitoring, biometric data use, and information sharing across agencies. These provisions illustrate how the state increasingly relies on computational systems to govern migration, embedding control within data infrastructures that produce visibility and legibility on its own terms. This legislative shift exemplifies the broader Data Turn—where algorithmic models and surveillance reshape who is recognized or excluded. Examining this through the lens of contemporary visual art reveals how artists expose and resist these mechanisms of control, offering critical counter-narratives that emphasize opacity, ambiguity, and the contested politics of representation in immigration regimes. This article stems from my reading of Canada’s Bill C-2 informed by Joy Rohde’s Armed with Expertise (that I just finished reading), connecting contemporary data-driven governance in immigration to its historical roots in Cold War expertise, and exploring how these dynamics shape the politics of visibility and liminality.

The Data Turn has reordered not just how states govern, but how they see. In systems of immigration control, policing, and security, governance now operates through data—through predictive models, biometric templates, and behavioral scores. These systems do not represent reality; they construct it, enacting a vision of the world in which subjects are rendered as variables and futures as risks. This logic, increasingly dominant across global institutions, marks a shift from rule by law to rule by model. And as it reconfigures power, it also reconfigures aesthetics.

This shift towards data-driven governance deeply affects how migratory subjects are categorized and controlled, often reducing complex human experiences to discrete data points subject to algorithmic prediction and intervention. The imposition of predictive models and biometric surveillance transforms migrants from individuals with agency into risks to be managed, their identities flattened into probabilistic profiles. This reordering not only reshapes bureaucratic practice but also redefines the conditions of visibility and invisibility, inclusion and exclusion. Those caught in liminal states—between legality and illegality, presence and absence—are particularly vulnerable to these regimes of measurement and control, which perpetuate uncertainty and precarity.

Visual artists have responded to this transformation not only by thematizing data regimes, but by dismantling the very mechanisms that render them invisible. They expose the apparatus behind the interface—the wires, scripts, ideologies—and stage counter-visions that assert opacity, indeterminacy, and refusal. In doing so, they challenge the way the Data Turn governs the liminal, especially those living in the suspended space of migration, statelessness, and bureaucratic indeterminacy.

This artistic intervention reframes vision itself—not as a neutral or purely descriptive act, but as a tool of power embedded within technological and bureaucratic systems. By peeling back layers of digital mediation, these artists reveal how contemporary surveillance and data infrastructures actively produce knowledge and enforce hierarchies. Their work highlights that visibility is not simply about being seen, but about how one is seen, categorized, and ultimately governed—a dynamic that is especially acute for those inhabiting the ambiguous spaces of migration and statelessness.

Artists like Trevor Paglen and Hito Steyerl foreground this shift from image to instrument. In their work, surveillance footage, facial recognition outputs, and satellite tracking systems are not just visual materials—they are operational weapons. Paglen’s images of classified military sites or undersea data cables reveal the landscape of surveillance that underpins contemporary geopolitics. Steyerl, in pieces like How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File, explores how machine vision abstracts, targets, and governs. In both cases, the act of seeing is no longer passive; it is a condition of being classified and controlled. The migrant, in such systems, is no longer a presence to be engaged but a deviation to be filtered—a datapoint, a heat signature, a probability.

Paglen and Steyerl’s work exposes the mechanisms through which visibility becomes a tool of control, transforming subjects into data points within vast systems of surveillance. Yet this logic of enforced legibility provokes a critical response: a turn toward opacity as a form of resistance. Where the state insists on clarity and categorization, artists embrace ambiguity and fragmentation, challenging the totalizing gaze and creating spaces where identity and presence refuse easy definition. This dialectic between exposure and concealment reflects the lived realities of migrants caught within regimes that demand transparency but offer exclusion.

If the state’s data infrastructures demand visibility and legibility, many artists respond with strategic opacity. Édouard Glissant’s philosophy of opacity—his insistence on the right not to be reduced—resonates powerfully here. In the works of Wangechi Mutu and Walid Raad, opacity takes material form: fragmentation, distortion, layering, and pseudofactuality unsettle any stable claim to truth or identity. These aesthetic strategies echo the experience of navigating migration regimes—systems that demand transparency from those who are systematically excluded from its protections. Opacity becomes a refusal of capture. It asserts a right to complexity in the face of an infrastructure that reduces lives to binary certainties.

I am guided here by the words of WG Sebald and the art of Gerhardt Richter and their use of things like dust and blur as integral to understanding of history and memory, in addition to the use of light and shadows in works of art immemorial and its relation to knowledge.

Building on this embrace of opacity, other artists turn their attention to archives—the sites where power not only records but also erases and shapes memory. By interrogating immigration documents, military footage, and bureaucratic data, these artists reveal how archives carry forward histories of violence and exclusion. Their work challenges the illusion of “raw” data, exposing it instead as deeply entangled with structures of power that continue to marginalize and render migrants invisible or precarious. In doing so, they create counter-archives that reclaim erased voices and insist on recognition beyond official narratives, mirroring the ongoing struggles of those living in legal and social liminality.

Other artists interrogate the archive: not just what is remembered, but how, by whom, and with what effects. The work of Forensic Architecture, Susan Schuppli, and Maria Thereza Alves reveals the afterlife of data—how immigration records, censuses, or military footage embed structural violence into bureaucratic memory. Their work testifies to how data is never “raw”: it is collected through regimes of power, and it carries that violence forward. These artists reanimate what official systems erase, constructing counter-archives that expose the silences, absences, and structural forgettings built into systems of documentation. This resonates deeply with the immigrant condition, in which legal presence is provisional and recognition is always deferred.

As archival artists uncover the hidden violences embedded in bureaucratic memory, another group of practitioners turns to the physical and infrastructural dimensions of data governance. By making visible the often-invisible hardware and networks that sustain digital control, these artists reveal how power operates not only through data but through material systems—servers, cables, and code—that shape everyday life. This exposure challenges the myth of a seamless digital realm, reminding us that governance is grounded in tangible, contested spaces where decisions about inclusion and exclusion are enacted.

Where the logic of governance is increasingly immaterial—hidden in code, servers, and proprietary systems—some artists work to make the infrastructure visible. James Bridle, in exploring what he terms the “New Aesthetic,” captures the eerie, semi-visible zone where machine perception intersects with urban life and planetary surveillance. Ingrid Burrington’s maps and guides to internet infrastructure render tangible the cables, server farms, and chokepoints that quietly govern digital existence. These works push back against the naturalization of the digital by showing it as a system of decisions, exclusions, and material constraints.

The “Data Turn” can be understood as a continuation of intellectual movements that critically examine the production and mediation of knowledge, much like the “Literary Turn” of the late twentieth century. The Literary Turn foregrounded language and narrative as active forces shaping historical meaning and subjectivity, challenging claims to objective or transparent truth. Similarly, the Data Turn interrogates the rise of data and computational systems as new epistemic tools that do not merely represent social realities but construct and govern them. This shift compels historians to reconsider the archives, sources, and methodologies that underpin their work, recognizing that data is embedded within power relations and ideological frameworks. Both turns reveal the contingency of knowledge and demand critical attention to the infrastructures through which it is produced and deployed.

By revealing the physical infrastructure behind digital governance, artists highlight how power operates through material systems that govern access and control. This focus on the tangible complements artistic engagements with the symbolic and bureaucratic forms that mediate migration. Together, these practices expose how both infrastructure and imagery function as aesthetic regimes—tools that shape and enforce legal and political inclusion, while also offering sites for creative rupture and alternative narratives.

Even the forms that mediate migration—passport photos, visa documents, biometric scans—are aesthetic regimes. They precede legal recognition; they shape it. Artists like Bouchra Khalili, in works like The Mapping Journey Project, appropriate these documentary forms not to affirm their authority, but to rupture them. Her work stages alternative cartographies of movement—ones based not on state control, but on narrative, memory, and resistance. In such works, the migrant is not a risk profile, but a storyteller.

By transforming state documentation into acts of storytelling and resistance, artists reclaim the migrant’s agency from reductive systems of classification. This reimagining challenges the prevailing logic of legibility, opening space for more nuanced understandings of identity and belonging beyond the constraints of bureaucratic control.

Across these practices, art offers not just critique but proposition. It creates space for reimagining how we understand legibility, personhood, and the infrastructures that shape both. In contrast to the Data Turn’s promise of seamless optimization, these works embrace what is incomplete, contradictory, and opaque. They remind us that data is not destiny, and that what cannot be captured might still be what matters most.

Together, these artistic interventions reveal that data regimes are not neutral frameworks but deeply embedded with values and power. By embracing ambiguity and incompleteness, they challenge dominant narratives of control and certainty, opening new possibilities for understanding identity and presence beyond bureaucratic constraints.

For scholars working at the intersection of immigration, data, and liminality, this aesthetic terrain is not peripheral—it is central. Art shows us that the Data Turn is not merely technical; it is philosophical. It carries assumptions about what kinds of life count, what futures are permissible, and how uncertainty should be managed. Visual practices, especially those rooted in the experience of liminality, offer a different grammar of visibility—one attuned not to classification, but to ambiguity; not to risk, but to relation.

photo of me, by me, from an art exhibition of the surveillance state in Montreal
this was from a room that tracked me taking photos of it taking photos of me

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Crowned in Ruin: Resonances Between Kurosawa’s Ran and Anthony Hopkins as King Lear (2018)

This post builds on a few earlier posts in the same vein, Cassian Andor and the Shakespearean Tragic: Macbeth in a Galaxy Far, Far Away and Shared Shadows: Samurai and Scottish Kings comparing recent interpretations of Shaekespeare's works. Each of those posts considered how Shakespearean motifs migrate across aesthetic and cultural regimes, illustrating the persistence of his tragic structures as they are recontextualized—from the ritualized violence and visual codes of feudal Japan to the allegorical architectures of the Star Wars universe. @DM - Thanks again for the suggestion!

Across cultures and media forms, King Lear, like MacBeth, resists containment, defying easy categorization or fixed interpretation. Its tragic scope—centred on the violent disintegration of power, family, and selfhood—possesses a universality that transcends time, place, and medium, enabling it to translate with remarkable force into radically different aesthetic and cultural settings. This is not simply a matter of thematic portability, but of profound structural and psychological resonance: the fissures in authority, the betrayal of kinship, and the unraveling of identity under existential pressures are motifs that persistently echo across civilizations and epochs. When Akira Kurosawa’s Ran is placed in dialogue with Richard Eyre’s 2018 film adaptation starring Anthony Hopkins, what emerges is not a straightforward comparative exercise but rather a meditation on how cinematic form and cultural context serve as vehicles to channel and transform the play’s eschatological despair. Both works adapt Lear not by slavishly preserving Shakespeare’s text or its Elizabethan idioms, but by distilling and preserving its structural truths: the implosion of sovereign power, the fragility and fracture of family bonds, and the ravaging of selfhood through time, betrayal, and grief. The critical question ceases to be about fidelity to text and instead focuses on how each adaptation exploits its medium—film’s visual grammar, narrative economy, and sensory impact—and responds to its own historical moment to crystallize a shared metaphysical crisis that remains powerfully relevant.

Kurosawa’s Ran is steeped in the imagery, ritual, and disciplined austerity of Noh theatre and the monumental landscapes of feudal Japan, offering a reimagining of Lear through the figure of Hidetora Ichimonji, an aging warlord whose attempt to divide his domain between his sons triggers a cascade of civil war, chaos, and existential ruin. Noh’s emphasis on stillness, subtle gestures, and the use of masks to express internal states resonates profoundly with Kurosawa’s cinematic approach to Lear. Rather than relying on dialogue to convey psychological complexity, Ran conveys the ineffable through composition and the choreography of bodies within space—faces frozen in painted expressions of torment, eyes that communicate despair through a stillness that contrasts sharply with the violent chaos surrounding them. This ritualized embodiment of suffering heightens the sense that the characters are not merely individuals but archetypes caught in the inexorable machinery of fate. The slow, deliberate pacing and the stylized blocking in Ran echo Noh’s meditative rhythms, inviting viewers into a contemplative space where tragedy is not simply witnessed but intuited at a spiritual level.

This film is a work not of language or speech but of silence and visual poetry: moments of stillness punctuated by haunting gazes exchanged across blood-soaked battlefields, the sight of fallen bodies scattered across hills painted with a surreal red, and faces contorted into stylized masks of suffering and rage. Kurosawa deliberately evacuates Shakespeare’s rich verbal tapestry, replacing it with an intense focus on composition, movement, and the symbolic use of colour and space. The succession crisis, the brutality of civil war, and the devastating natural disasters that punctuate the narrative become more than mere plot elements; they are staged as elemental forces working against human order, as if the natural world itself revolts against the arrogance and folly of man. This is Lear refracted through a cosmology governed not by Christian providence or justice but by the inexorable logic of karma and cosmic balance. The film’s sense of time is cyclical and cosmic rather than linear: history is not a progression but a repeating pattern, where violence begets more violence and human folly is met not with divine retribution but with the cold, indifferent consequences of fate. The film’s epic scale and ritualized style invite viewers to perceive the tragedy as part of a universal, cyclical human condition, where individual and political collapse mirror the vast, relentless rhythms of the cosmos.

Moreover, Kurosawa’s masterful use of sky imagery throughout Ran amplifies the film’s cosmic and metaphysical dimensions. The vastness of the sky—whether storm-darkened, brooding with portent, or piercingly clear—serves as a mutable canvas reflecting the inner turmoil and external chaos that engulf Hidetora and his world. In key sequences, the sky appears almost as a silent, omnipresent witness to human folly and suffering, its shifting colours and moods marking the rise and fall of power and sanity. Storm clouds gathering above battlefields echo the gathering doom, while moments of eerie stillness under open blue skies accentuate the loneliness and vulnerability of the fallen warlord. This sky imagery resonates with the cyclical view of history embedded in the film: the heavens do not intervene with divine justice but remain indifferent, a vast and empty space that dwarfs human struggles and amplifies their tragic futility. The sky thus becomes a symbol of the cosmic order—or disorder—that underlies the mortal world, a reminder that human agency is caught within forces far greater than itself.

In this way, Kurosawa’s visual and thematic choices transform Lear from a tragedy of a singular monarch into an epic meditation on the impermanence of power and the fragile intersection of human will with destiny. The Noh-inspired stillness punctuating the chaos underscores a fatalistic acceptance, as characters enact their roles within a predetermined cosmic drama. This ritualized aesthetic deepens the film’s meditation on time—not as a linear march but as a swirling continuum where past violence informs present suffering, and where Hidetora’s downfall is but one turn in an endless cycle of rise and ruin.

In stark contrast, Eyre’s 2018 King Lear thrusts the drama into a recognizably contemporary and militarized state—a Britain that is vaguely 21st century, marked by post-democratic malaise and institutional coldness. This modern setting is not simply a backdrop but an active commentary: Lear here is not a tragic monarch steeped in dynastic tradition, but an autocrat unmoored from institutional constraints or moral accountability, whose hubris precipitates a breakdown resonant with the decline of modern empires and the fragility of late-stage political order. Anthony Hopkins’s Lear is portrayed with a brutal clarity, embodying a figure more brittle than mad, more cruel than noble, a man whose decline is accelerated by a society that demands strength and punishes weakness or ambiguity without mercy. The adaptation distills Shakespeare’s sprawling text to its rawest emotional and political conflicts, tightening the narrative noose so that the tension and despair are borne primarily through the actors’ performances rather than linguistic flourish. Here, the tragedy is stripped of cosmic or metaphysical grandeur and recast as systemic and institutional: it is the failure of governance, the erosion of familial loyalty, and the collapse of genuine care within a hypermodern, bureaucratic, and alienated social order that drive the narrative. Madness in this version is psychological trauma writ large, a fragmented internal collapse in a world that has become inhospitable to vulnerability, a bleak portrait of mental disintegration framed by cold, oppressive spaces that amplify isolation.

Yet, despite these vastly different aesthetics and cultural idioms, both Ran and Eyre’s King Lear converge around a powerful, shared image: the body stripped bare and exposed—on the storm-swept heath, amid the ruins of once-powerful realms, in madness, silence, and desolation. In Ran, Hidetora’s corporeal decline is rendered as a slow, mournful journey across desolate fields ravaged by storms and bloodshed, his mind shattered by the horrors unleashed in his name. His body becomes a visual embodiment of shame, madness, and the ultimate futility of worldly power, framed through ritualized imagery and the stylized masks of classical Japanese theatre. In Eyre’s adaptation, Hopkins’s Lear similarly staggers through urban wastelands and confining, prison-like interiors, his psyche collapsing under the cumulative weight of regret, betrayal, and lost authority. Both men are undone by the very power they once wielded—victims of a violent logic of their own making. Their children—whether daughters as in Shakespeare and Eyre, or sons as in Ran—echo this collapse structurally and thematically: filial relationships degrade into transactional calculations, virtue is met with indifference or cruelty, and kindness where it surfaces is either futile or extinguished. The family becomes a site where political and emotional structures alike unravel, embodying the deep fractures within human society and identity.

Though these adaptations differ markedly in their gestures, they resonate profoundly in tone and affect. Both reject Shakespeare’s verbal poetry in favour of registers suited to their respective media and cultures: Kurosawa’s painterly frames and ritualized blocking recall the precision and symbolism of Japanese theatre, while Eyre’s claustrophobic mise-en-scène and psychological realism immerse the viewer in a contemporary world stripped to its emotional essentials. Both invite audiences not to decode or intellectualize Shakespeare’s text, but to viscerally experience what happens when the scaffolding of meaning—family, order, sovereignty—collapses into chaos. The storm that rages in both works is more than a plot device; it is a metaphysical force, a symbol of the loss of place and belonging in a world turned hostile and indifferent. This elemental turmoil conveys a profound crisis of being, where the human self is uprooted from the structures that once gave it identity and security.

Just as Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood and the Donmar Warehouse’s Macbeth illuminated each other through resonance rather than direct comparison, so too do Ran and Eyre’s King Lear engage in a shared dialogue across cultural and temporal divides. Together, they create a sensorium of decay and desolation, drawing from culturally distinct but emotionally proximate traditions. One unfolds through the epic fatalism of Japanese historical drama, where ritual and cosmic cycles shape human destiny; the other, through the claustrophobic intimacy of modern political collapse, exposing the fragility of late capitalist governance and family life. Yet despite these formal and cultural differences, both leave us with the same haunting sense: that the human heart, once severed from love, responsibility, and the ethical bonds that sustain it, cannot endure the corrosive weight of its own power.

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Shared Shadows: Samurai and Scottish Kings

After seeing the Donmar Warehouse’s Macbeth starring David Tennant and Cush Jumbo, alongside Andor (see my other post here), a friend suggested I revisit Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood from 1957—a prompt that opened a corridor between seemingly distant worlds.

Across cultures and centuries, Macbeth has proven uniquely adaptable—not because its language is universal, but because its psychological architecture and ritual mechanics resonate beyond context. The play’s core is less about words than about the patterns of human ambition, the cyclical nature of power, and the haunting consequences of guilt. These elemental forces find expression through highly specific cultural forms, yet somehow the underlying emotional and metaphysical structures transcend linguistic and geographic boundaries. When we look at Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood alongside the Donmar Warehouse’s modern staging, what emerges is not merely a contrast in style or medium, but a deep structural affinity. Both works articulate a shared grammar of ambition, guilt, and spectral dread, communicating a universal human crisis through distinct sensory and ritualistic vocabularies.

In Throne of Blood, the influence of traditional Japanese theatre, particularly Noh, shapes the film’s aesthetic and emotional tenor. The soft rustle of Lady Asaji’s kimono, for instance, is not incidental but a deliberate sonic signifier steeped in cultural meaning. In Japanese performance, such sounds evoke the ghostly restraint and suppressed violence characteristic of spirits and doomed aristocracy. This subtle auditory presence externalizes internal psychological turmoil in a way that is deeply evocative yet restrained—an elegiac whisper of fate’s inexorability. Likewise, the persistent motif of crows circling or calling in the background serves as an ominous refrain, a natural chorus underscoring the inevitability of doom. The bird’s symbolic weight crosses cultural boundaries, appearing in both Kurosawa’s and the Donmar production as a harbinger of death and the uncanny.

Conversely, the Donmar Warehouse’s staging, while embedded in contemporary theatrical forms, draws on an equally potent ritual language of its own. The palpable tension, the fractured psychological states, and the ever-present sense of paranoia and surveillance resonate with modern anxieties but also echo timeless human fears. The crows’ calls punctuate the space, anchoring the narrative’s supernatural and fatalistic elements, while the intense physicality and raw vocal performances evoke a different kind of ritual — one rooted in Western dramatic tradition but suffused with a contemporary edge. This juxtaposition reveals how cultural codes operate not to isolate but to illuminate shared affective experiences. Both versions of Macbeth externalize inner collapse and moral disintegration through a rich interplay of sound, movement, and symbolic imagery, adapted to their cultural and historical contexts.

The fascination lies not in erasing these differences, but in tracing how seemingly distinct traditions converge in affective resonance. Shakespearean eschatology, with its linear progression toward an apocalyptic reckoning, contrasts with the cyclical time of East Asian fatalism, yet both frame ambition and guilt within inevitable cosmic orders. Similarly, courtly restraint as embodied by Lady Asaji’s measured silence finds an uneasy counterpart in the martial paranoia of the Donmar’s Macbeth, who is equally trapped by invisible forces and internal demons. These are not mere thematic overlaps but expressions of ontologies that shape how power, fate, and the self are understood and performed. The works do not speak to each other through direct translation but through the vibration of shared human experience refracted through culturally specific prisms.

In this light, Throne of Blood and the Donmar Macbeth are less adaptations of a text and more dialogues between worldviews, each exposing how ritual and narrative craft produce meaning. They remind us that theatre and film are not simply vehicles for storytelling but complex systems of sensory and symbolic mediation where time, space, and identity intersect. The rustling kimono, the haunting caw of crows, the measured silences, and the bursts of violent expression function as nodes in a network of affect, drawing spectators into a shared psychic landscape of dread and desire. By exploring these shared shadows—between samurai and Scottish kings, between East Asian fatalism and Western eschatology—we glimpse the universality of Macbeth’s tragic vision while appreciating the particularities that make each iteration compelling and distinct.

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Cassian Andor and the Shakespearean Tragic: Macbeth in a Galaxy Far, Far Away

I just finished watching David Tennant and Cush Jumbo’s Macbeth and the experience lingered long after the final scene. There’s something about the way Shakespeare captures ambition’s darkness, the pull of fate, and the heavy weight of guilt that feels timeless. This production is one of the best that I have seen and I watched it from the comfort of my living room. I have also been watching Andor and suddenly, Cassian Andor’s story in Andor and Rogue One came into sharper focus—not as a simple space rebel, but as a tragic figure shaped by forces beyond his control, haunted by his own choices, and bound to a destiny that feels both cruel and inevitable.

Like Macbeth, Cassian is caught between his will and something larger—something mysterious and powerful. In Macbeth, it’s the witches. Their prophecy cuts through the air, twisting the future and planting seeds of ambition and doubt. They are strange, otherworldly figures—symbols of chaos, fate, and the unknown. In the Star Wars galaxy, that mysterious force takes shape as the Force itself, an invisible current that both guides and traps the characters who try to grasp it. It’s the spiritual undercurrent to Cassian’s rebellion, the unseen power that moves through everything and everyone.

Cassian isn’t driven by ambition like Macbeth—he doesn’t thirst for power or crowns. Instead, his fire burns for justice, freedom, survival. But the price he pays feels just as steep. Watching him, you feel the weight he carries: the betrayals, the violence, the endless paranoia. Like Macbeth’s hallucinations—ghosts and bloodied hands—Cassian’s scars are quieter but no less real. They live in his haunted eyes and his weary silence. Both men are trapped in a cruel dance with their consciences, a struggle that shakes them to their core.

Cassian sits in the shuttle, silent, his face carved in shadow. Jyn speaks beside him, unaware. He stares ahead, burdened—not just by his orders, but by the years that led him here. After Andor, the moment is heavy with history: this is a man unraveling quietly, long before the mission begins.

And yet, here the stories split. Macbeth’s path is a downward spiral—corruption, tyranny, death. Cassian’s is a slow-burning tragedy that ends in a sacrificial blaze. But beneath that sacrifice lies a quieter, deeper pain: the tragedy of a man caught between who he is, who others expect him to be, and who he fears he can never fully become. His death in Rogue One isn’t just an end; it’s a beginning. The bitter loss becomes the spark that lights a rebellion, a defiant hope born from sacrifice. Where Macbeth’s tragedy warns of ambition’s ruin, Cassian’s story whispers that even in loss, even in the failure to fully embody the heroic ideal imposed on him, there is power and meaning.

There’s also something communal in Cassian’s fate. He’s not alone—his sacrifice belongs to the many who fight alongside him, the countless unknown rebels who risk everything. And yet, in this collective struggle, Cassian’s personal fracture remains: the quiet anguish of feeling unable to be the perfect hero, the ideal symbol, or the saviour everyone demands. It’s a chorus of voices, a shared grief and courage that makes his story more than personal—yet his story is also the story of fractured identity, of the lonely burden carried behind the mask of rebellion. It is the collective heartbeat of resistance, shaped by the silent cracks in its most reluctant hero.

In the end, Cassian Andor stands as a tragic hero for our times—haunted and conflicted, caught in the relentless currents of unseen forces that shape his fate and fracture his identity. He wrestles endlessly between what the world demands of him and the limits of what he can give. The weight of sacrifice presses down not just on his actions but on who he is—or who he feels he is failing to be. Like Macbeth, Cassian’s story plunges into the shadows that live within us all: the fears, doubts, and moral ambiguities that make heroism feel at once noble and unbearably heavy. Yet where Macbeth’s descent ends in ruin and silence, Cassian’s darkness carries within it a fragile, flickering hope. His tragedy is not just about loss but about the quiet resilience of that spark—an ember that refuses to die even when the night seems endless. It reminds us that even in the deepest shadows of doubt and sacrifice, there is still light, still meaning, still a reason to keep fighting.

But what sets Cassian apart from the tragic heroes of the past—Macbeth, Oedipus, Hamlet—is the modern complexity of his identity and the fractured nature of his heroism. Classical tragedy often hinges on a fatal flaw—ambition, pride, hubris—that leads to a solitary downfall. Cassian’s tragedy, however, is rooted in a more nuanced tension: between the self he knows and the impossible ideals others impose on him; between the limits of his own being and the vast collective cause he must serve. He is not undone by hubris but burdened by the crushing weight of expectation and the sense that he can never fully embody the hero he is meant to be.

Unlike the solitary tragic figures of old, Cassian’s story emerges from within the murk of a collective struggle—where the self dissolves into the cause, where one life is both vital and disposable. His sacrifice is not singular but shared, echoing the quiet heroism of countless others lost to the margins of history. And yet, this solidarity does not spare him from isolation. If anything, it deepens it. He moves through the rebellion as a man hollowed by experience, forced to wear conviction like armour, even as uncertainty corrodes him from within. After Andor, we see that his courage isn’t blind—it’s bruised. That’s what makes it tragic. That’s what makes it real.

Moreover, Cassian’s tragedy is entwined with mystical and systemic forces—the Force, the Empire, the rebellion itself—which are not mere backdrops but active players shaping his destiny. His struggle is both personal and political, reflecting the modern anxieties of agency and meaning in a world dominated by overwhelming systems beyond individual control. In this way, Cassian Andor is a tragic hero for our fragmented, uncertain age—haunted by fate, fractured by identity, and defined by the delicate balance between resistance and sacrifice.

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Narrative Laundering: The Hidden Art of Shaping Belief

From The Economist: Russia is particularly keen on this kind of “narrative laundering”, in the words of Victor Ilie of Snoop, a news site in Romania. 

In Canada’s recent federal election, the battlefield was not confined to physical spaces or traditional media but unfolded dramatically within the digital realm. Here, foreign actors deployed a subtle yet potent form of information warfare, crafting narratives that blurred truth and fiction with deliberate precision. These stories did not announce themselves with grand fanfare; instead, they seeped quietly through trusted networks, their origins masked, their intentions concealed. Each narrative was layered and rewritten, shaped not only by its creators but by the very algorithms that govern digital spaces.

This contemporary form of narrative laundering, where information is continuously repurposed and sanitized to appear credible, exposes the vulnerabilities of our democratic processes in an age dominated by digital flows. Algorithms—those invisible arbiters of attention—act not merely as neutral conduits but as active amplifiers, selectively promoting content that engages, divides, or provokes. In doing so, they transform these crafted stories into echo chambers of influence, deepening existing social fractures while eroding trust in institutions meant to uphold collective governance.

The design of digital platforms, driven by profit and engagement incentives, turns influence into a form of subtle accumulation—where power grows not through direct confrontation but through constant, invisible shaping of attention and belief. This quiet manipulation feeds on data, harvesting behavioral patterns to refine and target narratives that shift perceptions and identities over time. The recent Canadian election exposes how this relentless layering of curated content can erode democracy, not by force, but through the gradual distortion of collective reality—an insidious accumulation of influence embedded in the architecture of the digital economy.

This moment demands a reckoning with the interplay between narrative, technology, and power. It calls us to consider not only the content of stories but the systems that enable their spread and transformation. To engage critically with digital narratives is to participate in a form of cultural vigilance—recognizing the layers beneath the surface, the coded incentives that shape what we see, and the ethical stakes of storytelling in an algorithmic age.

Storytelling is an act of resistance, a deliberate effort to reclaim truth amid the noise. It challenges us to move beyond passive consumption and to cultivate an active, critical literacy that can navigate complexity without succumbing to cynicism. As the lines between fact and fabrication blur, our collective task is to safeguard the democratic project by illuminating the mechanisms of influence, fostering resilience, and insisting on narratives that honour nuance, transparency, and human connection.

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Montreal in Black and White

Montreal’s architecture is a site where history and memory converge, with its blend of neoclassical, modernist, and postmodern structures reflecting the city’s layered cultural narratives. In monochrome, the play of light and shadow accentuates this tension between past and present. Shadows here are not simply absence but a marker of time, revealing the subtle ways in which architecture both preserves and reinterprets the city’s evolving identity and historical consciousness. And don’t get me started about the food!

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The Image Thinks: AI, Algorithms, and the Shifting Ground of Knowledge

There was a time when images were evidence. A medieval map was not just a representation but a claim to knowledge, an argument about how the world was structured. A Renaissance painting revealed divine order, a photograph proved that something was. Today, we face a new kind of image—one that does not record but generates, one whose authority does not come from witnessing reality but from statistical inference. AI-generated imagery does not document the world; it thinks the world.  

For centuries, knowledge was structured around categories. Aristotle, Linnaeus, and later the Encyclopédistes built systems to organize the world, classifying nature, history, and human thought into legible hierarchies. Even with the rise of empirical science, knowledge remained something accumulated, structured, and verified through observation.  

mid journey image #prompt = [coffee in St. Peter’s Square –ar1:1]

The algorithm, however, does not organize knowledge in this way. It does not categorize the world from above but learns patterns from within. Unlike an 18th-century taxonomist, an AI system does not define a tiger by its stripes or its feline characteristics—it simply processes vast quantities of data, detecting statistical correlations that allow it to recognize a tiger without ever defining it.  

This is a profound shift. Knowledge, once built through observation and classification, is now generated by inference. The AI-generated image follows this logic. It does not capture a moment, as a photograph once did, nor does it interpret a subject, as a painting might. Instead, it predicts what an image should look like, based on probabilities. The result is something fundamentally different from representation: an image that emerges from a machine’s internal logic rather than from reality itself.  

For centuries, images were linked to material constraints: pigments on a canvas, light on film, a chemical process that left behind a physical trace. Even digital images, while infinitely replicable, still maintained a relationship to a source—a photograph taken, a frame captured. AI-generated imagery untethers itself from this history. It is not a copy but an invention, synthesized from a dataset of other images, none of which serve as the original.  

This is not just a technological change; it is an epistemological one. If we once sought truth in the documentary image, where do we look now? If an AI can generate a face that has never existed, what happens to our belief in the evidentiary power of the portrait? And if an algorithm can create art indistinguishable from human creativity, what happens to the very idea of authorship?  

midJourney image #prompt = [idonthaveacoolname.com –ar 1:1]

We might think of AI as a historian of its own kind—one that does not preserve the past but extracts patterns from it. The great archives of human culture—museums, libraries, film reels—once functioned as repositories of collective memory. AI, trained on these vast datasets, does not remember but predicts. It does not curate the past; it recombines it.  

The implications of this shift extend beyond aesthetics. In medicine, AI does not diagnose based on fixed categories but on pattern recognition, seeing correlations that escape human detection. In law, AI systems sift through precedent not to enforce continuity but to optimize decisions. Across disciplines, knowledge is becoming less about interpretation and more about computation.  

Yet there is something unsettling in this. AI-generated imagery reminds us that knowledge, long thought to be something we built, structured, and controlled, may now be something we train—a vast statistical model that does not explain but predicts, does not reason but generates.  

midJourney image #prompt = [grid of a single leaf –ar 1:1]

If the image was once a window onto the world, AI has made it a hall of mirrors, endlessly reflecting a logic we do not fully understand. The question is no longer whether these images are real, but rather: whose reality do they belong to?

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The Architects of Transience: Concrete, Infrared, and the Unraveling of Modernity

The paradox of concrete as both the symbol of modernity and its antithesis—destruction—has been beautifully and vividly re-examined in the 2024 documentary by Viktor Kossakovsky,  Architecton. The film opens with the ravaged remains of concrete structures in Ukraine, setting the stage for an exploration not only of architecture’s relationship to materiality but of its role in the broader narrative of progress and decay. Through this lens, Kazimir Malevich’s geometrically pure forms gain new resonance, shifting from abstract utopian ideals to poignant metaphors for the tension between stability and fragility inherent in all human endeavours.

The ruins of Baalbek, stark against the infrared sky, their massive columns diminished yet unwavering. Their presence in the landscape is both imposing and ghostly, a relic of human ambition that now exists in a state of suspension, neither fully intact nor wholly lost. In the documentary’s meditation on concrete and stone, Baalbek serves as a distant counterpoint—where modern concrete is cast and shaped to fit the needs of the present, these ancient stones, quarried and placed millennia ago, endure as both triumph and ruin, a reminder that all architecture, no matter how permanent it seems, is ultimately subject to time.

One striking quotation from the documentary reads: “After water, concrete is the most widely used substance on Earth.” This simple statement highlights concrete’s ubiquity and significance in shaping the modern world. Water—life’s most fundamental element—has long been the basis of human survival and connection with nature, while concrete, as the second most used material, represents humankind’s drive to dominate and define its surroundings. Yet, despite its ubiquity, concrete’s eventual decay exposes a different truth: the same forces that humans attempt to master—through architecture, engineering, and design—are ultimately beyond control. Concrete, while seemingly permanent, is just as vulnerable as the stone it mimics, subject to the ravages of time, war, and nature.

In one particularly striking image, a solitary man with a wheelbarrow is dwarfed by a massive block of stone, carved millennia ago and abandoned. This visual echoes the evocative imagery of Michelangelo’s Prisoner statues, housed in Florence’s Accademia Gallery. These figures, half-formed, trapped in their stone prison, seem to struggle towards liberation, embodying both the act of creation and the stasis of unfulfilled potential. The abandoned stone, much like these unfinished figures, occupies a space between being and non-being, between intention and entropy. The stone seems to call out for a form that has not yet been realized, just as the massive concrete structures in the documentary gesture toward what could have been—monuments of progress now succumbed to time and violence. In this way, both the material and its artistic potential exist in a state of suspended animation, caught between the historical force of its creation and the inevitable dissolution of all things.

Integral to this exploration is the use of infrared imagery, a technological choice that disrupts our traditional understanding of built structures. Infrared, often used to reveal hidden heat signatures, transforms concrete buildings into spectral forms. What was once solid, monumental, and permanent is reduced to an ethereal presence, a visual manifestation of the invisible energies and decay beneath the surface. It’s as though the material itself is attempting to communicate its vulnerability—an image of architecture that exposes itself not as a static entity, but as a system of energies, histories, and eventual dissolution.

A crucial scene in the film—an extended sequence of a massive rockslide—underscores the inherent power of stone, nature’s counterpoint to human architecture. As colossal boulders cascade down the mountainside, the camera lingers on the massive, unyielding force of the stone. This raw, natural destruction stands in stark contrast to the calculated, human-made beauty of classical architecture. The imagery here is a reminder that stone, while emblematic of permanence, is also vulnerable to the overwhelming forces of nature. This stark juxtaposition of classical ruins, once thought to be eternal, returning to the earth, punctuates the fragility of human ambition and the fleeting nature of monumental achievement.

The pairing of concrete and rock, two materials that symbolize permanence, with such violence and collapse speaks to their liminal nature. Both substances, when used for habitation or as symbols, straddle the boundary between human-made constructs and the natural world. They strain the traditional distinctions between subject and object, man and nature—two concepts that architecture has long worked to contain and define. Concrete, as both a building material and a symbol of modernity, offers the illusion of control over nature. Yet, it is precisely this illusion that makes it so susceptible to forces beyond our grasp. Rock, though an ancient and seemingly immutable material, can also become a harbinger of destruction when untethered from human will. These materials blur the boundaries of the architectural discourse, pointing to an inherent instability between humanity’s ambitions and the larger natural forces at play.

Concrete, though seemingly durable, is as much a material of transience as it is of permanence. The structures it creates can endure for centuries, but the very process of their construction—through human labour, environmental forces, and the inevitable decay—ensures their eventual dissolution. In this, concrete is emblematic of the human condition: the striving for permanence caught in the endless flux of change and decay.

Through this lens, the interaction between concrete and rock becomes a reflection of the tension between human intention and natural forces. These materials are not mere objects to be shaped or controlled but are agents in their own right, influencing the spaces they inhabit. When viewed through infrared, they reveal themselves not as passive backdrops but as active participants in the construction of meaning. Concrete’s malleability and rock’s permanence, when combined, create a tension that straddles the boundary between subject and object, a dialectic that architecture itself has long sought to transcend. If technologies shape our understanding of reality, then the use of infrared here forces us to confront the complex interplay between human creation and the natural world.

Malevich’s Architecton, in this context, becomes more than a study of abstract form. It serves as a blueprint for reconsidering the purpose and meaning of architecture in a time when the very materials that define our spaces are constantly in flux. If the built environment is constantly being reshaped by forces both seen and unseen, then architecture is not a static monument but an ongoing negotiation between humanity and the materials that constitute it. And in the suspended forms of stone and concrete, we find a reminder that art, too, lies at the intersection of creation and destruction—a space where form is constantly being struggled into existence, only to eventually fade back into the material world.

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Mechanized Indeterminacy: AI, Asemic Writing, and the Fiction of the Text-Image Collapse

A friend sent me a link to this article: Operative ekphrasis: the collapse of the text/image distinction in multimodal AI by Hannes Bajouhr.

The argument that multimodal AI collapses the text-image distinction is, at first glance, compelling. However, this claim relies on an implicit assumption that such a distinction was ever stable or clearly demarcated. A closer examination reveals that AI’s generative processes do not so much “collapse” the distinction as they do mechanize an already-existing instability—one that has long been explored through avant-garde literary and artistic practices, particularly in asemic writing. 

Throughout the 20th century, artists and writers repeatedly disrupted the supposed boundary between text and image. Dadaist collage, Surrealist automatic writing, and concrete poetry all foregrounded the materiality of language, demonstrating that text could function visually as much as linguistically. In Lettrism, pioneered by Isidore Isou in the 1940s, letters were untethered from conventional phonetic or semantic meaning, transformed into visual compositions. Henri Michaux’s asemic ink drawings similarly dissolved the distinction between writing and mark-making, demonstrating that the act of inscription need not resolve into legibility. These historical precedents complicate the article’s central claim: rather than producing an unprecedented collapse, AI merely accelerates and mechanizes a longstanding artistic impulse to question the division between reading and seeing. 

Asemic writing resists the tyranny of meaning, inviting the reader into an interpretative space where language dissolves into pure form.

If asemic writing operates through intentional illegibility, inviting interpretation while resisting definitive meaning, AI-generated text-image hybrids do not resist meaning so much as they produce an excess of it. The logic of machine learning generates outputs that are overdetermined by probabilistic associations rather than by authorial intent. Cy Twombly’s gestural inscriptions, for instance, suggest meaning without fully disclosing it; their power lies in their resistance to linguistic capture. By contrast, AI-generated multimodal outputs do not refuse meaning but generate an abundance of semiotic possibilities, saturating the interpretative field. The article does not fully account for this distinction, treating AI’s multimodal capabilities as a collapse rather than an overproduction, a shift from resistant ambiguity to computational fluency. 

What is most fundamentally altered by AI is not the existence of an intermediary space between text and image but the industrialization of indeterminacy itself. Asemic writing historically resists institutional legibility, positioning itself against systems of meaning-making that demand clear semiotic functions. AI, however, converts indeterminacy into a computational process, endlessly producing outputs that are neither fully readable nor wholly visual but are nevertheless monetized and instrumentalized. Where the illegibility of Chinese wild cursive calligraphy or Hanne Darboven’s sprawling numerical texts was once a site of aesthetic resistance, AI-driven multimodality turns this ambiguity into a product, systematizing what was once an act of refusal. 

By severing the link between signifier and signified, asemic writing exposes the visual unconscious of text, revealing writing as an act of mark-making rather than communication.

Rather than signaling the collapse of the text-image distinction, AI-driven multimodality reveals how this boundary has always been porous. The article’s central argument overlooks the long history of artistic and literary practices that have anticipated and complicated the very phenomenon it describes. A more nuanced approach would recognize that AI does not dissolve the distinction between text and image so much as it absorbs their instability into a system that operationalizes ambiguity at scale, transforming what was once a site of aesthetic and conceptual resistance into an automated process of production.