If you’re receiving this email, I ported you over from my old Substack, Lychee. Enjoy it! But feel free to unsubscribe if you don’t want to be here.
Last month, I ate a meal at Hyderabadi Zaiqa in Hell’s Kitchen that I would highly recommend—if you go, order the goat dum biryani, and pls tell me so we can discuss how they possible got the meat to be so tender. Afterwards, I walked down to the Whitney and caught an exhibit on the late Harold Cohen, who turned to generative art in 1968 after a successful career as a painter, meaning that some or all of his work after those years was created with the help of artificial intelligence. Like Meryl, below, which was first sketched by his intelligence AARON, and after, hand-colored by Cohen.
AARON is not a member of the royal family that dominates our conversations today; DALL-E, Midjourney, Stable Diffusion. These are deep learning models that use neural networks to spot patterns in vast blankets of data. Hence, the back-and-forth around where this data comes from and whether more data and improved models will lead us to artificial general intelligence (AI that can perform well on any task that requires human intelligence—like reading several types of texts and mapping it onto current events), and what to do if and when it will.
AARON is a symbolic AI. It was programmed with explicit rules and logic, slowly and carefully divined by Cohen from his mind, an exacting process that took decades and several programming languages and tools—FORTRAN, which required Cohen to feed punch cards to a batch process machine; C, with which his initial programs directed a drawing “turtle” equipped with a marker; plotters that granted AARON a three-dimensional knowledge base for it to think about space and anatomical structure.
Simply teaching AARON about color took “two to three years,” only made possible with a switch to programming language LISP in the 90s. This, as you can imagine, wasn’t as straightforward as telling AARON that red complements green or that purple is analogous to red; Cohen’s relationship with color, like yours or mine, was more individual, more intimate and internal.
What is a shape? What does it mean to shade? And what unintentional actions influence a work? What, for example, does it mean that you rest your elbow on paper while watercolor painting, that you always set it to dry at a certain angle, at a certain hour?
Cohen wouldn’t dare use the tool of another unless “there [was] perfect accord about what the package [was] supposed to do,” and said: “It would take an extraordinary act of insight on the part of a young artist to conclude that to have real power you must do your own programming.”
By the time of Susan with plant, the first image below, it was the 2000s, when AARON had grown sophisticated enough to work on portraiture. You’ll see that the position of the eyes and nose are not symmetrical; they are at axes programmed by Cohen, lopsided and far away, and match how eyes appeared in his mind.
At 22, I moved from Queens to Bangalore, still a bit head-in-the-clouds despite the many jobs I’d held. I lucked out, met a kind editor who said that I was a writer, that she saw it in me. She offered me a job at her tech publication, a well-regarded one headquartered in Singapore. I was thankful and desperate to prove myself.
I wrote daily articles with my neck folded into itself. I wrote in traffic-stuck cabs, learned to transcribe as people spoke, to move my hand faster than my brain and flick the piece off the griddle when the thought was freshly hot. I learned to speak in chorus with the discourse, to mash out impressions of what I had consumed. Some of it was true; other times, I missed the mark. Much of it was not intentional.
I learned many things during those years; how to work, march to a quick beat, put whatever came out of my own intellect to the side while I wrote. What I did not learn, after all those years writing, was the secret way that language can yield for those who know how to use it well, how it can be a tool to clear out those parts of the mind that are hard-to-reach.
I am not commenting on LLM art, strange and macro and precise, not on how its productions are sometimes more art than corporate product; or on the recombinance it’s introducing to our art, remixing art history with an enviable irreverence; not on what it is now, or even what’s to come, which will surely be very different than what’s produced the models of today; will we, for example, see a more gentle relationship develop between symbolic and deep learning models, what will that mean.
This is a commentary on myself, a workhorse of a girl, unable to imagine making work that hit the bone with a device as powerful and unknowable, as unpredictable as an LLM. My art is a small morsel. A grain of rice. And I am moved by smallness too, the attempt to capture, as closely as possible, the sunsetting of a life. Like on that day, tongue swollen with star anise, so full that I had to sit down, following the plotter carrying on Cohen’s work imperfectly.
Imperfectly, because Cohen would have only been able to train AARON on so much of what he saw. And yet, what a bold and beautiful and brilliant effort it was, to turn to such a quiet tool before anyone else did. How little Cohen’s art has to do with AARON, with the machine. How much it has everything to do with the slow, laborious workings of Cohen’s mind.
If I didn’t slow down, I imagine my life would be like the very short, very wonderful story Going for a Beer, by Robert Coover.
Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst recently released Play from Memory, a series of images and audio works created by sixteen machine learning models based on the Orff Schulwerk, a 1920s method to teach children how to improve music freely. It is eerie, and any familiar tunes disappear after a few seconds of listening.
Ramadan Mubarak. I grew up believing in a naive and linear progressivism, that yearly the world would improve on its own; that inhumane things like famine would surely disappear in my lifetime. To see it used as a wartime tactic in Palestine—to watch families break fast with boiled grass and lemon juice—has removed whatever luxurious naivete I had once entertained. On a particularly sad, news-burdened day, I went to eat at my longtime friend Tsohil Bhatia’s Red Flower Collective and had Palestinian dishes; buttery shorabat labban studded with bits of mint, a glass of shay bil miramiya that lingered in my mouth far longer than the meal, then disappeared. I believe deeply that we will soon see a day again when Palestinians will be able to enjoy their own food again.
I helped Himanshu Suri (icon of wayward South Asians like yours truly) launch the first issue of our magazine, Veena, with a group of writers who can do pretty much anything with words;
(my dear friend who runs a very sharp Substack), Kaveh Akbar, Mayukh Sen, Tanaïs, Amil Niazi, Jason Diamond.I wrote about life in an extended family and taking the pressure off of our mothers
I will leave you with one last thing: As from a Quiver of Arrow, by the great Carl Phillips:
