Dinamismo di un cane al guinzaglio in the style of Studio Ghibli, generated by ChatGPT

Lethargy of a Person on a Leash

In 1878, Eadweard Muybridge produced the now iconic horse-in-motion images, with 12 cameras automatically triggered in succession. These images, known for depicting a horse's gait in ways no one had ever seen before, is credited with later influencing the work of Giacomo Balla, most notably his painting Dinamismo di un cane al guinzaglio, (Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash), completed in 1912. Painting, at least for the Futurists, was elevated by imitating photography (and embracing fascism). It represented a path into the future. As photography grew in popularity, many traditional artists panicked. Charles Baudelaire called photography “art’s most mortal enemy.” Paul Delaroche (allegedly) proclaimed, “from today, painting is dead!” upon seeing a Daguerrotype.” This anxiety should sound familiar. 

⁣Reading Readings won’t be re-litigating AI’s ethics, its ability or inability to be art, or whether or not we’re on the cusp of AGI. Instead, we are focused on the inevitably brief moment where the human subject is/was central to the development of AI. For years, humans were unknowingly producing dataset for LLMs by publishing their every thought onto social media platforms. After the feed-switch from chronological to algorithmic recommendation, the platforms started reading our scrolling behavior and shaping our experience against our will (or at least against the will of our ego). As humans continue to post, we are forced to read the algorithmic-attention black-box, training our brains to be more like AI so we can better gamify the algorithm to our benefit. And now, the recent introduction of LLM chatbots has intertwined reading and writing into a double helix of AI reading our writing, and humans reading AI’s writing. And if a human doesn’t understand what the AI wrote, we call it a “hallucination,” as if the ongoing neural loop we’re trapped in isn’t psychedelic enough. Understanding these interconnected actions is critically important for a human artist to embrace, lest we get put on a leash by the dynamism of the LLM, limited by our own lack of understanding. 

Milan Kundera described totalitarianism as “...a world in which shit is denied and everyone acts as though it did not exist. This aesthetic ideal is called kitsch.” Along the Futurist tradition, official social media accounts of the current dominant party have openly adopted the prompted and the generated. Shortly after the events of Oct. 7th 2023, the propaganda Instagram account @livefromisrael posted dozens of hallucinated military scenes. In Feb. 2025, Trump famously posted a “Trump Gaza” reel, featuring an AI generated song with the lyrics: Feast and dance, the deed is done, Trump Gaza number one. The video included visuals of a Dubai-style beachfront resort, imagined to be in Gaza. It depicts a golden Trump statue, Netanyahu and Trump in lounge chairs, and Elon Musk walking through raining cash. Musk himself has indulged in AI-adjusted PFPs which depict his jawline more chiseled than it really is. While Mussolini never adopted Futurism as the official aesthetic of his party, it’s clear that today’s fascists are fully embracing the aesthetics of new technology. They flood our feeds with AI slop in order to deny the shit they want to keep hidden. Perhaps Mussolini’s problem was that Futurism was made by human artists. It is the ultimate act of totalitarian kitsch to remove the human from aesthetic production (and to remove certain humans altogether). 

The more we refuse to understand what is now called AI, the more we will encounter its enshittified dross in our feeds, which has been proven to reduce our grey matter. We cannot simply reject AI, all the while posting on the same algorithmic platforms that built them. We must better understand what humans are trying to do online and in what ways the online might reflect what makes us fundamentally human. If we don’t reach this understanding, we will remain in a world of mere scroll-level content lethargically consumed within corralled software boxes. Every day, the amount of consumed content inches closer to being entirely AI generated. The real-world, collaborative human process of artmaking is simply not profitable enough.

Reading Readings seeks to be a first step for those fed up with the lethargy of the feed, the binary of AI good/AI bad, and the violent kitsch of @POTUS. Each artist has been prompted to output something that illustrates a critical understanding of this new technology. This is not an anti-AI “look how stupid the robot is” treatise; rather, this is a serious invitation for artists to respond to the technology threatening the economy and our jobs as we know it, and/or paving the way for socialist UBI, and/or ushering in the crypto dollar. Somewhere between whole cloth adoption, outright degrowth rejection, and tentative responsive embrace. This event will resemble a reading, as in, a person reading text out loud. But every artist and attendee will consider this reading knowing that reading and writing is different now, and that we are not AI. We hope to reconsider what makes the human artmaking process especially human, instead of assuming that artmaking only belongs to us. What can’t AI do?