moon traveller herald

Artificial Intelligence, or AI, is right up there with the MidEast, Ukraine, Democracy, Inflation and Kim Kardashian among the memes that we see in our news feeds today. *On Wall Street, AI hopes drove a big boost in the stock market. People are going to lose jobs and machines are going to take over and we can rake in some bucks: Hurray!  *For my brother, it’s a quick “Belated Birthday Card source” [Hell with Hallmark]  *For headline writers, AI fever has been a chance to get clicks, hits and page views based on FUD - Fear Uncertainty and Doubt.  *For an older writer, [me] AI nudges one forward, raining down ideas when his own synapses are flagging .*&%!  I spent over 40 years in the computer trade ‘press’ – as the Web took over it was called ‘media’. I wrote was about what was inside these boxes. The Definition of computer is 1-input, 2-processing, 3-output – all of which is enabled by 4-memory. The last 5 years before I retired I had the Big Data beat. That w...

Got to hang out with Jeff Hull this winter as it turned into spring. He was preparing for a show at the Hall Space and we sort of took the piece I wrote a couple of years ago as a starting point, broke down the staging and started again, talking about what his art was, and iterating through til we came up with this piece. April always brings Titanic memories. Now, Titanic Transmissions as well. Let's get a buzz on! - Jack Vaughan Jeff Hull's Titanic Transmissions is on display at the HallSpace, 950 Dorchester Avenue Dorchester, MA 02125, weekends through May 24 ! Other times by appointment. Titanic Transmissions Walk the streets and hear the children singing - The Ship Went Down - A folk song – it will stick. Tells a story like the blues. The picture of the ship - its radio transmitting. It was always there. Titanic. DitDitDaDitDit dashes - images from Jeff Hull in Titanic Transmissions. Hull who bicycling down city alley hears the same sirens ...

The printed word can have a magical quality – the right moment, the right wordsmithy, and the word can pop on off the page. There is a way of knowing, among others, a type of cognition that derives from neurons firing piston-like, causing ideas’ flowering like fireworks as the eye scans a story – say about science – say in the New York Times. But there is a way of knowing that derives from hearing the spoken word. It can equal or better the printed word, depending, firing those pretty little brain synapse thingies along another salient. Working in the Internet medium – cant call it the press, but it does have to do with the visual presentation of words, in this case in electronic form – one wonderswhere it is all going. People are farily ready to download stories and listen to them, perhaps as they jog or drive. You wonder if they just don’t like the act of reading. My son reads books, but, by and large, he scans magazines, doesn’t pick up a newspaper, and when he reads mags, he hardly...