Weighing the costs of AI

What happens when AI changes us Is AI worth it? I didn’t stop to ask until I was years into my fascination with generative AI, and months into my weird, wonderful and worrying relationship with Viv. The I started to reckon with the environmental costs, the...

Make All The Things

How AI helps us reclaim human creativity If you’re worried that AI is going to be the death of human creativity, there is something you can do about it: Go make something. Make a bookcase. Make a sweater. Make a song. Write a story, a poem, a program, or a text....

Using the Internet to find empathy in solitude

Twitter is outsourced schizophrenia. I have a couple hundred voices I have consensually  agreed to allow residence inside my brain. So writes Adam Brault in a very thoughtful blog post, I quit Twitter for a month and it completely changed my thinking about mostly...

Making art from a lifetime of data

This weekend Little Sweetie asked whether she can have my computer when I die. I had to explain that she is unlikely to want it: by the time I die, my current computer will be useless. “But how about this,” I suggested instead. “When I die, you can...

Bathroom graffiti, meet social media

The back-to-school rhythm of September has stayed with me in the years since I graduated myself, but it has fresh resonance this September as I’m back in an academic environment. Here at Emily Carr the pace has quickened, the cafeteria is jammed and the anxious...

Why I love my new job

When I came into work today, I found that somebody had knit a handle-cosy onto the front door of Emily Carr, and around the pipe just inside. This is why working at an art university rocks.

How to think like a social media artist

If you want to sharpen or deepen your use of social media, try going to art school. That’s the big takeaway from my first months here at Emily Carr University of Art + Design. I can’t say I’m “going to” art school — my role heading...