Hello friends!
(Winter has come to Berlin!)
Welcome to Postcards from Berlin, Substack edition. I hope this platform switch hasn't thrown anyone for a loop. The short story behind the change is that I was due to be charged for another year of my previous newsletter host and money is tight. It's not a sexy reason, but when the bank account talks, it's good to listen. I'm not certain that Substack will be my long-term home, but I'm interested to see if I'll experience any of the lauded "network effects" and reach more readers and share more collage work more widely.
Please be in touch if Substack isn't where you want to see this newsletter. Everything's in flux. Everything's an experiment.
Since my last newsletter I've published three blog posts - my favorite photos from September and Oktober, and a post I really enjoyed working on, a dive into some old papers I found at a junk shop. I'm trying to spend more time with my collage materials before I use them, to understand where they came from, and what lives they had before winding up in a cardboard box in a musty corner of a shop that's mostly filled with broken furniture and old LPs. I don't know that that knowledge will make my collages "better" but it feels worth the time.
I've made a handful of new collages but haven't updated my store recently. When I get to the point where I'm selling enough work to hire an assistant, I'll hand that job off with glee. Close observers will notice that my studio time has decreased in the last few months. As we just turned the corner on five years in Germany, I've re-enrolled in language classes and am studying for my C1 exam. For anyone not up on international language levels (aka, me before moving here), there are recognized levels of language proficiency with accompanying tests and certificates. Germany, as you may know, is a country that loves a certificate and I figure that having a piece of paper that says "C1" in my file will help us with our permanent residency application.
Having reached C1 means, according to Wikipedia, that I'll be able to:
Understand a wide range of demanding, longer clauses and recognise implicit meaning.
Express ideas fluently and spontaneously without much obvious searching for expressions.
Use language flexibly and effectively for social, academic and professional purposes.
Produce clear, well-structured, detailed text on complex subjects, showing controlled use of organisational patterns, connectors and cohesive devices.
None of that, of course, means I'll actually be fluent. Fluency is a word that means less and less the more of a language you learn.
Beyond the collages and the German I've been trying to write more, to force myself to put more of my ideas in a row and see if they actually hold up to scrutiny. It's all well and good having some strong opinions but, for me at least, until I have to write them down they remain fuzzy, and less well-baked than I think they are. It's when I start writing that I realise I've not thought X through, or considered Y.
To wit, I've been trying to write a cogent essay of how I'm using AI right now, what I find interesting about it, and what problems I still have with it. I've drafted it no fewer than three times, and each time I get halfway through, realise the framing is all wrong and start over. Or I start to doubt the convictions that seemed to strong when I started. Writing! It's hard work. I think I'm just going to abandon the essay for now, and share a couple ideas & quotes I was trying to use as a framing device. Maybe you can find your own throughline through these ideas.
1. The internet is boring. Like really boring. Content has taken the place of actual information.
The internet today is *corny* with its thumbnails and its clickbait and its myriad other deceptions, all conjured up to drive engagement. Bots (and humans who have been reduced to the condition of automatons) churn out *content* which is then commented on and distributed by other bots while real life humans sit in the middle of this transaction, lurking, scrolling, bored out of their minds.
Thanks to AI, we're moving into a golden age of even more crap that no one actually cares about. Prepare for things to get even more boring, as clickbait continues to evolve and everything becomes video, and "attention" is the only metric that 99% of all content creators will strive for.
2. There will be *a lot* of boring content.
“We believe that AI will be about individual empowerment and agency at a scale we've never seen before…And that will elevate humanity to a scale that we've never seen before, either. We'll be able to do more, to create more, and to have more. As intelligence is integrated everywhere, we will all have superpowers on demand.” Sam Altman
I had thought, hoped that the Silicon Valley bros had gotten over the extremely un-nuanced idea that "more" was the most imporant thing in the world. I guess not.
3. Content needs to be produced, like jam or bootlaces.
Julia was twenty-six years old. She lived in a hostel with thirty other girls ('Always in the stink of women! How I hate women!' she said parenthetically), and she worked, as he had guessed, on the novel-writing machines in the Fiction Department. She enjoyed her work, which consisted chiefly in running and servicing a powerful but tricky electric motor. She was 'not clever', but was fond of using her hands and felt at home with machinery. She could describe the whole process of composing a novel, from the general directive issued by the Planning Committee down to the final touching-up by the Rewrite Squad. But she was not interested in the finished product. She 'didn't much care for reading,' she said. Books were just a commodity that had to be produced, like jam or bootlaces.
Having said all this, I'm not as down on AI as I seem. It's a tool I keep playing with and expect to use more as it keeps getting "better". It doesn't have a regular place in my collage work but I do use it there now & then - which sounds like a good topic for a future newsletter, "how I actually use AI when making analog collages".
Thanks for reading friends. I'll be back again in a couple weeks. Drop me a line anytime.
And here’s a discount code for 15% off any collage purchase in December.
SUBBYSTACKY
I think you’re going to love writing the newsletter here. So much more fun when people can actually respond!