Was listening to Paola Antonelli on an MIT talk today and it made me wonder why does all the incredibly rich artistic, speculative, critical work seem to sit adjacent to (but not inside) the actual trajectory of technology?

It wasn't always this way.

Researcher at MIT Media Lab | Creating futures | https://cyrus.website/info

creating and destroying; flying cars, roc.camera, july.rocks

i started writing something around this about 2 months ago, then got busy, but things Paola said really sparked this question back into life for me. funnily enough i was also thinking about domes/cathedrals as an analogy, while also thinking about how something like Bell Labs functioned or even how Media Lab was in its heyday: proposing radical  paradigms vs. incremental shifts. 

Your first point makes sense around specialization and this constant desire for further siloing, the popularity of specific forms of optimization combined with intense financialization to feed technocapitalist scaling. Also the rise of venture funding as a default model must be playing a role. 

I do wonder if there's something more subtle though, for example did the reduced materiality of this era compared to previous eras leave artists behind?

This is a really interesting topic 

one thing that comes to mind me is specialization. I think we spent the last couple decades maybe even since the industrial revolution becoming really good at specializing because compartmentalizing and modularization is really good for scaling things and scaling things is sort of the root of technology and capitalism

On the other hand I think about Brunelleschi’s dome in Florence, and how it was built - this combined art / technology track. I also think about this idea of techne in the Heideggerain / old Greek sense where it was about creating something regardless of whether it was art or mechanical contraption; creation was creation

can you say an example? how it used to be and how it’s now