Welcome to the inaugural ArtPol newsletter: part archive of our collective reading, part personal research inspired by our collective reading, all 100% pure unfiltered newsletter.
We’ll be collecting a good (or at least representative) selection of our recently read articles every month, mostly in the domain of the reading group’s current topic.
This month was Solarpunk, the only vehicle for utopian thinking we have left.
Also featured are some readings on AI art, which we covered in February.
With this newsletter, we hope to start expanding our monthly reading group beyond the local Florentine circle and compile bite-sized gateways to various topics passing through art and politics. Like the reading group, high quality non-academic (as in peer reviewed) pieces are prioritised in any medium from audio recordings and video essays to illustrations and memes, as is anything else that inspires personal interest and even implementation(!).
Art by Imperial Boy
Sustainable architecture and the housing crisis: An interview with Vishaan Chakrabarti
"The question is not whether we can afford to build sustainably. The question is whether we can afford not to."
Utopian cities: the article highlights the need to rethink traditional models of high-rise development and prioritize the creation of healthy, sustainable communities.
The '15-minute city' and the future of urban planning
"Cities need to be designed for people, not cars."
An introduction to the bizarrely controversial idea, with the added bonus that one of our members is from Oxford, where an international mix of hysterical reactionaries descended to decry the evil globalist plot to… be able to walk to work?
AI art and the problem of consent
"Artificial intelligence is only as good as the data it uses, and that data often belongs to someone else."
ChatGPT is currently blocked in Italy for this reason.
“Despite soliciting the opinions of over 11,000 people, from 11 different countries, each of the paintings looked almost exactly the same.”
To be read with the following in mind: is AI as we currently use it capable of doing anything but accelerate the trend to sameness? Death to the distinct.
Abolitionist Creativity: A Short Overview
“Precisely because it is awkwardly modelled on Early Modern laws related to physical property, IP is full of contradictions and absurdities, which offer intriguing opportunities for transgressive experimentation, radical imagination, and subversive play.”
On the philosophical challenge behind legalistic handling of AI, full of great examples, more engaging than one might think.
C.S. Lewis on our task in troubled times
“Human culture has always had to exist under the shadow of something infinitely more important than itself. If men had postponed the search for knowledge and beauty until they were secure, the search would never have begun.”
As it seems humanity might finally be forced to acknowledge an equal or greater Other, is it right to be afraid?
And from the better end of YouTube video essays
See you in May!