Spirited Hay

This Sunday, I was walking around Edinburgh without anywhere in particular to be, and decided to go into the Museum on a whim. There is currently an exhibition on about COVID, called Injecting Hope: The Race for a COVID-19 Vaccine. It was strange to walk around an exhibition that narrated and contextualised a historic event that I lived through. It actually made me quite emotional to revisit this time, presented in such a thoughtful way. One of the most effective sections of the exhibition was a sort of information overload tunnel, where you stand between two walls covered in screens with news reports, Zoom video calls, and Joe Wicks exercise videos, all playing at once.

It was a very effective way of capturing the feeling of becoming overwhelmed by information during the pandemic. But I (as I'm sure others do) continue to experience that feeling of overwhelm - perhaps because of the news or social media in general, or maybe due to a specific topic.

One such topic for me is AI: there is so much discourse about it right now, and yet I find it hard to gather any sensible thoughts. It's daunting to make any art about - for one thing, it's a constantly evolving topic and something that is A Big Thing one week might be forgotten the next; and how can you be sure that everyone is up to date on the latest nonsense?

I fear this following comic won't be relevant in a few weeks' time - but I just had to do it.

In the cultural bubble that I find myself in - working in an Animation studio, following artists on social media - there is a lot of worry, fear and anger right now. I've been reading around the subject a bit (I enjoyed Ted Chiang's article in the New Yorker titled Why A.I. Isn’t Going to Make Art).

Something the COVID exhibition illustrated to me was that we cannot make sense of or narrate an experience while we are still going through it - but of course we want to do those things to help us deal with uncertainty! The appearance of AI is still unfolding right now, and it feels like a very big shift.

I am 28 years old - I've lived through some groundbreaking technological advances, like the spread of the internet and the invention of smartphones. However, since those mostly happened when I was teenager, I was not worried that those inventions could take my livelihood away and worsen inequality in the world and set the planet even more on fire than it is!

But I actually have been finding comfort in reading/thinking about the past, rather than the present or the future. I started thinking about the industrial revolution and how humans have responded to new technology in the past. Maybe some comfort or guidance can be found when looking at how we've dealt with change in the past, I thought, and suddenly it was midnight and I was reading about the invention of tractors. Essentially, I'm trying to relate to people in history to make my own experience feel less scary.

Back to the fields,

L x