gr3gjsmith.bsky.social
@gr3gjsmith.bsky.social
Editor for HOLO & Educator
I don't want to be the 'whither the adjuncts' guy either. I am very lucky to constantly be booked up—many scrape by. It just sometimes feels like we are the only ones incentivized to call out the bullshit. Tenured folks and admin are 'comfortable'... they kind of are fine despite the kitchen fire.
Everything is risograph and cyanotype and fermentation. It's clear that AI slop and accelerationist destruction are prompting the seemingly ubiquitous resurgence of interest in these slow, organic, manual processes.
I deeply identify with this. I never loved marking but in the last 1.5 years I have gone from 'net positive love of teaching with some serious caveats' to ... some new normal that is barely tolerable.
AI causing ‘moral injury’ to lecturers trying to police its use, Trent University research shows
Some in writing faculty are overwhelmed by task of spotting AI in students’ work, paper says
theglobeandmail.com
In positive news we are talking to and working wirh like 2-3 dozen artists, curators, and cultural workers for a new editorial project as part of HOLO's imminent relaunch.
What if every time you retired a replicant... a little bit of you died too? Yes, Greg the ChatGPT spotter is marking again and contemplating gouging his eyes out to force an abrupt career change.
Still not sure what shape my fall theory seminar will take but these will all be in it.
I have a parrot print shirt that I call my 'stochastic parrot shirt.' It is loud and colourful and dumb. I love it. 🦜 I am wearing it today and my wife said I have 'Joey from Full House energy' and I may have to burn the shirt or find a new (possibly colour blind) wife. Which path to pursue?
Can we just have a ‘Rivals’ style Canadian miniseries with actors playing Marshall McLuhan and Northrop Frye as its protagonists? It will have a lot of Victorian spires of academia, Catholic guilt, groundbreaking ideas, and sex? I think this could sell.
I don’t remember there being any culture war around the casting of that robot either... 🤔
Josh Fruhlinger@jfruh.bsky.social · 3w agoI love that INTERSTELLAR has what were clearly at some point in the writing process “wisecracking robots” that in the final product are aggressively inhuman slabs that deliver their quips extremely mournfully
For those outside academia who are curious: as someone who has taught for ~25 years, many of us now face an existential crisis in assessing student work. Anything you haven't viewed a student actually writing down with their own hand is basically suspect; it's a shitty feeling, to put it bluntly
Andrew Heiss@andrew.heiss.phd · 4w agowoof ≈80% of assignments this summer term have essentially been just raw chatgpt/claude output, including assignments that required designing stuff in illustrator/affinity/canva. The battle is lost for asynchronous online courses.
Starting to feel like my PhD was a sidequest/vanity project as I have no time to continue my research let alone turn my dissertation into a book. Outside my work with HOLO it is basically teach or be broke.
The fact that cats come with a built-in low-frequency oscillator is not discussed enough.
Back in the classroom so trying out like v.5 of ‘your writing should sound like it was written by a person, ideally’ spiel.
Gonna train an LLM project exclusively on lazy and sensational attempts to theorize AI slop.
When you are young and lustful you are prone to choosing partners based on fleeting qualities but eventually you realize what really matters (cable management).
Reviewing art news from last few weeks and can’t believe (parts of) the web3 crowd were gushing about Kanye West dropping by Art Basel and ‘learning about digital art.’ Maybe invite Stephen Miller next year and give him a tour.
As I learn more about proto-media art in the early/mid-20th century, I increasingly believe Nam June Paik and Fluxus are the ‘final boss.’ So much of what I find inspiration in—methods, attitudes—routes back to them.
Really appreciate how well this is all laid out. “They Rule” redux
Joe Noonan@joenoonan.bsky.social · 2mo agoProf. Francesca Bria has mapped connections
*Has anyone prompted Claude to make the case that Claude is more "digitally human" than any scholar in the "digital humanities" *Also, is there a Faraday room in Montreal where people might switch over to the analog-humanities
Crystal Fleming クリスタル@alwaystheself.bsky.social · 2mo agoI'm attending a digital humanities event in Montreal. There was a keynote on AI and something about the talk made me wonder if it had been written by Claude. I said as much in the Q&A. As I posed the question, the speaker shifted, looking slightly uncomfortable. What he said next shocked the room +
New public art installation “Unfinished Arch” by artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer at Sherbourne Common in Toronto.
The concrete poetry handiwork of @mrprudence.bsky.social arrived today. HOLO very proudly produced Paul's artist book interpretation of our archives (every word we have published). It is delightful–in a Ballardian sense—and will be available for purchase when we launch our revamped site in July.
Elon Musk now a trillionaire after taking Weyland-Yutani Corporation public.
I'm on track to teach 11 courses this year. Don't actually think I can do this much longer. I heard Katherine McKittrick speak years ago and she talked about how the university ‘killed her friend’ ... and, I think about that sentence a lot.
But: I. Am. So. Burnt. Out. Have a month out of the classroom thank god but this semester left me rekt. There is a weird roulette wheel of doom that spins every semester and some are just devastating. I’ve had two nightmarish ones (last in fall 2022) in aftermath of the pandemic.
My semester ended yesterday! Lots of sweet moments with students but also tears because drama. Somehow I got bumped up from a Kia Forte to a Mercedes Bens CLA 250 for my rental. May just have gunned it to 180 km/hour while blasting the new Boards of Canada at the end of the day.
Argh. Completely defeated by AI text. Yes every piece of student writing should be between 15 and 76 pages now because MORE is clearly better. The value of a sentence is quickly approaching zero. Maybe I finally get poetry.
