The Dutch-Israeli author on a demonic club hit, her fish fixation, and her love of furniture restoration videos Born in Tel Aviv, Israel in 1987, Yael van der Wouden is a writer and teacher who lectures in creative writing and comparative literature in the Netherlands. Her work has appeared in publications including LitHub, Electric Literature and Elle.com, and she has a David Attenborough-themed advice column, Dear David, in the online literary journal Longleaf Review. Her essay on Dutch identity and Jewishness, On (Not) Reading Anne Frank, received a notable mention in the 2018 Best American Essays collection. The Safekeep, published by Viking earlier this year, is Van der Wouden’s debut novel and is shortlisted for the Booker prize. Continue reading...

As generative AI advances, it is easy to see it as yet another area where machines are taking over – but humans remain at the centre of AI art, just in ways we might not expect When faced with a bit of downtime, many of my friends will turn to the same party game. It’s based on the surrealist game Exquisite Corpse, and involves translating brief written descriptions into rapidly made drawings and back again. One group calls it Telephone Pictionary; another refers to it as Writey-Drawey. The internet tells me it is also called Eat Poop You Cat, a sequence of words surely inspired by one of the game’s results. As recently as three years ago, it was rare to encounter text-to-image or image-to-text mistranslations in daily life, which made the outrageous outcomes of the game feel especially novel. But we have since entered a new era of image-making. With the aid of AI image generators like Dall-E 3, Stable Diffusion and Midjourney, and the generative features integrated into Adobe’s Creative Cloud programs, you can now transform a sentence or phrase into a highly detailed image in mere seconds. Images, likewise, can be nearly instantly translated into descriptive text. Today, you can play Eat Poop You Cat alone in your room, cavorting with the algorithms. Continue reading...

For his explosion event in Los Angeles, Cai Guo-Qiang built his own version of ChatGPT and employed a drone army to answer the question: what is the fate of humanity and AI? For decades, Cai Guo-Qiang has been the world’s foremost fine artist of explosions. He is famous for his massive fireworks displays, from his glowing footsteps in the sky at the opening of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, to his 2015 Sky Ladder, a 1,650-foot flaming ladder to heaven featured in a Netflix documentary. Recently, the gunpowder artist has become obsessed with a new threatening technology: artificial intelligence. Continue reading...

As debate rages around the ethics and legalities of artificial intelligence, artists are exploring the technology’s possibilities – and its precarities Cate Blanchett – beloved thespian, film star and refugee advocate – is standing at a lectern, addressing the European Union parliament. “The future is now,” she says, authoritatively. So far, so normal, until: “But where the fuck are the sex robots?” The footage is from a 2023 address that Blanchett actually gave – but the rest has been made up. Sign up for the fun stuff with our rundown of must-reads, pop culture and tips for the weekend, every Saturday morning Continue reading...

Facebook founder shares photo of sculpture of Priscilla Chan, rendered in green with a large silver cloak Mark Zuckerberg has raised eyebrows by commissioning a giant sculpture of his wife, Priscilla Chan. In a photo of the statue, posted to Instagram, the Facebook CEO and co-founder said he was “bringing back the Roman tradition of making sculptures of your wife”. Continue reading...

The performance artist and ‘sex clown’ shares her list of (mostly) wholesome clips: the cutest children, the best dog and the glitziest aerobics workout * Get our weekend culture and lifestyle email I am a person who believes in laughter. I work in live art. My main medium is performance. In art-making I revere legacies of border-riders, defiant sexualities, witches and rascals. I have been known as a sex clown and I am proud to invoke laughter. Some of the best laughing is out of absurdity. Laughter erupts and massages. Purrs and murmurs. It erodes calcified, rational, top-down thinking. It appears mysteriously, sometimes even when we think we should not laugh. My grandmother Betty used to say to my brother and I: “You’re laughing now, you’ll be crying in a minute!” We need our tears and hope; I wouldn’t be laughing so hard if it wasn’t so deeply serious. Continue reading...

A new exhibition showcases British hobbies, the Rotterdam Architectural Biennial and a South Asian London city map Both mending and hobby crafts get the respect they deserve in this month’s design news. Check our stories to see where these fine activities get treated as art. We also look at the history of Casio watches and a new future for the Apple Watch. Sign up for the Design Review newsletter to receive more stories like this about architecture, sustainability and craft each month. Continue reading...

The New Zealand-born photographer was planning to take a portrait of a farm owner when two animals caught his eye For the last two years, Mark Aitken has been working on a photo series in Lapland. “It’s called Presence of Absence,” he says, “and it explores the liminal and sometimes uncanny boundaries between life and death experienced by people living in this extreme climate and landscape.” Aitken, who was born in New Zealand, raised in South Africa and has lived in London for years, took this photo in spring of this year, on a sheep farm. “Kukkola is a borderland hamlet in Finnish Lapland on the River Tornio, near Sweden. The farm has been running for 20 years and this lamb is one of about 100 born in March and April,” he says. Continue reading...