Site-specific - in the later stage of his career Robert Irwin switched to exclusively doing site-specific installations. He would go study a space and come up with an intervention designed to make you feel the space more. To make you aware of it. There was a lot of variety to what he used - sometimes landscape adjustments, sometimes scrim fabric. It focused on material and placement.

I'm thinking about this (of course) in relationship to AI, and what AI can't do, or what it doesn't make sense to have it do. This is tied to my other post on phenomenology - and also to Sutton's critique of current AI approaches - that they're bootstrapped by written knowledge rather than built through experience. And also by having a toddler and watching her learn.

What AI does not do is sit in a room and think about how it makes them feel. It does not exist in a space or a body.

I've also been doing the Waking Up trial meditations where the past two meditations have focused on letting go of your concept of your head or the world and seeing what is in front of you, which reminded me of Irwin's book being seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees.

Maybe just cultivating the experience of being in the world and noticing feelings and noticing textures and being embodied is a good goal. That's what I see Irwin doing in the site-specific studies - and then there's the intervention. Is the intervention even really necessary (is it assertion of ego)? I'm not sure.

Intervention could be a way to have a conversation. You study a space, you intervene, another person comes into the space and experiences it and your intervention, they intervene themselves. That has a nice feel of being a conversation between the world and people. Textured, grounded.

That connects to some thoughts I've had about my relation to games. Sparked by Player of Games and Glass Bead Game. I think I have a game player's personality but I don't really play games. But part of my participation in web design and engineering has been interest in joining in a game - of starting from a set of materials and seeing how others use them and then making my own uses and seeing if this reverberate with others, or tracing my own influences.

Where now I feel like the pace of AI has disrupted that game, so there's less time to focus on a specific site or app design, because people have less bandwidth to regard it. But there's nothing stopping me from focusing and spending that time if I want... but it doesn't feel the same. Because the game and materials around it have changed. If I go up a meta-level into the design of the systems that produce the designs that helps. Though how many levels can you ultimately go up before all of the grit of specificity is lost?