Welcome again to the Convivial Society, a newsletter about technology and culture. This post features the audio version of the essay that went out in the last installment: “Lonely Surfaces: On AI-generated Images.”

For the sake of recent subscribers, I’ll mention that I ordinarily post audio of the main essays (although a bit less regularly than I’d like over the past few months). For a variety of reasons that I won’t bore you with here, I’ve settled on doing this by sending a supplement with the audio separately from the text version of the essay. That’s what you have here.

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You can go back to the original essay for links to articles, essays, etc. You can find the images and paintings I cite in the post below.

Jason Allen’s “Théâtre D’opéra Spatial”

Rembrandt’s “The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp”

Detail from Pieter Bruegel’s “Harvesters”

The whole of Bruegel’s “Harvesters”

The Convivial Society

"Lonely Surfaces" (Audio Version)