Author: Taylor Bowman

The Feed as Framer: When Platforms Became Patrons Walk through any contemporary art fair and you’ll see them—works that seem born for a phone screen. Punchy contrasts, instantly readable compositions, a kind of visual shouting that survives the scroll. It’s easy to roll your eyes and blame artists for pandering. But that misses the real… Continue reading The Feed Decides: How Algorithms Became the New Art Critics

When the Beat Sheet Became the Machine: How AI Writing Tools Quietly Became Editorial Agents The first AI writing tools were slot machines. You pulled the lever—a prompt, a genre, a character name—and the machine spat back three paragraphs of prose that read like a press release written by someone who had never read a… Continue reading When the Beat Sheet Became the Machine: How AI Writing Tools Quietly Became Editorial Agents

The Feed as Curator: How Social Media Algorithms Shape What Gets Called Art Something quiet but seismic is happening to the definition of art. No manifestos. No radical new techniques. Just a bundle of recommendation engines, tweaked and re-tweaked in A/B tests we’ll never see. The algorithm—opaque, restless, utterly indifferent to intent—has become the most… Continue reading The Feed as Curator: How Social Media Algorithms Shape What Gets Called Art

There’s a quiet, stubborn fiction that art and the internet are just in a distribution deal—platforms as neutral galleries, the feed a simple window. Scroll for five minutes and the lie falls apart. The feed isn’t a window; it’s a curator with a severe, peculiar appetite, one that rewards high-contrast visual punch, emotional immediacy, and… Continue reading The Algorithmic Gaze: How Platform Feeds Decide What We Call Art

Something strange has happened to the way we see. Not in the grand, philosophical sense—though that’s part of it—but in the daily, practical sense of what appears in front of our eyes. The gatekeepers of visual culture have been replaced. Not by a new wave of radical critics or daring gallerists, but by a set… Continue reading The Algorithm’s Eye: How the Feed Decides What Art Looks Like

How the Beat Sheet Became the Invisible Grammar of Algorithmic Visual Culture The YouTube thumbnail is a logline. Not metaphorically—structurally. It compresses a narrative premise into a single frame that has to do three things at once: establish conflict, promise payoff, and trigger enough curiosity to override the scroll reflex. The open mouth. The arrow… Continue reading How the Beat Sheet Became the Invisible Grammar of Algorithmic Visual Culture

There’s a special kind of humiliation that comes with checking your notifications as an artist. You spent three weeks on a painting—or a poem you bled into the notes app at 3 a.m., or a photograph you composed with the patience of a sniper. The platform chews it up, decides it isn’t conversationally sticky enough,… Continue reading The Algorithmic Gaze: How Your Feed Decides What Counts as Art

There’s a quiet, insistent whisper in every studio, every gallery opening, every 2 a.m. doomscroll. It doesn’t speak in paragraphs about lineage or materiality. It doesn’t care about your MFA. It asks one thing: Will this perform? The whisper belongs to the algorithm, and it has become the loudest art critic of our time. We… Continue reading The Algorithm Is the Curator Now: How Social Media Decides What We Call Art

There’s a specific, dizzying nausea that hits when a painting you bled over for six months gets twelve likes, while a video of someone pouring glitter on a pizza slice racks up 2.3 million. It’s not jealousy—well, not just jealousy. It’s the creeping realization that the conversation you thought you were having, the one between… Continue reading The Algorithm’s Eye: How the Feed Decides What Art Gets to Exist

There’s a certain kind of image that thrives on Instagram. It’s high contrast, built around a single focal point, and drenched in a colour palette that looks like a packet of fruit chews left out in the sun. Almost always, it’s a painting of a woman. She stares out at you with wet, planetary eyes,… Continue reading The Algorithmic Gaze: How Social Media Decides What Art Looks Like