![INFINITE ART](https://cdn.magzter.com/1422886351/1699864904/articles/NTDiNjZBe1699959770532/INFINITE-ART.jpg)
Last fall, the artist and musician Holly Herndon visited Torreciudad, a shrine to the Virgin Mary associated with the controversial Catholic group Opus Dei, in Aragón, Spain. The sanctuary, built in the nineteen-seventies, sits on a cliff overlooking an inviting blue reservoir, in a remote area just south of the Pyrenees. Herndon and her husband, Mathew Dryhurst, had been on a short vacation in the mountains nearby. They were particularly taken with an exhibit of Virgin Mary iconography from around the world: a faceless, abstract stone carving from Cameroon; a pale, blue-eyed statuette from Ecuador; a Black Mary from Senegal, dressed in an ornate gown of blue and gold. Moving from artwork to artwork, the couple discussed Mary’s “embedding.” In machine learning, embeddings distill data down to concepts. They are what enable generative A.I. systems to process prompts such as “Cubist painting of a tabby cat, wearing a hot-dog costume and eating a hot dog” or “country application, as a sestina.” At Torreciudad, the sculptures and paintings on display all had aesthetic and material differences, yet there was something consistent—ineffable but essential—that made the artworks legible depictions of the same figure.
Esta historia es de la edición November 20, 2023 de The New Yorker.
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Esta historia es de la edición November 20, 2023 de The New Yorker.
Comience su prueba gratuita de Magzter GOLD de 7 días para acceder a miles de historias premium seleccionadas y a más de 9,000 revistas y periódicos.
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