The real thing

"there’s a particular kind of disappointment when you begin to admire a bouquet or a blossom at a distance and find out closer up that it’s fake. The disappointment arises in part from having been deceived, but also from encountering an object that is static, that will never die because it never lived, that didn’t form itself out of the earth, and that as a texture coarser, dryer, less inviting to the touch than a mortal flower.” (Solnit, 2020, Orwell’s roses). That's what I think about chatGPT, artificial things, and fakes. When everything is automated, human interaction is precious. More than ever, the natural, the handmade, the imperfect, becomes the real luxury. Photo by Monica Pinheiro CC BY-NC-SA (CC). November, 2024.