Culture Under Pressure

The Intersect of Tech and Art

This week I’m stepping into territory I usually sidestep: politics. Several stories here touch on art’s uneasy relationship with power, public policy, and the ways culture gets shaped—or squeezed—by whoever holds the reins. I know this isn’t our usual beat, so if you’re here for cosmic illusions or the odd bit of digital nostalgia, don’t worry, there’s some of that too.

From city planning that treats creativity as essential infrastructure, to the slow erosion of public arts funding in the US, to the blurred lines between propaganda and art, I’ve tried to pick pieces that show just how tangled things get when politics enters the conversation. And if you’re wondering whether technology ever really escapes these forces, there’s plenty here to chew on about AI, public art maps, and what we see when we look up at the night sky.

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Takeaways:

1. Urban cultural planning goes beyond metrics; true “creative wellness” in cities depends on policies that prioritize art, storytelling, and community memory over data-driven efficiency.
2. The ArtVenture project in South Lake Tahoe demonstrates how interactive public art maps can help residents and visitors engage with local creativity intentionally, not just by accident.
3. Astrophotography from advanced observatories often misleads the eye; space images can look dramatic or even supernatural, but they highlight how much we still misunderstand about the universe.
4. Gosha Rubchinskiy’s photo book “Victory Day” at the London Photo Festival re-packages military symbols associated with Russian aggression, sparking debate about the political responsibility of artists.
5. In contrast to Russian art’s recent nationalistic tone, American artists have typically used military and patriotic imagery to question authority, not glorify it.
6. Proposed elimination of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) threatens the entire infrastructure supporting diverse, community-based creative projects in the United States.
7. The shift in arts funding from local, inclusive decision-making to centralized, top-down mandates risks turning public art into a tool for political branding rather than authentic expression.
8. Jörg Colberg’s critique of generative AI in photography argues that these systems flatten creative intent, recycling sanitized versions of the past instead of imagining new futures.
9. The National Ethnographic Museum’s exhibition in Sofia pairs Bulgarian myths about the cosmos with scientific perspectives, showing how folklore and astronomy have always intersected.
10. Tate Modern’s “Electric Dreams” exhibition reveals that artists have experimented with technology and digital concepts long before the internet, challenging the notion that art-tech fusion is a new phenomenon.