In a couple of weeks, The Annex Gallery will receive an exhibition by Juan-Sí González. There are several generations of Cuban artists —the younger ones especially— with only a very blurred idea of who Juan-Sí is and what his role has been in Cuban visual arts during the second half of the twentieth century. Some do not know him at all. This does not surprise me...
Wave Pool opens a group photography exhibition about human and nonhuman histories, environmental change and the passage of time.
Evendale pairs a history exhibition with juried outdoor photography, a curator talk, awards and a gallery walk.
Cincinnati Museum Center offers a camera obscura, hand-colored portraits and historic photograph cases inspired by J. P. Ball.
The artist and curator discuss their Cuba-to-Ohio journeys and the making of I.T.I.N.E.R.A.T.I.O.N.S at The Annex Gallery.
Photographs by Gordon Baer and Jano Rečo examine aging and institutional care across Cincinnati and former Czechoslovakia.
Kent Krugh layers multiple exposures of trees into photographs that compress seasonal change and duration into single images.
Pyramid Hill brings local artists, food trucks and family art activities to its two-day outdoor fair in Hamilton.
Seven artists use photography, altered perspectives and mixed materials to imagine unfamiliar relationships with the natural world.
Photographer Jens G. Rosenkrantz Jr. opens Crossing the Border next Friday, September 4, in the main gallery of the Museum of Contemporary Art of the Americas in Miami. This is only the second time this body of photographs, taken along an extensive stretch of the southern border of the United States, has been shown publicly. Its first presentation took place in Cuba, at Fábrica de Arte Cubano, in 2019...
For this series, Rubio & del Amo, a Murcia-based studio specializing in visual identity, editorial design and packaging, joins forces with Cruz más Cruz, the Madrid firm founded by José María Cruz Novillo and later consolidated with the arrival of his son Pepe. Two fairly complementary sensibilities feeding into a common project.
Some of my most interesting conversations about ÆQAI columns and/or issues raised therein occur between me and Dennis Harrington, the Director of The Weston Art Gallery in The Aronoff Center. In the fall, we were discussing a review that ÆQAI had published about Alison Crocetta’s exhibition and attendant video at The Weston. Dennis asked me whether I agreed that a working knowledge of American Film history had become...
Every month, ÆQAI will be presenting one book review, generally contemporary fiction, for our readers’ edification and enjoyment . A lot of back and forth occurs between and amongst novels, the world of film, and visual culture in general. We begin this series with Love and Shame and Love, a novel by Peter Orner (Little, Brown, and Company, 2012)...
Author’s Note: Valinkat (aka Kathy Valin) is a blog I created in the summer of 2010. I am currently a freelance writing and editing professional enjoying life in the Over-the-Rhine neighborhood of Cincinnati, Ohio, when I’m not traveling all over the world with my husband. On Valinkat I regularly post a mix of urban diary, dance, pets, food, and some stuff that just feeds my crazy sense of humor...
In the mid-1990s, I had many printed copies of the Financial Times in my hands. Probably sometime between 1995 and 1997. I was fascinated by its design, the wan salmon of its pages and Ingram Pinn’s illustrations: its visual identity, basically. As for reading it, very little, I confess. It was an almost purely retinal experience, and little else. But it became clear to me that its texts were written for professionals —people who make decisions on the basis of verified information—
The smell of fresh ink on a print just lifted from the press has a remarkable ability to turn devotees into addicts. So do the uneasy intervals built into the process, which forge a very particular bond with the craft. This lies at the origin of nearly every printmaking and screen-printing workshop. Another trait they tend to share is an unusual capacity for endurance...
Since Wednesday, August 12, Annex Gallery has been presenting Tiger Lily: Collective Impressions. Tiger Lily Press is a cooperative printmaking workshop founded in Cincinnati in 1979, conceived as an open space for practice, teaching, and the preservation of artistic printing techniques. Over several decades, it has brought together printmakers from different generations, providing access to presses, tools, workshops, and shared technical knowledge, while establishing itself as one of the...
An Environmental Protection Agency proposal would remove the federal requirement that states notify the public and invite comments before granting air-pollution permits to facilities classified as minor sources. The Associated Press reported that the change could affect data centers and supporting equipment as companies build infrastructure for artificial intelligence. States could keep their own participation rules, although the federal minimum would disappear. The EPA says the proposal leaves emissions standards intact, reduces administrative burdens, and gives state and local agencies control. A coalition of nearly 200 environmental, health, and community groups warns that residents in states with weak rules could learn about projects only after approval.
The dispute makes public participation part of AI infrastructure. A data center is assembled through permits, utility agreements, cooling systems, backup generators, and land decisions long before a model answers its first prompt. Notice and comment give neighbors a narrow moment to examine that bargain while changes are possible. Removing the common floor would make a household's influence depend on local rules and its ability to discover an application buried in an administrative process. The result could be a geography of unequal visibility. Some communities debate the machines arriving beside them; others meet the building after the decision. Artificial intelligence may be sold as a national race, yet its air, noise, water use, and power demand settle at specific addresses. A permit issued without witnesses turns technological ambition into a local fact before the public can speak.
OpenAI has begun rolling out GPT-6 Astra, a model it says reaches 99.9 percent on ARC-AGI-3, a benchmark for artificial general intelligence (AGI), and human-level action efficiency on 96 percent of that benchmark's levels. Astra is the first OpenAI model classified at the Critical cybersecurity threshold, meaning that with tools and access it can discover unknown flaws and develop exploits across hardened systems without step-by-step human direction. OpenAI delayed parts of the release to strengthen containment and is initially limiting access. It does not call Astra AGI.
OpenAI's charter defines AGI as a highly autonomous system that outperforms humans at most economically valuable work. One saturated benchmark cannot prove that claim, and Astra still falls below the company's High threshold for AI self-improvement. Yet a turning point can arrive before its official name. Astra combines reasoning with direct computer use across long professional workflows. That changes the unit of automation from an answer to a finished assignment. Scientists may compress weeks of technical work. Offices may remove layers of junior labor. Cyber defenders and attackers may search for the same unseen vulnerability at machine speed. The human consequence depends on who can delegate, who owns the infrastructure, who is displaced and who retains authority to stop the task. If Astra is remembered as an AGI milestone, the evidence will come from workplaces, laboratories, public agencies and security incidents rather than the launch page.
Nvidia agreed to acquire Hugging Face for $12.93 billion, taking control of the platform where 18 million developers, researchers and creators share over 3 million models, 500,000 datasets and 1 million applications. Closing is expected in the first half of 2027, subject to regulatory approval. Jensen Huang promised that Hugging Face will remain open, continue supporting models and datasets chosen by its users, accept other chip vendors and require no Nvidia hardware. A company that sells the dominant computing system for AI is purchasing one of the main public squares where alternatives circulate.
Ownership enters through quieter controls than a locked download button. Search rankings decide which models are seen. Hosted inference sets a price for running them. Safety reviews can remove files, while preferred integrations can make one hardware path easier than another. Nvidia will also gain a close view of what developers test, copy and deploy. Here, open describes access under corporate ownership. Hugging Face grew through contributions made under the expectation of shared technical infrastructure, yet that infrastructure now belongs to a corporation with products to sell and competitors to outmaneuver. The promise should be tested through published rules for ranking, data use, pricing and hardware neutrality. Its first serious measure will arrive when a popular model works better on a rival chip and still receives the same visibility, support and speed.
