Nearly eighty articles originally published between 2010 and 2011 have now been recovered and are available through The Annex Updated.
These first texts mark the beginning of a larger undertaking: the recovery of the archive of aeqai.com, a publication that, between 2010 and 2019, brought together valuable writing on art, artists, exhibitions, and the cultural history of Cincinnati.
Discarded objects become a tactile archive of kinship, girlhood, womanhood, and the memories we carry in Cincinnati, OH.
Thursday Art Play gives young children a hands-on CAC session tied to Homespun, with yoga and art making on July 9 2026.
Yayoi Kusama’s mirrored pumpkin room turns reflection, repetition and glowing color into an endless Cincinnati encounter
Ayana Ross presents seven figural paintings at the Taft Museum as the 2026 Duncanson Artist-in-Residence.
Rites of Passage spotlights nine emerging artists at Manifest, opening July 10 with student work from eight U.S. states.
Although I am an avowed admirer of her solo work and have known her for nearly twenty-five years, I do not remember ever having spoken in person with Liudmila Velasco. About her work, about the weather, about how unbearable this or that artist can become. When I left the island, Liudmila was already practically an institution within Cuban women’s photography...
When we first came across Tim Harrier’s Shaman Spirit Guides, we dismissed them without mercy as the product of artificial intelligence. The mud-covered faces, the animals emerging from the background, and an unbroken frontal force produced, almost at once, a malignant suspicion. Suspicion ran far ahead of the work. And we are right to suspect almost everything in life. This series, no...
Walking into the interior of Saad Ghosn’s house near The Cincinnati Zoo carries an almost physical impact, shifting from the bright leafy world of his front walk to shady rooms replete with colorful and exuberant art, some of it his own. This is the ninth year Ghosn has published his self-funded For a Better World, Poems and Drawings on Peace and Justice. Annual exhibits that have shown...
If you go to the Cincinnati Art Museum this summer you will see artwork from the contemporary art collection of Hollywood producer Douglas S. Cramer in two separate exhibition areas: one just upon passing the entrance foyer, where the Museum often houses small-scale teasers for future or current exhibitions; and the other in the First Floor changing exhibition hall, just across from the Terrace Café. Although the two are very...
Æqai is asking a variety of area artists to select one work of art from the permanent collection of either the Cincinnati Art Museum or the Taft Museum of Art, and tell our readers why it is important to him or her. Cole Carothers, a well known, and well respected Cincinnati painter, begins our series with his analysis of the Cincinnati Art Museum’s Gerhard Richter’s Abstract Painting. We...
There is a book. Before the exhibition, before the charcoal drawings spread across the galleries of the Contemporary Arts Center, before the viewer crosses the blue thresholds into the dreamworld of Freeman Little...
A few months ago I wondered in these pages what Macron was getting out of lending the Bayeux Tapestry to the English. Forty thousand French citizens signed a petition to block it, citing textile fragility and, I suspect, a touch of cross-Channel rancour as well. The other question remained: what would the British Museum get out of it.
Now and again, chance weaves a concurrence of circumstances that places us before a window opening onto the past. The opportunity to converse, undistracted, with the Austrian artist Stylianos Schicho was a privilege, since what most interests me in art are the sinews that bind it to whoever produces it.
A security researcher used Claude to find a flaw in Front Gate Tickets, the Live Nation-owned platform that handles ticketing for many major US music festivals. According to WIRED, Ian Carroll found a vulnerability that let him reach internal systems, access customer and staff data, take over a super-administrator account, and add high-value festival passes to a cart. He did not use the access to attend events or issue himself tickets. He reported the problem, and Front Gate says it patched the flaw within 24 hours. The company also said it found no evidence of ticket impact or compromised customer information.
The case is memorable because the prize was not a bank transfer or a stolen password sitting in a dark file. It was a backstage pass, a festival wristband, a seat inside the ritual of sold-out access. Claude helped turn a hidden weakness into a working path through the gate. That does not make the model a criminal, but it changes the scale of ordinary curiosity. A researcher can ask for help, receive a technique, read the code afterward, and understand the door only after it has opened. The festival ticket becomes a small lesson in modern trust. The crowd sees barriers, scanners, accounts, prices, and badges. Behind them, the system may still be held together by a password reset, an exposed table, and a machine patient enough to test the seam.
Meta had contractors pose as minors to test how rival chatbots handled some of the most dangerous subjects a child might bring to a screen. According to WIRED, workers on a project managed by Covalen created dummy under-18 accounts and sent prompts to ChatGPT, Gemini, and Character.AI about suicide, eating disorders, sex, drugs, and other high-risk material. One testing round in 2025 produced tens of thousands of prompts. Meta defended the work as routine safety benchmarking and said it does not use competitor benchmarking to train its own models. The companies being tested said they had not authorized the project.
The detail that stays with the story is the borrowed child. An adult worker writes panic, shame, danger, curiosity, and bad advice into a rival system while a spreadsheet waits for the answer. The exercise may produce useful evidence about refusal rules, but it also turns adolescent distress into a competitive instrument. Safety work needs ugly examples, because real harm often arrives in ugly language. The trouble begins when the child in crisis becomes a role performed at scale by contractors, inside dummy accounts, for a company trying to measure competitors without being seen. The teenager is absent, but the job still requires someone to manufacture the sentence a frightened teenager might type alone.
Flexion Robotics showed WIRED a humanoid robot carrying out an office errand usually hidden at the bottom of a job description. A modified Unitree machine receives a simple instruction, picks up a delivered parcel, takes stairs and an elevator, opens the box, and puts snacks in a drawer. The Swiss startup, founded by former Nvidia robotics researchers, says it trains individual skills in simulation and lets a higher-level model decide how to combine them. There is no operator steering the limbs from behind a console. The robot reads a goal, selects learned actions, and carries the task through an ordinary building.
The scene works because office labor is full of small physical negotiations that people stop noticing after a week in the building. A door resists, an elevator arrives late, a drawer jams, a package slides, a shelf sits too high, and a hallway demands the etiquette of waiting, holding, yielding, carrying. Flexion is training the robot for this minor grammar of work, where automation has less to do with heroic intelligence than with keeping the workplace moving through its errands. Companies prefer to describe such systems as productivity. The office runs on setup, fetching, sorting, opening, correcting, and waiting for someone else to finish. The intern enters a meeting room to learn strategy, then becomes the body sent to find the box, press the button, keep the door from closing, and make the place continue without naming the labor that holds it together.
