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.
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.
Prosecutors in the Palisades fire trial brought ChatGPT logs into court alongside iPhone location data, security camera footage, and witness testimony. Jonathan Rinderknecht was accused of starting a January 2025 blaze that later became one of the deadliest wildfires in Los Angeles history. According to The Verge, the prosecution cited chatbot exchanges in which he generated images of fire, asked why he felt angry, complained about the wealthy, and recorded a question about whether someone could be blamed if a cigarette started a fire. The jury did not accept the theory. After a 10-2 vote favoring the defense, the judge declared a mistrial.
The juror who spoke afterward gave the case its sharper edge. She said she talks to ChatGPT all the time and became angry at the suggestion that using a chatbot showed a character flaw. That reaction marks a limit prosecutors will keep meeting as private AI use becomes ordinary. A search history can look incriminating because it points to an action already known to have happened. A chatbot record is messier. It can contain fantasy, rehearsal, confession, curiosity, venting, boredom, or a sentence typed because the interface was available at a bad hour. The courtroom now has to decide when a prompt is evidence and when it is only a person speaking into software that answers back.
