THE

ANNEX

updated

Reconstructing ÆQAI

June 22, 2026 | By The Annex Gallery Team

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.

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LATEST

art review

Thresholds. Liudmila Velasco’s Long Road Home

June 9th, 2026 | By Jorge Rodriguez

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...

Midwest

Before the Flood: Tim Harrier’s Spirit Guides

June 8th, 2026 | By Jorge Rodriguez

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...

AEQAI

ARCHIVES

AEQAI ARCHIVES

Versoza’s World

June 15th, 2011 | By Keith Banner

“All things resist being written down,” Franz Kafka writes in an October 13, 1913 diary entry. Joey Versoza’s 2011artworks survey that resistance – objects refusing to go along with meaning, and meaning finding its way out of the experience of seeing. It’s hermeneutics in reverse: what’s in the gallery space is a visual language divorced from imagery, and imagery trying very...

AEQAI ARCHIVES

Carl Fudge

June 15th, 2011 | By Jane Durrell

Carl Fudge is a sly fellow. Just as you think you’ve caught the drift for one of his series works, either paintings or prints – ah yes, you think, look how this cluster balances that – he changes the color scheme for another version and all relationships shift gear. New game entirely.
Carl Solway Gallery is showing a selection of the work of British-born Fudge, who now lives...

AEQAI ARCHIVES

Insects and Astronauts:

June 15th, 2011 | By Keith Banner

Jeff Casto’s shadowboxes and assemblages in “Future Tense,” his current exhibit at 1305 Gallery ending July 15, 2011, conjure Joseph Cornell’s Utopia Parkway workshop, as well as Pee Wee Herman’s Playhouse, extracting wistfulness from detritus, seriousness from folly. The toys, junk and other materials used in Casto’s art have the allure of Saturday...

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art review

Gee Horton and the Construction of a Mythology of African American Mourning

June 7th, 2026 | By Jorge Rodriguez

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...

Art News

82 Pence a Minute

May 24th, 2026 | By Jorge Rodríguez

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.

art review

Zugunruhe: Stylianos Schicho and the Mutual Gaze

May 24th, 2026 | By Jorge Rodriguez

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.

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The Bought District
June 25th, 2026 | By Jorge Rodriguez

Corporate AI money has turned a Manhattan congressional primary into a test site for the industry's political future. According to The Verge, super PACs tied to AI interests have spent about $27.83 million around the NY-12 race, much of it connected to state Assemblyman Alex Bores, who helped pass an AI safety law in New York. Some money has come from safety-aligned groups linked to Anthropic supporters. Other money has come from anti-regulation or rival tech interests. A crypto billionaire connected to Ripple has also entered the fight. The candidate himself did not set out to make AI safety the center of the campaign, but outside money has made the seat into a proxy contest.

The useful fact is the scale. AI companies are trying to shape the political field before most voters have a clear language for the policy fight. Super PACs cannot coordinate with campaigns, but they can buy ads, produce content, define enemies, and make a local race feel like a national referendum. Residents may still be thinking about rent, transit, Israel, Trump, or the direction of the Democratic Party. The industry is thinking about future committee votes, liability rules, model restrictions, data centers, and who will be friendly when regulation reaches Congress. The ballot remains local. The invoice already belongs to the AI economy.

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The Default No
June 23rd, 2026 | By Jorge Rodriguez

Meta's Oversight Board has ordered Instagram to remove a reportedly AI-generated sexualized video impersonating a woman who is not a public figure. The eight-second post was flagged by Meta's automated systems, reported by two users, and appealed by one of them, but it remained online. Meta later argued that it lacked a clear signal that the woman depicted was real or that she had not consented, partly because she had not reported the post herself. The Board rejected that standard. It said the content violated Meta's rules on non-consensual intimate imagery and recommended that AI-generated sexualized impersonation of real people be treated as non-consensual by default.

The decision moves the burden away from the target of the abuse. A person whose face or body has been simulated may learn about the post after copies have traveled through accounts, messages, screenshots, and search results. Requiring that person to prove harm first gives the platform time while the image keeps circulating. The Board wants Meta to let trusted friends or family report on someone's behalf and to create a separate reporting category for AI-generated sexualized impersonation. A synthetic body can still damage a real person, and the first useful response is removal before the victim is forced to become the evidence clerk for her own violation.

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The Exposed App
June 22nd, 2026 | By Jorge Rodriguez

AI coding tools are making it easy for people to build apps before they understand what those apps can expose. The latest concern is vibe coding, the practice of describing a product in natural language and letting an AI system write much of the code. That can help a student, worker, founder, or hobbyist build useful software in hours. It can also put a public database, a customer record, a medical note, a private message, or a payment field online without the builder recognizing the risk. Recent examples include hidden SQL injection flaws, production databases left open, and thousands of public apps with weak or missing authentication.

The social change is simple. Software creation is no longer limited to people trained to think about failure. That is good for experimentation, but it moves responsibility faster than knowledge. A private tool becomes a public service the moment it stores someone else's data or runs in the cloud. Security cannot remain an expert ritual added after launch. The person who asks a model to build an app must also ask what the app stores, who can enter, what happens if it leaks, and whether a human needs to review it before strangers use it.

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