Unknowing

The idea the rest of the work is an angle of.

There are things I could measure and don't. No visitor counts, no analytics, no reach figures, on any site or tool I publish. I don't argue a decision from audience numbers, because I don't have any.

The reason is not privacy. An unknown quantity can be anything. It can be zero and it can be infinite, and both stay possible only while it is unknown. A counter doesn't violate anyone. It replaces a possibility with a figure, and once the figure exists everything downstream starts arguing from it.

I have held this since the early years of the Museum of Vestigial Desire.

We do not keep server logs, so there is no way of knowing how many people visit the website. If you do not know a number it can be anything. It can be zero and it can be infinite.

— Audience, Museum of Vestigial Desire, 8 October 2013

What it isn't

It isn't a refusal of reach. Narrowcasting and broadcasting are both available and both get used. The setting is chosen for the particular thing being made, after working out what it holds and who it is for. Something that reaches four people hasn't failed if it was configured for four.

It isn't a refusal to know anything either. A practice can know what it did. What it doesn't get to know is what happened afterwards.

The philosophy holds. The interpretation depends on your life.

The idea is fixed. What it becomes depends on what a person is trying to do.

You cannot shoot in the blind if your business is to shoot. A curator's version and a designer's version are not the same instruction, because the work isn't the same work. The idea constrains the interpretation. It doesn't select it.

What each kind of work takes away is a residue: the trace unknowing leaves in that particular field. A residue records a relation it didn't create, and it isn't a route back. You can receive the whole operation in your own work and never meet the philosophy that produced it.

The test of any interpretation is whether it still refuses something. One that permits everything you were already doing hasn't interpreted anything.

The angles

• Zariia — curation The label may know what it did. It never knows what happened. Presence open, content keyed: it can see who was handed a key and never who used one.
• Split-Domain Cognition — authorship Language work must not know the verdict it is carrying you toward. The split ratio can't be read off finished prose, because a held verdict and a smuggled one look identical once polished.
• zetizeti — software The stone never knows the answer, and code rather than good intentions rejects any output that behaves as though it did. No scores and no user modelling, so the tool can't know who is improving or whether it works.
• Koher — tools Nothing counted, so a free tool can be serving anyone. And the voice between people is kept human by denying the tool the position of witness.
• Teaching — declared extent Designers don't need to unknow. Their business is to know. What they need is to declare the extent to which they know.

Teaching, at more length

Knowing how to use AI well leaves you better placed for what's coming. That's true, and it is only half of it. The other half is that you have to use it in a way that doesn't erase you.

What these tools take is not your labour and not your visibility. It's your standing to say how far your knowing goes. The output arrives whole, without provenance. You weren't there for the knowing, so you can't honestly report its edges even if you want to, and a person who can't say where their knowledge ends has nowhere to speak from. It is quiet, because the work looks better than it did before.

Everyone has limits. Almost nobody reveals them, because visibility punishes the revealing. That is where the corrosion actually sits. Not in being seen, but in what being seen makes a person conceal.

The cost

A practice with no feedback can't detect its own drift. If the fourth thing I make is worse than the first, nothing in this arrangement will tell me. That is the price, and I chose it. It is why the positions written in advance carry more weight here than they otherwise would.