The Intersect of Art and Tech

The Intersect of Art and Tech Subscribe for updates on the art-tech relationship. The Intersect: Art & Technology Fusion

Welcome to The Intersect, a unique space where art meets technology.

"The Intersect" examines the reciprocal influences of technology and the arts, providing analyses of how tech advancements shape artistic expression and how creativity fuels technological progress. Curated by me, Juergen Berkessel, we explore how technological advances shape artistic expression and vice versa. This platform serves as a digest for enthusiasts and professionals who seek to understan

d and contribute to the evolving dialogue between these two dynamic fields.

🔹 What You’ll Find Here:

Insightful Articles: Deep dives into how technology influences art and how creativity drives tech innovations. Featured Discussions: Conversations with artists and technologists who are bridging the gap between creativity and technological execution. Resource Sharing: Curated links and resources for those who inhabit the nexus of art and technology.

🔹 Join Us:
Stay updated with the latest trends at the intersection of art and tech. Engage with a community that values deep, nuanced discussions about the integration and mutual influence of these fields.

🔹 My Background:
I'm Juergen Berkessel, founder of Polymash, a digital strategy company with a focus on podcast production, SEO, and web design. But I also combine my expertise in digital strategy with a passion for art and music, offering a unique perspective on the convergence of technology and artistic expression.

Ralf Jacobs, an artist based in the Netherlands, built a Harmonograph.If you're not familiar: a Harmonograph is a pendul...
06/04/2026

Ralf Jacobs, an artist based in the Netherlands, built a Harmonograph.

If you're not familiar: a Harmonograph is a pendulum-driven drawing machine. You set it in motion, and it traces curves onto paper — slowly, hypnotically, as the pendulum loses momentum and the lines tighten and decay. No algorithm. No screen. Just physics doing its thing.

Jacobs built his with a frictionless hinge, which gives the stylus enough momentum to produce those long, intricate spirograph-adjacent patterns you've probably seen in old physics textbooks and immediately wanted to own.

Here's the part that got me: the machine is also, apparently, a piece of furniture. It lives in his home as an object. Which means the drawing machine and the drawing are both artifacts — one permanent, one made fresh each time.

There's something quietly pointed about building a machine like this right now, when generative AI can produce ten thousand variations of a similar pattern in the time it takes to read this sentence. The Harmonograph takes as long as it takes. The output is unrepeatable. The process is visible.

None of that makes it better than a generated image. But it makes it different in ways that seem worth paying attention to.

Full piece in Issue 78: https://jb9.me/c1BGfk

The Moog synthesizer terrified people when it came out.Not because it sounded bad — because it sounded like it might rep...
06/01/2026

The Moog synthesizer terrified people when it came out.

Not because it sounded bad — because it sounded like it might replace musicians entirely. That anxiety sounds familiar, doesn't it?

Ellen McGirt's piece at Design Observer uses the Moog as a starting point for thinking about how new tools always follow the same arc: they arrive, they threaten, they get absorbed, and eventually they become the thing younger artists deliberately reach for because it sounds "authentic."

The synthesizer that was going to kill music is now the sound of warmth and humanity in a track.

This pattern keeps repeating. Electric guitars. Drum machines. Autotune. Each one was supposed to be the end of something real. Each one became part of the vocabulary.

The honest question is whether AI creative tools will follow the same arc — or whether something is genuinely different this time. McGirt doesn't pretend to have a clean answer, which is probably the right call.

What's worth sitting with is the Moog comparison itself. If the thing that was going to automate music away is now considered soulful, what does that say about how we assign meaning to tools in the first place?

Issue 78 of The Intersect: https://jb9.me/waYRFH

DRIFT's “Franchise Freedom” — 1,000+ illuminated drones choreographed above LACMA's newly opened David Geffen Galleries ...
06/01/2026

DRIFT's “Franchise Freedom” — 1,000+ illuminated drones choreographed above LACMA's newly opened David Geffen Galleries — is the kind of work that makes you want to argue about it.

Is it art? Is it spectacle? Is there a difference when it's this carefully considered? The Dutch studio DRIFT has been making swarm work for years, and there's genuine intention behind it — the piece is about collective behavior, about what freedom looks like when it's coordinated.

But it's also happening above a building designed by Peter Zumthor, one of the most deliberate architects alive. Two practices that both care obsessively about presence and atmosphere, sharing the same sky.

I find myself more interested in that collision than in either work alone.

Full story in Issue 77: https://jb9.me/ikfeWy

Why does every new piece of music software still look like a rack of hardware from 1987?Skeuomorphism — the design habit...
05/27/2026

Why does every new piece of music software still look like a rack of hardware from 1987?

Skeuomorphism — the design habit of making digital tools look like their physical predecessors — is everywhere in audio software. Virtual k***s. Fake patch cables. Simulated VU meters that glow amber for absolutely no functional reason.

On one hand, it's a crutch. The software doesn't need to look like a patchbay. It's not a patchbay. It can do things a patchbay could never do, and dressing it up in analog clothing might actually obscure that.

On the other hand, those visual metaphors aren't just nostalgia bait. They carry real information about how the tool works, what its lineage is, and how you're supposed to think about signal flow. Strip all that away and you might end up with something that's technically more powerful and practically more confusing.

The question isn't really "old look vs. new look." It's whether the interface is teaching you something true about the tool — or just making you feel comfortable while hiding what's actually happening under the hood.

We're looking at this in Issue 78 of The Intersect: https://jb9.me/di5xl7

400 drones. Coachella traffic. Skeletor."SHOULD HAVE LEFT EARLIER."I don't have much to add to that. The “Masters of the...
05/27/2026

400 drones. Coachella traffic. Skeletor.

"SHOULD HAVE LEFT EARLIER."

I don't have much to add to that. The “Masters of the Universe” drone show that trolled gridlocked drivers on the way to Coachella is the most purely enjoyable drone story I've encountered in years. No ambivalence required.

Sometimes a technology just does something delightful and you're allowed to laugh.

(The rest of Issue 77 is considerably more complicated. But we start here.) https://jb9.me/hmXfTS

An artist is crocheting early 2000s tech into oversized textile sculptures. Floppy disks, dial-up modems, chunky hardwar...
05/26/2026

An artist is crocheting early 2000s tech into oversized textile sculptures. Floppy disks, dial-up modems, chunky hardware — all rendered in yarn at human scale. Oddly moving. https://jb9.me/4iZKM8

Carlo Zappella's _Digital Doubles_ at Horizont Gallery in Budapest is work about analog-digital tension that — refreshin...
05/25/2026

Carlo Zappella's _Digital Doubles_ at Horizont Gallery in Budapest is work about analog-digital tension that — refreshingly — doesn't take itself too seriously.

Most art in this space arrives with a heavy theoretical apparatus strapped to its back. Zappella seems more interested in the strangeness of the situation than in delivering a verdict on it. The camera looking back. The digital copy that isn't quite a copy.

It's a relief, honestly. The best work about technology tends to be curious rather than conclusive.

Read more in Issue 76 of The Intersect: https://jb9.me/jBFqVT

22,580 drones. Simultaneously. Over the city of Hefei, China, for the 2026 Spring Festival Gala.The previous record was ...
05/25/2026

22,580 drones. Simultaneously. Over the city of Hefei, China, for the 2026 Spring Festival Gala.

The previous record was 15,847. This one shattered it — and the swarm was programmed to depict Hui-style architecture and lanterns that appeared to actually sway in the wind. Not just shapes. Motion. Texture. The illusion of weight.

I've been sitting with this one. Because it's genuinely spectacular and I can't pretend otherwise. But it's also a technology that, at a different scale and with different software, is being used to kill people in active conflict zones right now.

Same propellers. Same coordination algorithms. Completely different outcomes.

That's the tension I keep returning to. Not "is this art or propaganda" — that's too easy. The harder question is what it means to feel wonder at a tool that is simultaneously being weaponized.

Issue 77 has the full story: https://jb9.me/oj2t4c

Someone made a DIY Eurorack module you assemble yourself, with swappable program cards that turn it into a reverb, a seq...
05/21/2026

Someone made a DIY Eurorack module you assemble yourself, with swappable program cards that turn it into a reverb, a sequencer, a MIDI brain, or whatever else you feel like building that week.

It's called the Music Thing Modular Workshop Computer, and it's a genuinely strange object to exist in 2024 — when you can get a plugin that does all of those things, instantly, for less money, without soldering anything.

So why does this exist? And more interestingly, why do people want it?

There's something going on here that's bigger than nostalgia. When music production gets frictionless enough — when every sound is one click away — some people start deliberately adding friction back in. Not because it sounds better. Because the constraint changes how they work, and that changes what they make.

The Workshop Computer isn't really competing with Ableton. It's offering a completely different relationship with the tool. You built it. You understand (roughly) how it works. When it does something unexpected, that's a feature, not a bug.

Whether that's a meaningful creative choice or expensive hobbyism dressed up as philosophy is a fair question. But it's an interesting one.

More in Issue 78: https://jb9.me/uiPdFg

The World Wide Web turns 35 this year. Christopher Sonnleitner's piece on the Ars Electronica Blog traces the whole arc ...
05/18/2026

The World Wide Web turns 35 this year. Christopher Sonnleitner's piece on the Ars Electronica Blog traces the whole arc — from the 1990s dream of a free, democratic information commons to what we actually got.

The throughline is depressingly consistent: every open system eventually gets optimized for extraction. The web didn't get worse because bad people took over. It got worse because the incentives were always pointing in one direction, and we just didn't want to see it.

"Ensh*ttification" is Cory Doctorow's word for it, and it fits. First the platform serves users. Then it serves advertisers. Then it serves itself. Then it collapses under its own weight — or gets replaced by something that starts the cycle over.

Now we're doing it again with AI. Same dream, same incentives, same destination?

Read the full piece in Issue 77: https://jb9.me/Yu8HaO

Address

Bradenton, FL
34203

Telephone

+17322905760

Website

Alerts

Be the first to know and let us send you an email when The Intersect of Art and Tech posts news and promotions. Your email address will not be used for any other purpose, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Contact The Establishment

Send a message to The Intersect of Art and Tech:

Shortcuts

Share

Category