Sign in Subscribe
4 min read 20

UofWinds 437, Week 20, 2026: The Process as Product, How to See Like a Machine, Coordinate Me


Good morning. For the last ten years, I have started my Saturday morning of the Victoria Day long weekend by writing this newsletter. Ten years! Some of you have been with this newsletter from the start (🙏🏽) and you know how much more wordy I've become since those first days.

I am sitting at the desk in the study and this has disappointed the cats as they can only get scritches if I opt to bring the laptop to the sofa. I can hear that one of them has resorted to pestering my husband for attention in the kitchen. It has been a cool May and so the windows are only just open enough to let the birdsong in. (It was birdsong which woke me up so very early this morning which is why this newsletter is in your inbox before 10am!)

The forecast is that warmth and rain are on its way.

The Process as Product


I'm not entirely sure when I started collecting examples of artists sharing their process alongside their product, but let's say it was this instagram post from Charli XCX: "i love talking about making things and process and stuff with my friends so if you want to ask me questions about creative process / song writing / anything else that would be cute". She recently released a music video for her latest single "Rock Music" [00:02:04] alongside a documentary released of its filming [00:16:49].

Creating documentaries of the creative process isn't new, but in the age of machine-generated music and video, I think it might become more prevalent.

Another example: electronic artist Fred Again released the audio of nine of the ten concerts on his USB Tour in what is possibly the longest YouTube video currently being hosted. (I'm on hour 15 of this 108 hour combined-set). Fred Again also invited someone to document the behind the scenes process behind the show and his team captured the video of the making of this video [00:04:45].

In order to assure the viewer that what they are experiencing was hand-made and not machine-generated, creators who normally stay behind the scenes are moving in front of the camera and showing how they create the footage that they then are showing on screen.

What these artists are competing against is perfectly captured in this widely-shared essay by Kate Davies that explores the scourge of Knitting Bullshit, which itself is perfectly encapsulated by the video, "Someone Has Always Been Knitting" [00:04:32].

How to See Like a Machine


I was listening to this interview between Nilay Patel and Joanna Stern talking about living with consumer robots when their conversation took a turn that caught my attention. Patel asked Stern about the gap between the current marketing hype and the actual capability of home-robots:

There's just no way. even if it was ready that people would be letting some of these things into their homes right now. And that's largely the data gap which we can talk about the fact that these robots don't have enough data of doing real world things especially in the home because the home is the hardest place to put a robot.
It's not a factory floor. Everything isn't repeatable. Everything isn't mapped out for it. Everything in your home changes especially in a home with kids and a dog and you know whatever else animals I have living in my house this week. That gap is massive... ... And then you come to robots like physical AI and it works for Amazon where they have a warehouse and they can paint the lines on the floor and they can put all the bins in the right places and you watch those videos of all the robots doing their orchestrated movements... How am I going to get enough data ever to make a house with kids in it legible to a robot? It doesn't even seem likely to me.

"We once looked at pictures. Then, with the advent of computer vision and machine learning, pictures started looking at us." That's the marketing blurb for the forthcoming book, How to See Like a Machine: Images After AI by artist and geographer Trevor Paglen.

A great introduction to Paglen's work is the short [00:17:14] documentary entitled "Secrets" that is part of Season 7 of Art 21's Art in the Twenty-First Century series. That documentary captures the state of the art of surveillance from 2014. I am looking forward to reading what Paglen has captured since then.

Coordinate Me


Back in December of 2012, I was feeling restless during Winter Break, and on a lark decided to participate in that month's Wikipedia challenge to take and share photos of officially registered Historical Places that are near to where I live.

I feel far from restless on this first day of the long weekend (I am sooo looking forward to doing a lot of reading). But, on the off-chance that I will eventually feel like I need to take myself out for a walk, I'm thinking I might take part of this month's Wikidata challenge:

COORDINATE ME 2026 is the third edition of the international Wikidata competition around content with geodata – from villages and pharmacies to public art and natural monuments. Its goal is to improve or create Wikidata items which have a coordinate location(P625) property that is located in one of the participating focus countries. Join the competition right away or explore our various tools and resources. For beginners, there are Wikidata online workshops in different languages.
The competition starts on 1 May 2026 and ends on 31 May 2026.
Wikidata editors from all over the world are invited to join the project. There are many prizes with a total value of 4850 euros. The focus countries reflect a wide diversity, both in terms of their local conditions and their current representation on Wikidata.

Member discussion