The Intersect: Art in Tech and Tech in Art - Subcultures, Screens, and Signals

Greetings from Juergen

Hi all,

This week, I’m spotlighting how subcultures and new technologies find unexpected homes—from goth artists staging a festival on a haunted aircraft carrier, to design schools that now treat machine learning as essential as color theory. You’ll find a look at Salvador Dalí’s abandoned screenplay, resurrected by AI, and an interview with Hicham Berrada, whose art lets chemistry and decay shape the final outcome.

There’s also a moment to marvel at auroras as seen from the International Space Station, and a look at Adobe’s newest AI agents for Photoshop and Premiere Pro—designed to make the technical bits less of a chore. Finally, I share thoughts on a new exhibition that claims the information age is already behind us, and the real challenge now is cutting through the noise.

Prefer to listen? Each edition is also available as a companion podcast, where I unpack the stories in a conversational format—subscribe and join in.

Societal Impact of Art and Tech

Goth Artists to Take Over a Haunted Ship in San Francisco Bay

Goth artists are taking over the USS Hornet, a decommissioned aircraft carrier docked in Alameda, for a two-day festival of dark art, fashion, and music. As Katy Atchison writes for Broke-Ass Stuart, the event is hosted by The Menagerie Oddities Market and promises everything from goth fashion shows and live bands to paranormal ship tours and a “Dark Refuge” tea lounge. It’s part haunted museum, part art fair, part dance party—above the waves and below the radar.

Here’s one for a code-switching society. The last venue I’d expect for goth subculture is a military vessel. But maybe that’s the point. The contradiction is the draw. Cold steel, institutional trauma, and military pageantry are the perfect foil for self-expression that’s deeply emotional, theatrical, and defiantly nonconforming.

I can’t decide if it’s brilliant irony or just poetic chaos, but it works—and it’s visually stunning. Picture moody synths echoing off bulkheads while someone in leather and lace poses beneath a Cold War-era fighter jet.

Is this subversion, homage, or just a killer aesthetic mashup no one saw coming?

Istituto Marangoni Milano Design School Trains Students for an Era Shaped by Technology

At Designboom, Istituto Marangoni’s Milano Design School is spotlighted for its forward-leaning curriculum that blends creative practice with new tech. Their three new programs—focused on AI, robotics, and virtual reality—aim to prepare designers for a future that doesn’t just use tech as a tool, but builds with it from the ground up.

This reminds me of my own winding path. I started out with a fine arts degree, which eventually led me into programming, then banking, then launching a company in marketing tech—and now, back to visual arts and acousti guitar compositions. If that sounds chaotic, it was. But it taught me something: when creativity meets systems thinking, you don’t just adapt to change, you shape it.

It’s refreshing to see design schools finally catch up to the idea that a wide-angle, liberal-arts-style education—updated for today’s tech—isn’t just viable, it’s vital.

What path would you have taken if your art degree had included a class in machine learning?

AI in Visual Arts

Salvador Dalí’s “Giraffes on Horseback Salad” to Be Recreated Using AI.

Salvador Dalí’s long-lost screenplay Giraffes on Horseback Salad is being reimagined using AI through Google’s Veo 2 platform, as covered in an article by Maxwell Rabb for Artsy. First conceived in 1937 for Harpo Marx, the project was shelved for being “too surreal”—hard to imagine, coming from the man who painted melting clocks and lobster telephones. Now, with support from Goodby Silverstein & Partners and The Dalí Museum, Dalí’s dream is being brought to life—not as a replica, but as a strange new interpretation.

I grew up mesmerized by Dalí’s dreamscapes, but as an adult, I find myself wrestling with the man behind the brush. His ego was monumental—he once said waking up as himself was a daily joy. When I see AI “reawakening” his work, I can’t help but wonder: would Dalí have loved this homage, or sued everyone for not making it weird enough?

“Dalí wasn’t just an artist; he was a showman, a provocateur, and an unapologetic narcissist. His flamboyant personality and relentless self-promotion were as much a part of his brand as his paintings were.”

Can we really separate the brilliance of the art from the brashness of the artist—or should we stop pretending we need to?

Art & Science

HICHAM BERRADA, Between Science & Poetic Transformation

French-Moroccan artist Hicham Berrada's interview in CLOT Magazine explores how his work lives at the edge of science and poetic intuition. He doesn’t sculpt in the traditional sense—instead, he sets chemical, electrical, and environmental processes in motion and lets materials evolve on their own. With roots in scientific observation, his pieces are shaped by forces like erosion, electrolysis, and decay, creating organic, sometimes alien-looking forms that seem to grow on their own.

What draws me in is his ability to step aside and let nature “work.” There’s something quietly radical in that. Berrada talks about landscapes formed through electrochemical processes, or 3D-printed sculptures designed to decompose. I find this idea of impermanence—of embracing decay and transformation—deeply moving and surprisingly relevant in today’s hyper-controlled creative workflows.

“The physical sculpture is intentionally subject to time and decay, but the ability to recreate it from the digital file opens up a dialogue about preservation, impermanence, and how we relate to materiality in art.”

Is the future of art a collaboration—with nature, with code, with decay itself?

See Gorgeous Green Auroras Dance Over Earth in Dazzling ISS Astronaut Video

NASA astronaut Don Pettit shared two astonishing videos of Earth’s auroras captured from the International Space Station, as reported by Space.com. One video floats above the southern lights near Antarctica, the other hovers over a green-lit turbulence of atmosphere so ethereal it barely looks real. Pettit, now 69, is still actively exploring the delicate mix of science and wonder from earth orbit—and sharing it with us in ways that feel strangely intimate.

What hits me is how familiar these lights are—and yet completely different. Seeing auroras from Earth is already surreal, but from space, they don’t just dance, they ripple like giant sheets of liquid energy. It’s no longer just a light show—it’s planetary behavior.

“Green vaporous turbulence,” Pettit called it. That phrase got lodged in my head. Like something out of a Giger sketchbook, but real, and it’s our own upper atmosphere.

How would you capture something so vast and silent in your own work?

Creator Platforms and Tools

Adobe Is Building AI Agents for Photoshop and Premiere Pro

Adobe’s CTO of Digital Media, Ely Greenfield, shared in a recent Adobe blog post that Photoshop and Premiere Pro are getting AI agents designed to suggest and carry out photo and video edits. These agents live in a new floating Actions panel and respond to natural language prompts—“remove background people,” “add a text box,” “organize layers”—and then just do it for you.

What’s interesting to me is how Adobe continues to take a careful, integrated approach to AI. They’re not shoving automation into the creative process. They’re letting it sit alongside us. This isn’t about replacing creativity—it’s about making the technical part less of a hurdle so we can focus on decisions that actually matter.

“While AI can't replace human creative inspiration, with your input it can make some educated guesses to help you get your project off the ground,” Greenfield wrote.

Does this kind of AI collaborator make you feel empowered—or like someone’s standing over your shoulder with a clipboard?

Exhibitions & Events

The End of the Information Age is Here: Information Has Become Noise

Researcher and media artist Eryk Salvaggio’s recent piece for HOLO, covering the “Signal to Noise” exhibition he co-curated at Melbourne’s National Communication Museum, struck a nerve. He argues we’re no longer overwhelmed by a lack of information—but by the impossibility of escaping it. AI, in his view, isn't the issue—it's just the latest filter in a long line of systems trying to impose structure on human chaos.

I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of signal and noise. When the noise overwhelms the signal, what’s left? We’re flooded with data, yet clarity feels rare. I appreciate that this exhibition format invites us to question whether we’re still in the “information age,” or if that ended while we weren’t looking. What comes next may not be more data, but better ways to interpret—or ignore—it.

“This show is a post-AI exhibition,” Salvaggio writes, “and AI merely the most recent in a long series of confrontations between the ordered logic of computers and unstructured creativity of human beings.”

What if the next creative leap is learning when to stop listening?

The Last Word

Thanks for reading and spending some time with these stories. Your engagement keeps this conversation alive and evolving. If any of these pieces sparked a thought, a question, or even a disagreement, I’d genuinely like to hear from you. Let’s keep exploring the ways art and technology shape each other, and see what we uncover next.

Best, Juergen