Bytesize Podcast

I have been following Nancy Baker Cahill's work for a number of years now, watching it evolve in scale and expand to collaborative interventions that invite artists to grow their own work through her platform, 4th Wall. Just recently, LACMA announced that it had acquired her work into their collection alongside digital artists like Trevor Paglen and Lauren Lee McCarthy, marking an important moment in the evolution of digital art in the age of AI. Baker Cahill also completed a LACMA residency at 18th Street Arts Center in Santa Monica, CA, and, earlier this year, received a fellowship from United States Artists. Tune in to hear her discuss her work and future projects.

Here is more about the exhibitions and projects we mention:

* 4th Wall app

* Ecologies of Scale, North Carolina Museum of Art, NC

* CENTO at the Whitney Museum, NYC

* Residency at 18th Street Arts Center, Santa Monica

* Seismic at Charlie James Gallery, LA

Celebrated photographer and filmmaker Ed Kashi and I connected earlier in 2026 around Timeline, a mentorship project by LACP, during which documentary photographers work with dedicated cohorts to capture long form projects about their cities and neighborhoods. Kashi led the San Francisco cohort (Ibarionex Perello led the LA cohort), whose works are now shown at LACP (through October 12) and are featured in an online archive. As we are launching the 2027 cycle, it felt like the right moment to dive deeper into the project and his decades-long work.

Kashi, who is also a renowned photojournalist, speaker and educator, shared why he thinks we are in a golden age of photographic creativity, and what concerns him about the field. We also get into the challenges of publishing work, and why he advises photographers to chart a path of their own.

Here are some links to projects we discuss:

* Timeline 2027 by LACP.

* Ed Kashi’s website.

* Books: Abandoned Moments and Aging in America.

* The Enigma Room project.

* Photo-essay: Kashi’s multi-year archival project about aging featured in The Guardian.

Jacqueline Nesi, PhD authors the popular newsletter Techno Sapiens, where she dissects our relationship with technology, how psychology research responds to tech advancements, and how they shift the conversation between parents and their children. She is also an Assistant Professor at Brown University, and, as she shares about her newsletter, her path was defined by her experience as a young parent.

I got to hear from her about using a dumbphone, what happens when chatbots replace real social friction, how to discuss generative AI with your kids, and why is she still optimistic about AI.

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Assaf Dar-Sagol is a veteran music producer, composer, orchestrator, cellist, and the co-founder and CEO of Polyverse Music, a company developing audio effects plugins and virtual instruments for musicians, producers, and sound designers. In the past few years, they have shaped a vibrant community around their products and work. Dar-Sagol’s perspective is particularly important, since the community around synthesizers and plugins is not only global and vibrant, but it also mirrors the visual arts’ return to analog technologies and tactility as a response to digital existence in unexpected ways.

Dar-Sagol’s co-founders are Aviram Souhami, as well as Erez Eisen from Infected Mushroom, the iconic psytrance duo. Together, they develop unconventional tools that allow artists to radically transform their sounds. I was curious to hear from Dar-Sagol about how musicians and the electronic scene are impacted by the current AI landscape, as well as what innovation looks like at this moment.

A number of High Resolution conversations have focused on the impact of collaboration and community on one’s practice in the context of visual arts, but I did not yet get to speak with someone who navigates the intersections of audio, production, and tech about that context. It feels pressing to look at what is happening in other creative domains, and how similar pressures and technological shifts shape both fields. As always, we also get into some predictions, discussing the future impact of AI on both the electronic music industry and the musicians’ studios.

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Ahead of the opening of Everybody Hates Exhibitions this Thursday, April 2, at 6 pm at LACP, I welcomed Ali LeRoi to Bytesize this week. This solo exhibition, curated by your truly, features his never-before-seen photographs captured behind the scenes of the iconic TV show, which recently marked its twentieth anniversary.

In this conversation, we discuss the experience of going back to those moments, two decades after the show debuted, and how the camera allowed LeRoi to both connect to the moment and position his own life story in relation to both the fictional narratives of the show and the real human relationships on set.

Ali LeRoi: Everybody Hates Exhibitions, opening April 2, 6-8pm, at LACP: lacphoto.org.

Canadian author, journalist, and activist Cory Doctorow coined the term Enshittification in 2023, accurately capturing the experience of being online in the 2020s, in virtual environments that were purposefully being decayed by corporations and tech giants. The companies that govern our day-to-day life online were deteriorating the level of service to increase their profits: If the search results you receive on Google are not good enough, chances are you will click on more results, therefore seeing more ads, therefore improving Google’s bottom line. Enshittification poignantly reminded the world that the participants in the online domain – us! – are the product and that we are users also in the sense that we are trapped within those systems.

In this post, I suggested that the flux of images generated by AI creates a similar phenomenon that can be considered as Artshittification: a flood that keeps going at our expense, locking us into services we cannot not use. In this case, the platform was not downgraded after providing a trustworthy service, it was decayed and degraded from the get-go in order to attract as many users as possible, before protective guardrails were set around it. In that respect, the process of artshittification might be more rapid (and perhaps more massive) than enshittification.

I finally got to speak with Doctorow about this term and how he understands the condition (predicament?) of our current global and visual culture.

His new book, The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI, explores life with AI further, and will be coming out in June. You can see more and pre-order here.

What a great way to start 2026!

I have been following Penelope Umbrico’s work through her Suns from Sunsets on Flickr ongoing project, which she began in 2006. Accumulating images of people capturing themselves in front of sunsets on Flickr, Umbrico created a stunning collage of the sun’s vibrant colors at dusk, and while doing so, she captured our shifting understanding of participation in the world through digital images and the social rituals that were developing around them online.

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In 2025, we finally got to work together, as part of Reservoir: Loneliness, Photography and Well-Being which I organized at LACP (and shout-out to @Jennifer Pritchard, who helped develop the concept!). The program brought together nearly 40 artists from across the world, who were invited by mentors to work with them for a period of nine months and incubate new work about loneliness. The results of their extraordinary efforts will be shown in an exhibition at LACP, opening January 29, 2026, before traveling to other locations.

Under her guidance, Penelope’s cohort explored the meeting points of consumerism, technology and well-being, producing work that navigates our shared and strange lives with robots, landscapes that are re-defined by Amazon distribution centers, or how AI captures a thematic image of female aging.

During the first week of the new year, she and I got to have a conversation about her path, projects from recent years and how all of this connects to a beloved department store in Toronto.

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Eivind Røssaak’s recent book, The Cory Arcangel Hack, makes a compelling argument for observing the first generation of twenty-first century post-conceptual artists as hackers who disturb the modernist picture plane. For groundbreaking multimedia artists like Cory Arcangel, the surface of an image, a computer, a floppy disk, a gaming console, a record or the Instagram feed is a starting point, an invitation for intervention, or, to use Røssaak’s terms, to cut through the flow to see what lies beneath the surface.

Working on research at NYU in the early 2000s, Røssaak had a front row seat to the shaping of Arcangel’s artistic milieu on the Lower East Side and its resonance across the art world during and after the first decade of the twenty-first century.

Røssaak and I also got to speak about archiving the web, his current research around archives and indigenous communities, as well as the impact of AI on scholarship shortly after he came back from launch events in New York.

A reminder:

Today, Monday, December 15, I will host Bytesize’s first Happy Monday – Portfolio and Work Share for paid subscribers.

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Michael Howard is trying to change the relationship between social media and photographers. He wants photographers to be able to see and share work without ads, videos, strange audio, or unnecessary additions. Images only, please, and if the app can be a gateway for building a community online and IRL then, well, fantastic! Foto, the app he co-founded and launched in February this year, hopes to address a very real need: to bring the focus back to the photographic image, and cultivate a social network that is actually social, and — maybe? — friendly.

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The feed is chronological, and the team rolls out updates after receiving community sourced feedback. New pro features will be added behind a paywall in the future, yet the free version will continue to be available for all. In addition, they began organizing events IRL, specifically, a global photowalk that took place in a number of cities.

I have been really interested in Foto’s model, which is devoid of ads, and the generous way in which Howard utilizes the Substack chat to garner feedback, suggestions and comments from actual Foto users. It feels sincere and, who knows, it might help shift how we orient ourselves online. In other words, Foto might carve out a space on social media that focuses on people as contributors and members rather than users.

Tune in to listen/hear us talk about Foto’s origin story, its mission, where it’s headed, and Howard’s thoughts on the conflicted meeting point between photographers and AI.

Michael Howard, Foto app’s Co-Founder, is coming to ByetSize this week, and I hope you’ll tune in to hear us discuss building a social network that focuses on images rather than using images to grab your attention, and fostering a community instead of advertisers. It was wonderful to hear from him about the vision, how the app started, and where it might be headed. The full interview is coming later this week.

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On a very different note, last week I was honored to be invited by Orange County’s Community Scholar Program (CSP) to talk about Israeli photography in the wake of the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, as we just marked three decades since the murder. I still perceive that day as a watershed moment in Israeli society, a moment of no return. I thought the confluence of tragic political circumstances, shifting media landscapes and the response of the local art world might be of interest for many of you, so here it is: