AMMDI is an open-notebook hypertext writing experiment, authored by Mike Travers aka mtraven. It's a work in progress and some parts are more polished than others. Comments welcome! More.
A rather queasy and disturbing experiment with LLM generated text. Nothing out of the ordinary these days, when LLM slop is everywhere. But disturbing to me personally, because it makes me question my purposes here (which are always at issue anyway). If I write to figure stuff out, having a machine do it is crosswise to my goals. If I write for others, well, I need to do more promotion (why don't I have a Substack like everyone else).
In this case I didn't really care enough to write something myself based on an idle brainfart, so what the hell, automate it. The result is reasonably insightful, but bland and a bit vacant. It lacks soul, vision, and thus Art. I feel slightly soiled, desecrated, by letting this machinery chew over and spit up my thoughts.
Something deeper is missed in this, not surprising since it isn't generally written down. The Media Lab was not so much about promoting STEAM which is kind of a lame marketing slogan, but about the actual fact that art, science, and technology have always been joined at the hip, not separate kinds of intellectual activity. Real artists push the limits of technology. Even Blake's genius manifested in both his prophetic visions and innovations in printing techniques. "Art" and "Science' are artificial institutions and the best minds are not constrained by them.
Whoops actually the gen text makes this point.
OK now I feel better. Let the LLM automate my boring thoughts, saving me time for the slightly more interesting.
There's something almost quaint about the STEAM movement's optimism—the idea that we can simply add an "A" for Arts to the venerable STEM acronym and suddenly heal centuries of intellectual apartheid. It's a beautiful dream, really, but one that crashes headlong into some pretty stubborn realities about how knowledge gets made and, more importantly, how it gets funded.
William Blake saw it coming, of course. His Newton—that famous etching of the great physicist hunched over his compass, measuring the world into submission—wasn't just artistic license. It was prophecy. Blake understood that the Scientific Revolution's gift to humanity came wrapped in a kind of curse: the more we learned to quantify and systematize the world, the more we seemed to lose our capacity for wonder, for the kind of knowing that can't be reduced to data points and peer-reviewed papers.
Fast forward a few centuries, and you'll find the folks at Weird Studies carrying Blake's torch in their own peculiar way. Phil Ford, JF Martel, and their fellow travelers aren't anti-science exactly, but they're deeply suspicious of scientism—that overweening confidence that scientific methods can and should be applied to everything worth knowing. They champion what they call "weird" ways of understanding: the occult, the anomalous, the irreducibly subjective experiences that make positivists break out in hives.
The Media Lab Experiment
Into this ancient quarrel stepped the MIT Media Lab in the 1980s, with Nicholas Negroponte's audacious vision of a place where technologists and artists could play in the same sandbox. The Lab was going to prove that the science-art divide was a false choice, that the most interesting innovations would emerge from their intersection. And for a while, it looked like they might actually pull it off.
The early years produced some genuinely magical stuff. Artists were hacking computers in ways that made engineers rethink what their machines could do. Musicians were inventing new instruments that couldn't exist without sophisticated signal processing. Designers were creating interfaces that felt more like conversations than commands. It was interdisciplinary collaboration at its best—messy, unpredictable, and occasionally brilliant.
But here's the thing about the Media Lab that its origin story tends to gloss over: it was never really an equal partnership between science and art. From the beginning, the Lab operated according to the logic of technological innovation, with artistic sensibilities providing texture and polish rather than fundamentally different ways of knowing. The artists weren't there to challenge the underlying assumptions of digital culture; they were there to make it more beautiful, more usable, more human.
When Money Talks
And this gets to the heart of why the STEAM reconciliation remains so elusive. In our society, science and technology command resources in ways that art simply doesn't. A breakthrough in materials science or artificial intelligence can generate billions in economic value. A breakthrough in poetry or painting? Well, that's harder to quantify, which in a capitalist system means it's harder to fund.
The Media Lab's evolution tells this story in miniature. What started as a genuinely experimental space increasingly became a showcase for corporate sponsors looking to associate their brands with cutting-edge cool. The artists were still there, but they were increasingly working in service of technological agendas rather than pursuing their own lines of inquiry. The art became instrumentalized—valuable insofar as it could help engineer better user experiences or generate more compelling marketing narratives.
This isn't to slag on the Media Lab specifically. They were trying to solve a genuinely hard problem within the constraints of existing institutional structures. But those constraints matter. When you're dependent on corporate funding and measured by metrics like patent applications and startup creation, certain kinds of knowledge inevitably get privileged over others.
The Weird Alternative
Which brings us back to the weird studies folks and their insistence on preserving space for non-instrumental ways of knowing. They're not trying to reconcile science and art so much as defend art's right to exist on its own terms—to pursue questions that can't be answered with data, to value experiences that resist quantification, to take seriously forms of knowledge that don't fit into peer-reviewed journals.
There's something both admirable and tragic about this position. Admirable because it refuses to let artistic and humanistic ways of knowing be colonized by scientific rationality. Tragic because it seems to concede that genuine integration might be impossible—that the best we can hope for is peaceful coexistence in separate domains.
A Different Kind of Reconciliation
But maybe there's a third way, one that doesn't require artists to become technologists or scientists to abandon their methods. Maybe the reconciliation of science and art isn't about creating new hybrid disciplines so much as recognizing that both are fundamentally about paying attention to the world in all its complexity.
The best scientists I know have always been artists of a sort—people with an aesthetic sense for elegant theories and beautiful experiments. And the most compelling contemporary artists are often those who engage seriously with the technological and scientific realities of our moment, not to celebrate or condemn them but to help us see them more clearly.
Perhaps the real obstacle to STEAM integration isn't intellectual or methodological but economic and institutional. Maybe what we need isn't new curricula or interdisciplinary programs but different ways of organizing intellectual life—structures that can support knowledge-making that doesn't immediately justify itself in market terms.
The MIT Media Lab pioneered something important, even if it didn't quite achieve its original vision. It showed that scientists and artists can indeed collaborate productively when given the space and resources to do so. Its mixed success points not to the impossibility of integration but to the difficulty of sustaining it within institutions shaped by market logic.
Blake's Newton is still hunched over his compass, still trying to measure the world into submission. But maybe, in the margins of his calculations, there's room for other ways of seeing—weird, artistic, irreducibly human ways of making sense of the strange reality we inhabit. The full STEAM ahead approach might not reconcile these different modes of knowing, but it can at least insist that we need them all.