This story appears in the August 2026 print edition. While some stories from this issue are not yet available to read online, you can explore more from the magazine . Get our editors' guide to what matters in the world, delivered to your inbox every weekday. Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst believe the future doesn't have to belong to slop. The art was way too heavy. In mid-March, the artists Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst were preparing an installation to coincide with the Venice Biennale, the prestigious international art festival, but the execution was becoming tricky. They wanted to suspend sculptures of a trippy cityscape upside down from the ceiling of an 18th-century palazzo. But the construction material they envisioned-- 3-D-printed sand--would weigh tons, which was more than the antique building could bear. The sculptures, they realized, might fall and crush someone. Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read. This was a rather analog problem for a married couple widely seen as technological prophets. Herndon, 46, and Dryhurst, 41, have reached the upper echelons of the art world thanks to a media-spanning output--music, images, software, and reams of commentary--with a cybernetic bent. They are high culture's most influential exponents of artificial intelligence, an invention that many people believe spells doom for the arts but that they think could lead to a renaissance. I met them on a cold, bright Tuesday in Berlin.

It would be wrong to claim that I first met the German artist Hito Steyerl on such-and-such day, in such-and-such city, where the weather was bright or blustery, and that she arrived suitably dressed for this season or the next. It is more accurate to say that she simply appeared while I was waiting in the atrium of the Communist Party court, under a spectacular red banner from which the faces of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin bore down on me. One minute I was alone, and the next she was there--all yellow and smooth, except for the thick black cubes of her hands and her large, impassive face. Four black cats trailed her, in place of her shadow. "I spawned a lot of them, so they have multiplied," she murmured.

There is a health and safety warning on one of the apps you must download to get the full augmented reality experience of Hito Steyerl's Serpentine Gallery project. "In the future, 100% of all humans will die," Steyerl warns us. "Access this zone at your own risk and don't complain later." She forewarns us of trouble, and that adults are advised to treat the experience as a fiction. "Anyone under the age of 19 is safe to understand it as they please, as they can probably deal with it."

Images used to be made by people, for people. Today, there's an entirely new kind of image: pictures taken by machines, for other machines to use. This new genre–created by cameras mounted on traffic lights, in shopping malls, on advertisements, and on computers and smartphones–is teaching computers how to see. "You have a moment where for the first time in history most of the images in the world are made by machines for other machines, and humans aren't even in the loop," says the Berlin-based artist Trevor Paglen. "I think the automation of vision is a much bigger deal than the invention of perspective."