In episode 83 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Peli Grietzer.
Peli is a scholar whose work borrows mathematical ideas from machine learning theory to think through “ambient” and ineffable phenomena like moods, vibes, cultural logics, and structures of feeling. He is working on a book titled Big Mood: A Transcendental-Computational Essay in Art and contributes to the experimental literature collective Gauss PDF. Peli has a PhD in mathematically informed literary theory from Harvard Comparative Literature in collaboration with the HUJI Einstein Institute of Mathematics.
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Outline:
* (00:00) Intro
* (02:17) Peli’s background
* (10:40) Daniel takes 2 entire minutes to ask how Peli thinks about ~ Art ~
* (26:10) Idealism and art as revealing the nature of reality, extralinguistic experiences of truth through literature
* (52:05) The autoencoder as a way to understand Romantic theories of art
* (1:14:55) More on how Peli thinks about autoencoders
* (1:18:05) Connections to ambient meaning, stimmung/mood
* (1:37:18) Examples of poetry/literature as mathematical experience, aesthetic unity and totalizing worldviews
* (1:51:15) Moods clashing within a single work
* (2:10:14) Modernist writers
* (2:32:46) Outro
Links:
* Peli’s Twitter
* A Theory of Vibe
* Why poetry is a variety of mathematical experience
* Peli’s thesis
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