aesthetics Archives - Nate Cooper

Walter Benjamin vs. BenjamAI

by natecooper | Mar 31, 2025 | aesthetics, art, Comics, culture, technology

“On the Aura, Reproduction, and the Machine That Dreams” I have been deep in ChatGPT conversations recently and I happened upon a framework supposing that Walter Benjamin (Author of the Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction) considered whether ai similarly...

The Shining and the Function of Dreams

by natecooper | Oct 6, 2013 | aesthetics, culture, movies

I recently watched the documentary Room 237 which explores different interpretations of the 1980 movie the Shining. As you might suspect from a movie as cryptically coded as Kubrick’s, there are a lot of interpretations some more credible than others. What’s clear...

Gadget Posturing

by natecooper | Jun 21, 2012 | aesthetics, culture, digital media, style, technology

Social media is abuzz with how Microsoft is (again) derivative and playing the copy cat and how much “cooler” Apple is. In all of this posturing and finger pointing a few familiar photos kept cropping up and it’s sparked a revelation from my Apple days. In Steve’s...

Chasing the Long Tail: Five Tips to Make Teaching a Part of your business

by natecooper | Mar 19, 2012 | aesthetics, books, cool, culture, education, technology

1. Maintain a Network Last year I did something daring. For the first time in my life, I quit my job and decided to start my own company. If you talk to anyone who has done it before, you’ll know that there’s a familiar story of freedom and sheer terror. It helps to...