Robert Pollard
EAT II
2005, Rockathon Records
In 2023, anytime someone tells me that Artificial Intelligence will take over the arts and replace human creations with digital patchworks, I stop listening to that person.
There are a few drops of truth in it, probably. I’ll give them that.
A popular song birthed entirely from an algorithm isn’t far-fetched these days. The awkward clickbait articles that I get suckered into reading online never seem to come from human beings. Life is in a weird place now, for sure. This is not the same world that my Generation X ass grew up in.
But if someone sincerely believes that HAL 9000 will be the new Mozart, I think that they just hate people. That’s the only explanation I have for why it makes sense to anyone that human connections through music and writing will simply fade from fashion. We will no longer care about what others are feeling, thinking, and seeing. We won’t be hooked when someone who shares our experiences makes something great out of it.
Instead we’ll be satisfied with artistic blow-up dolls.
I don’t buy it. I don’t buy it at least for oddballs like you and me. Us deep-diggers. Us crazies who get into EAT.
That’s what I think about in 2023 as I go over this second issue of Robert Pollard’s long-running art magazine. Its X-Acto knife cuts and its occasional visible Scotch tape, and even its poems, have human fingerprints all over them. Today, it feels like a resistance outpost against the cyber-dystopia.