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Video essays Season one Written by Carl Brunson

Thinking Digits

The design choices inside the tools, images and sounds we create with.

Watch on YouTube Four essays
The season question

When tools make creation easier, where do human judgment and cultural meaning move?

Four essays move through authorship, interfaces, musical instruments and fashion. Each braids three strands: an object or experiment from my own work, a second field that shows the same mechanism, and what it means for people. AI is one case among several, not the whole subject.

If a tool can produce convincing creative work, which choices preserve a person’s authorship?

Runtime
11 min
Subject
Authorship
Status
In post-production

Interfaces don’t simply present choices. They express assumptions about people, and intelligent systems can increasingly act on those assumptions.

Runtime
11 min
Subject
Interfaces
Status
In post-production

Instruments have characteristics that shape the music made with them. Invention happens when people do unexpected things with those characteristics.

Runtime
12 min
Subject
Instruments
Status
In post-production

Taste is shaped by the work, the people interpreting it and the institutions that give it context. AI may change who gets to create and who gets recognized.

Runtime
13 min
Subject
Fashion and taste
Status
In post-production
A dark wooden door opens onto a corridor filled with warm light.
E02 Push or pull. A door is the first interface most people misread.
An attic portrait studio with a skylight, a chaise, a painted backdrop and a bellows camera on a tripod.
E01 The camera was the problem
A Quiet Signal poster clipped to a pegboard in a print workshop, above open tins of ink.
E04 The workshop print
From the channel art

Nineteen
faces

Mathematicians, composers, engineers and performers whose portraits make up the Thinking Digits channel art.

  1. 01Ada LovelaceMathematician
  2. 02Charles BabbageMathematician, inventor
  3. 03Hedy LamarrActor, inventor
  4. 04Alan TuringMathematician
  5. 05Grace HopperComputer scientist
  6. 06Katherine JohnsonNASA mathematician
  7. 07Annie EasleyNASA computer scientist
  8. 08Margaret HamiltonSoftware engineer
  9. 09Mae JemisonAstronaut, engineer
  10. 10Sun RaComposer, bandleader
  11. 11Steve ReichComposer
  12. 12Pauline OliverosComposer
  13. 13Suzanne CianiSynthesist
  14. 14Herbie HancockPianist, composer
  15. 15Stevie WonderMusician
  16. 16Quincy JonesProducer
  17. 17Laurie AndersonArtist, musician
  18. 18Ryuichi SakamotoComposer
  19. 19BjörkMusician