Patrick Feaster's Explorations in Historical Media
I m always curious to see how generative AI tools will fare when asked to mimic content from different time periods, and when Google launched Lyria 3 through the Gemini app on February 18, 2026 — just three days ago as of this writing — that s the first task it occurred to me to put to
Back in August 2013, a cabinet card came up for auction on eBay, described by the seller as depicting an exceptionally handsome man with a moustache and mutton chop whiskers. I was the high bidder at $39.50, maybe five to ten times what such things usually fetch — an outcome that suggests someone else had
One critic calls it definitely the most hilarious literary experiment of the decade and perhaps the strangest form of literary competition ever conceived — and that s even before any human being but me has seen any of it yet. Welcome to the AI Fiction Duel, Griffonage-Dot-Com s first foray into the brave new world of machine-generated
Did you know that The Jazz Singer (1927) wasn t necessarily the first Al Jolson sound film? And did you know that acoustic-era recording artists Collins and Harlan, Cal Stewart, Billy Murray, and others featured in early sound films as well? If you didn t, you re not alone: the Renfax Musical Motion Pictures are all but forgotten today, earning
They re visually striking images and playable musical audio at the same time. I ve been calling them synesthetic sound-pictures. You ll find a huge assortment of recent examples below — 136 of them, to be precise — and if you d like to try making some others of your own, I ll provide instructions at the end for that
Numerical prompting is a little-known secret weapon for creating interesting AI-generated images and sounds. The adjustments it involves are fairly simple to make, technically speaking, but learning how to use them intelligently to yield desired results promises to be a long, slow, limitless voyage of discovery. I started experimenting with Stable Diffusion two years ago,
What did the generation of Americans who fought in the Second World War believe they were fighting to protect? Let s listen to a radio program from 1943 to find out. The recording offered here comes from the series Lest We Forget, produced by the Institute of Oral and Visual Education (which later morphed into the
Now that Liberation Day has finally come and gone and the United States government is imposing heavy tariffs on all imports, it occurs to me that we ll need some way of marking consumer goods to indicate that a tariff has been paid on them. In the future, whenever Americans spot an unexpectedly high price on
An eBay seller recently auctioned two nineteenth-century postal cards, separately, describing each as written in shorthand. It took me only the briefest of glances to recognize that they were written not in shorthand (in the interest of speed), but in cipher (in the interest of secrecy). The fact that they appeared to share many of
On July 31, 1896, an unusual postal card arrived in Freiburg im Breisgau, then part of the Grand Duchy of Baden within the German Empire. It had been mailed from Cincinnati, Ohio on July 20th, addressed to the Anzeiger in Freiburg — that is, to the Freiburger Anzeiger, one of the local newspapers. Somehow this
