Whoever Decides What It's For

Hrutul, an artist from Ahmedabad, built a concert format called HEXAIMMERSIVE around six projection surfaces arranged in a hexagon. Set Design Magazine describes six triangular audience sections facing inward, with projectors "positioned on opposing axes" making "intersecting beams that form a luminous star-like geometry" above the arena, and an audience dressed in white so the light lands on bodies and fabric. The six screens, it says, can show six views of one scene, "a unified 360-degree spatial world, or opposing 180-degree narratives". For the Mumbai production the magazine reports each surface measured over 75 feet wide and nearly four storeys high. The format was made for the storytelling concert YOUFORIA chp. पार्थ, built from 18 original compositions drawing on Indian history, the Ramayana, the Mahabharata and Vedic philosophy while arguing with artificial intelligence, capitalism, identity and social media. Its credit line reads "Concept, Design, Direction, Lyrics, Composition, Screenplay & Dialogues: @_hrutul", and it describes him as director, writer, composer, lyricist, designer and live narrator. Pune, Delhi and Bengaluru are listed as upcoming, without dates.

Compound Camera 3 is a walk-in inflatable by Pneuhaus, the Rhode Island studio, premiered late last month at MODE Festival. Colossal counts 221 lenses in it, "to be exact", each one a camera obscura, across more than seven hundred square feet. The studio's own page, which describes the earlier Compound Camera, counts "109 inflatable pinhole cameras" — a different edition and, strictly, a different optic, since a pinhole has no lens. We carry Colossal's figure for this version and flag the gap. Lenses pointing up throw the sky across the interior; lenses pointing sideways throw trees, buildings and the people walking past outside. The images land on bulbous inner surfaces that a visitor can push with both hands to distort what the studio calls a bug's-eye view. There are no LED screens in it. The whole projection is powered by the sun.

Tina Tarighian is an artist using technology, and hers is the plainest available account of where the job title came from — the one quoted above, in which the storefront needed engineers and the budget did not want to pay for them. What makes it worth reading past the origin story is that she is also doing the work.

Her own definition is better than any of the industry ones: the job is "writing the first draft of what a technology means — sitting with something new before the obvious use cases have had a chance to calcify". The work follows from that. A purity test measuring how promiscuous you are with AI. An email lottery, built after a breakup, with a 0.0001% chance of ever reaching her ex's inbox — seen by five million people and used in more than a hundred countries. A dating app that will only match you through Instagram's algorithm. Each one borrows the trust of a format you already know how to use.

Fuller was combining choreography with silk costumes lit by multi-coloured lighting of her own design in the early 1890s — Wikipedia, citing Britannica, dates it to 1891, while other accounts date the breakthrough to 1892, so we give the decade. She coloured the gels herself and mounted them on revolving lamps so the colour could change at will. For Fire Dance at the Folies Bergère the floor was glass, lit from beneath. She had no technical training: Wikipedia's line is the one to keep, that she "created everything she patented herself with little knowledge of stage designs, or fabric designs." She was elected to the Société astronomique de France, and Rodin said she had "paved the way for the art of the future."

Then the part that failed. In 1892 she sued an imitator, Minnie Renwood Bemis, to establish ownership of the Serpentine Dance; she had filed a written description of it with the Copyright Office first, and the court refused her an injunction anyway. Fuller v. Bemis is still a landmark in dance copyright. So the record is precise about what this job can and cannot hold: she owned the apparatus, down to the chemistry, and she could not own the idea of what to do with it. A hundred and thirty-four years later that is still the bad news, and the reason the valuable decision keeps being the cheapest line in the budget.