Both essays make interesting claims about the nature of creative practice and the ways systems can be employed to perfect or disrupt process & result. The authors take two very different approaches to “automation” but generate similar questions around what can be said of beauty in relation to systems, and both have developed really interesting projects. The other thing that I think they both share is this “totalizing” form that they try to transport from the frameworks of their specific projects onto the world at large. Automated projects in the way that they both talk about them, seem to be about solving problem, and they both seem to have located something ”reflexive” in their projects which I think they are confusing with being universal condensed truths about the way the world works. I think systems can solve alot of problems and provoke a lot of learning and new energy. But I also think systems in themselves do not unlock any universal truths, & are like everything else are subject to a context and relationship to power. When talking broadly about using computers to automate things in our lives I think yes, that could be liberatory for a person’s free time, but historically has only ever meant less-waged labor for the working class. And when we’re talking about how general artistic meditative practices relate to larger question of non-violent revolution, or that political resistance relates at all to aesthetics or art I just think that scale of a reflexive art practice is lost on itself and kinda also denies history, the material world outside of ideas and loads of things like that.