“You know the way animals are… They’re run by instincts. You can’t expect them to behave morally. It likes to eat, it likes to have sex… Don’t expect too much from a thing like that. Just take it for what it is.” —Scarlet Droppings (1990), George Kuchar Cinema has historically been a fecund site of…

To invoke the notion of the muse around Juliana Huxtable seems out of fashion. After all, the title was tirelessly anointed to the 28-year-old artist, poet, and DJ as she gradually emerged from various sites across New York’s cultural landscape. The most recent case-in-point: the 2015 New Museum Triennial, in which the audience was confronted with Juliana, a life-size sculpture of Huxtable’s naked body by Frank Benson, exhibited alongside Huxtable’s own poetry and photographic portraiture. Media sensationalism sugarcoated her with the muse appellation and infected almost all of the popular websites and magazines.

The basic premise of the Lovelace test, created to determine intelligence within the cognitive sciences, is that a machine must originate an idea on its own. Ada Lovelace, for whom the test is named, argued that this was the marker of true intelligence. In distinction to the Turing test—which tests the ability of a machine…