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Anyone who’s visited a contemporary art museum in the past 75 years has almost certainly encountered the artwork of Alexander Calder. His delicately balanced mobiles and swooping steel sculptures are mainstays of American abstract art. But in most of those museums, from the Whitney to Pompidou Centre to the Reina Sofia, Calder’s pieces haven’t had their intended presentation. For artworks that are meant to move or be moved through, Calder’s kinetic works and supersized sculptures are often given the default museum treatment of being static, separate from visitors, or both. A new art space in Calder’s birth city of Philadelphia aims to correct that. Calder Gardens is a unique, artist-specific building complex and garden that’s meant to give people views and experiences of Calder’s works as the artist, who died in 1976, intended. [Photo: Iwan Baan/Calder Foundation] Designed by the architecture firm Herzog & de Meuron, the center’s cavernous galleries and outdoor areas have been shaped and proportioned to let Calder’s kinetic mobiles move slowly in the natural airflow of the building, and to allow visitors to walk through and around his large-scale sculptures, or “stabiles,” in the changing hues of year-round open-air daylight. “The pieces transform as you move around them and through them and with time,” says Jason Frantzen, a partner at Herzog & de Meuron who led the design team. This is only part of what makes Calder Gardens a unique space. “It started without a very clear description of what the project should be. It was more of a description about what it shouldn’t be, which is a conventional museum,” says Frantzen. Calder Gardens is a project of the Calder Foundation and overseen by the Barnes Foundation, which operates its own world class art museum nearby. Both entities stress that this new art space is not a museum, but a place where visitors can have evolving encounters with an ever-changing selection of Calder’s works. That sets a different tone for visitors accustomed to the traditional museum experience, but perhaps more importantly for the architects who designed it. [Photo: Iwan Baan/Calder Foundation] “They didn’t want the conventions of a museum to dictate our thinking about the space,” Frantzen says. Calder Gardens is both a building designed to showcase the varied works of an influential artist and an all-seasons perennial garden designed by the eminent landscape designer Piet Oudolf. Known for designing the gardens on New York’s High Line and in Chicago’s Millennium Park, Oudolf’s approach revolves around planting for every season, and embracing the seasonal changes seen within each plant species. The landscape design is intended to be a changing background for a changing slate of Calder works that will be displayed there. “We wanted to put people into an environment where they could really experience Calder in a different, non-museological way. And then from an urban perspective to bring people out of the city and to create an escape where they could really appreciate the art in a different kind of environment,” Frantzen says. [Photo: Iwan Baan/Calder Foundation] Inside the museum Calder Gardens’ site certainly is different. Despite being located on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, one of the most famous grand boulevards in the U.S., the plot Calder Gardens was built on was far from bucolic. Wedged between a sunken expressway and wide surface streets, the site had little ingrained charm. Even with its close proximity to the Barnes Foundation, the Rodin Museum, and, farther up the parkway, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the site was disconnected and overlooked. “This piece of land was sort of a leftover,” Frantzen says. But the architects saw it as more than just a space for urban infill. Herzog & de Meuron chose to zag away from the institutional standards of its neighbors on the parkway, instead coming up with a more reserved building that almost disappears into the ground. “We immediately knew it should be something more related to the landscape, more an extension of public space on the parkway,” Frantzen says. “And then when it came to Calder’s work, we wanted to create something that wasn’t somehow imitating his work in any way.” Visitors approach the building through the garden and encounter a long metal wall interrupted halfway through with a pitched roof overhanging a wooded entry. The wall serves to block noise from the highway behind the building, but also is polished to reflect the colors of the garden. Inside, past the lobby and coat check, stairs descend into the galleries, which take on winding, curving, and sometimes tunnel-like appearances before opening up into large and double-height rooms. [Photo: Iwan Baan/Calder Foundation] There are 10 galleries overall, including two that are fully outdoors, but also sunken into the site. Some house mobiles and stabiles, while others will show lesser-known two-dimensional works and smaller-scale wire sculptures from early in Calder’s career. There’s even a small hole carved into the wall of a stairway offering a porthole view to another suspended work. The building mixes the darkness of the underground with carefully managed daylight streaming in through openings in the building and in the depths carved into the site for the sunken galleries. “Each one of these spaces has its own completely different conditions, its own specific light, its own scale, which just means that the variety of work can all find its own home in a relatively small series of gallery spaces,” says Frantzen. Calder Gardens will be curated by the Calder Foundation, which intends to constantly bring in new works to the space, moving artworks around and offering visitors a changing view of Calder’s extensive portfolio. For the architects, the challenge was to create a space that could hold them all and create the right conditions in which they can be appreciated. “The word early on was almost like a chapel,” says Frantzen. The intent is that it’s “a place where you can go and you can experience a piece in a very kind of contemplative setting.”
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E-Commerce
The rise of artificial intelligence in recent years, along with the surge in AI-generated online content, has given more credibility to a decades-old conspiracy theory known as the Dead Internet Theory. It holds that most of the content we encounter online isnt actually produced by living humans but by lifeless bots. AI is increasingly turning the once-fringe theory into a reality, but even today, at least one of the participantsthe living, breathing observer browsing the web on the other side of the screenis still usually a real, sentient being. Yet this may not be true for much longer. Thanks to AI systems increasing reliance on a technology known as headless browsing, artificial intelligence is becoming a primary consumer of the internet. And if that happens at scale, the internet will truly be a land of the unliving. Heres what you need to know about headless browsing, a term youll likely hear increasingly often in the years ahead. Headless browsing is nothing new Nearly every web browser youve ever usedwhether its Google Chrome, Apples Safari, or even Microsofts old Internet Exploreris a traditional visual browser. It features a graphical user interface (GUI), which includes buttons, tabs, scrollbars, and, of course, a large window that displays content (i.e., a website) that you can see. You navigate a visual browser mainly by clicking with your mouse cursor on hyperlinks or other buttons on a web page. If the web page requires you to enter text, such as in a form, you click in the text entry field and use the keyboard to type your characters. But for decades, another kind of browser has existed: the headless browser. A headless browser has no graphical user interface (GUI). It has no window that displays a webpage and does not support pointing and clicking with a mouse cursor. Instead, a headless browser processes a website’s content by reading its code directly. It interacts with the site, such as clicking on a link to go to the next page or entering text into a form, all through direct interaction with its code. Since humans are visual creatures, its clear why GUI browsers are the primary way most of the world accesses the internet. So then, what are headless browsers used for? Historically, they have been tools for web developers, as enterprise proxy provider Oxylabs explains. Because every graphical user interface element on a webpage has corresponding code, an automated program designed to help devs find errors on a website running through a headless browser can interact with that website just like a person wouldbut much faster since no visual interface needs to be displayed. The traditional benefit of headless browsers is that websites become more stable and reliable because headless browsing allows errors to be found relatively quickly. But human developers arent the only ones using headless browsers anymore. Headless browsing in the age of AI Once a tool for web developers and other programmers, headless browsers are now being employed by new userswho dont have heads at all. Increasingly, artificial intelligence systems are the primary users of headless browsers. AI browsers, such as Perplexitys Comet, use headless browsing to scan websites to carry out your prompts quickly. For example, when you prompt an AI browser for a list of the capitals of the 50 United States, the browsers AI will read the content of numerous websites via headless browsing to quickly retrieve the answer. But headless browsing goes beyond letting AI scan a website to retrieve information. As artificial intelligence systems evolve from being simple answer bots to becoming personal assistantsknown as AI agentsheadless browsing is also being utilized by these agents to interact with websites on your behalf, performing tasks like clicking links, checking boxes, or even adding items to your shopping cart. A large part of why an AI agent can perform tasks you prompt it to do so quickly is due to headless browsing. For example, say you prompt an AI browser to order the ingredients you need to make Thanksgiving dinner from multiple grocery websites. The browsers AI agent isnt actually perusing grocers websites through any visual interface and then clicking on Buy Now buttons to find and add items to your shopping cart. Its using headless browsing to read and interact with the websites code directly. But while headless browsing makes AI more efficient and versatile, theres a negative side to AIs use of it, particularly if youre a website or one of its advertisers. An internet where AI is the main user, not humans As more people turn to agentic AI and AI browsers, these AI systems will utilize headless browsing to visit websites and carry out tasks assigned by humans. This means that AI has the potential to be the primary type of user that is visiting a website. And there are already signs of this happening. A report from the AI monetization platform TollBit last month showed that, for the most recent quarter, human traffic to the websites that TollBit monitored declined by 9.4%, while AI traffic continued to rise. And its rising a lot. In the first quarter, TollBit found that 1 out of every 200 visitors to the sites it monitors was AI. By the second quarter, AI visitors accounted for 1 out of every 50 visitors. Thats a fourfold increase in less than a year. TollBits report goes on to note that when AI agents visit a website, the website often has no way to tell that it’s an AI and not a human being. Thats terrible news for companies, which rely on web advertising to pay the bills. Advertisers sell things to human beings, and if advertisers can no longer trust whether a website knows precisely how many actual people are visiting it, they likely arent going to spend their limited ad dollars on that site. For what its worth, an executive at an unnamed large digital publisher told Digiday that they believed headless browsing does not currently pose a major issue for publishers. However, they noted that if big players in the AI space, such as OpenAI or Google, adopt the technology for their AI agents, headless browsing could become a significant concern. And if headless browsing does become the norm, it also means that the Dead Internet Theory could take on an expanded meaning. No longer would the phrase be used to signify only an internet where human beings do not make the majority of the contentbut where the majority of the browsing is no longer done by humans either.
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E-Commerce
If you ride along a bike path in the U.K. city of Leeds and approach a street, the traffic light can automatically turn green for youor stay green if you’re already midway across. The city is one of a growing number testing technology that uses sensors, anonymous data, and AI to make it easier to cross streets. Made by a company called VivaCity (known as Viva in the U.S.), the sensors can detect cyclists and pedestrians from more than 200 feet away. In some cases, someone on a bike might not need to stop at the corner. Pedestrians can keep walking without breaking their stride. (Cities can choose to program traffic signals to give cyclists either a shorter wait or full priority.) Traditionally, most traffic signals force people who arent in cars to push a beg button and waitor risk their life to cross while the lights still red. If automated sensors exist, theyre typically just for cars. [Image: Viva] At the moment, a lot of traffic signals don’t detect cyclists, says Matt Shaw, head of product at VivaCity. If they’re really basic, they operate on a fixed time schedule, so it will just rotate 30 seconds at a time. Or they might have vehicle detection, so they know if a car’s approaching, but they don’t know if a cyclist is. Wires embedded in the pavement can detect metal, but often miss bikes. VivaCitys technology also analyzes direction, so the automatic walk sign isnt triggered if a pedestrian is just passing by without intending to cross. It also counts the number of people waiting, so cities can choose to use a formula to change the light faster if more people are waiting. Most traffic controllers now have no idea if it’s one pedestrian or a hundred, says Shaw. If you’re in New York City and somebody pushes the button, you’ve got no sense of how many people are waiting. [Image: Viva] Unlike standard traffic signals, Viva’s system also knows if someone in a wheelchair or an elderly person with a walker is still crossing. Being able to know if a pedestrians still on the road, and hold the green light for them, is pretty important, he says. (The data collection focuses on privacy; after the AI analyzes the video feed, it deletes it, leaving only the number of people and the path that theyre taking, not their identity. The data cant be used for enforcement.) In Leeds, the city hasnt yet gone as far as giving cyclists and pedestrians full priority at major intersections. But at certain crossings where bike paths or sidewalks meet a road, the sensors already prioritize people walking or biking. The tech is one piece of a bigger strategy to become a city where you dont need a car, as the city puts it. That also includes improving bus service and building a better network of bike routes and bike parking. Making streets easier to crossand shrinking the time that cyclists or pedestrians waithelps make it a little more likely that people will want to walk or bike. Some cities are using the underlying data without yet connecting to traffic controllers. In New York City, for example, the Department of Transportation has been using the sensors at some intersections to track trends over time, from the number of bikes or scooters to how fast theyre traveling and the paths that people take to cross the street. The technology can also track near misses, which lets cities flag dangerous intersections and design interventions, such as changing the timing of signals or banning turns on red at intersections where cyclists have repeated close calls with turning vehicles. You cant solve the problem if you dont understand where people are cycling, Shaw says.
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