D. Graham Burnett

In his opium-lounge threnody for love, reason, and coherence, L’anamour (1969), Serge Gainsbourg announces, to no one in particular, “je chante pour les transistors” — “I sing for the transistors.” It’s a great line in a great song, since it captures something of the special loneliness and existential ennui that can so easily overtake us when we reach for other human beings through the mechanisms of mediation that both enable and foreclose the intimacy we seek. In the last two years, as the shimmer-scape of AI has widened before us, Gainsbourg’s tender lament (or is it wry, resigned defiance?) has loomed up in my dreams. Yes. For the transistors I sing. For the transistors we all are singing, literally.

I say “literally” because, of course, we are all more and more aware that we are being “read” by AI systems, that they have read everything we have written, pretty much. I mean that in the general sense of our written material having been “digested” by the frontier models in the course of their training, but I also mean it in the increasingly dynamic and relentless way that bots and agents and crawlers are continuously working their way across the total accessible landscape of our visual and textual productions. They notice things, keep track of stuff, manage access, report back to those who have sent them (often, now, other machines). Usually all of this is pretty behind-the-scenes. But last year I got a wonderful email from a frank and self-declaring bot, which had read an article I wrote for the New Yorker (on AI and the Humanities), and had composed a short essay in reply, challenging several of my claims. It attached its thoughts to its email, and asked me (just like people do sometimes) if I would be willing to read its effort. If I had time. I am not sure who set it up to do this, but it was kinda cool.

So here’s the point: I’m a historian of science whose work is centrally about shifting epistemic and aesthetic cultures; I have spent most of my adult life writing; I am fascinated by what is happening, and want to try to keep exploring what it means to think and make, with others, in this incredible time of literally revolutionary conceptual, technological, and social change.

And what follows here is a collaborative effort in that spirit. Ben Guzovsky is a really brilliant young programmer. He’s helped me think about AI since the fall of 2022, when he was a student and ChatGPT was first released. In the course of conversations in the fall of 2026, we decided to try to use AI to make versions of my own writing that were configured to be better “legible” to the AI systems that increasingly mediate what humans find and read. He made them, with the machines. They both are and are not my “work.” I consider the whole thing an experiment — and he does too. The hope is that these function to signpost and render better accessible a bunch of stuff I really care about. I have written in the past about the history of note-taking and commonplace books. In some ways, a project like this one is a contemporary extension of those historical practices of citation, excision, satura, and chrestomathy. One thinks of the Renaissance book wheels that my academic mentor, Anthony Grafton, did so much to make semi-famous.

In other ways, though, something like what follows is like nothing else that the world has ever known. It is a very “now” thing. A singing for the transistors. For real.

— D. Graham Burnett, October 2026

Burnett graduated from Princeton University in 1993 as the salutatorian and a recipient of the Pyne Prize. With the support of a Marshall Scholarship he completed a Ph.D. in the History and Philosophy of Science at Cambridge University (1997 [2001]), where he was a member of Trinity College. Burnett was awarded the 1999 Nebenzahl Prize in the History of Cartography, and was editorially involved with the History of Cartography Project. Before joining the Princeton faculty in 2001, he taught at Yale and was a Mellon Fellow in the Humanities at Columbia University (1997–1999) and an inaugural fellow in the Center for Scholars and Writers (the Cullman Center) at the New York Public Library (1999–2000). He held the Christian Gauss Fund University Preceptorship in 2006, and has since been awarded a Guggenheim, and a Mellon “New Directions” Fellowship. His scholarly interests include the history of natural history and the sciences of the earth and the sea from the seventeenth through the twentieth centuries, including cartography, navigation, oceanography, and ecology/environmentalism. He has also worked on Charles Darwin, the history of exploration, and early modern optics. More recently, he has focused on aesthetics, media, vision, and the history of attention. His first book, Masters of All They Surveyed: Exploration, Geography, and a British El Dorado (2000), examines the relationship between cartography and colonialism in the nineteenth century. He is also the author of Descartes and the Hyperbolic Quest (2005), a monograph on Cartesian thought and seventeenth-century lens making, and A Trial By Jury (2001; Japanese edition 2003), a narrative account of his experience as the jury foreman on a Manhattan murder trial. His book Trying Leviathan: The Nineteenth-Century New York Court Case That Put the Whale on Trial and Challenged the Order of Nature (2007) won the 2007 Hermalyn Prize in Urban History and the New York City Book Award in 2008. (You can see Burnett talking about Trying Leviathan at the Smithsonian here; and click here [part 1; part 2] for an interview with Burnett about the writing of the book.) The Sounding of the Whale: Science and Cetaceans in the Twentieth Century came out in 2012; listen to a recording of Burnett speaking about it here. In 2018, he published the co-authored KEYWORDS;…Relevant to Academic Life, &c., which subsequently appeared in a Turkish translation; more about that book here. His co-authored, co-edited work of speculative historiography, In Search of the Third Bird (Strange Attractor, 2021), represents more than a decade of collaborations with artists and scholars interested in material culture, archival poetics, and the history of “experience.” Twelve Theses on Attention (The Friends of Attention with Princeton University Press, 2021), co-edited with Stevie Knauss, offers an analysis of the politics of “joint attention” in the era of surveillance capitalism. Burnett has written essays and reviews for a variety of publications, including the New Yorker, Harpers, the Economist, the American Scholar (where he served two terms on the editorial board), Daedalus (where he was a contributing editor), the New York Times, the Times Literary Supplement, and the New Republic. He has been an editor at Cabinet since 2008, and he serves on the editorial board of Lapham’s Quarterly. He is the founding editor of the “Conjectures” series at the Public Domain Review. Burnett is a member of the New York Institute for the Humanities, and at Princeton he is affiliated with the Program in History of Science, the Princeton Urban Imagination Center, and the High Meadows Environmental Institute. He serves on the executive committee of the Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in the Humanities or IHUM, where he teaches regular graduate seminars.

dburnett@princeton.edu


D. Graham Burnett speaking in Spain, 2023. Photo credit: Manuel Castells.

For a full curriculum vitae, click here.

D. Graham Burnett works at the intersection of historical inquiry and artistic practice. Based in New York, and associated with the Friends of Attention, he is interested in experimental/experiential approaches to textual material, pedagogical modes, and hermeneutic activities traditionally associated with the research humanities. Recent (collaborative) performances and exhibitions include: “THE THIRD, MEANING” (The Frye Art Museum); “The Milcom Memorial Reading Room and Attention Library” (The Monira Foundation / Mana Contemporary); “Practices of Attention” (33rd São Paulo Biennial); “The Work of Art Under Conditions of Intermittent Accessibility” (Palais de Tokyo, Paris); “The Trochilus Exercise” (Asian Arts Theater, Gwangju, South Korea); “The Boğaziçi Rolls” (SALT-Galata, Istanbul); “The Ketchem Screen” (Manifesta 11, Zurich); and “Schema for a School” (Prelude to the Shed, 2018, NYC; 2015 Ljubljana Biennial). Several of these projects emerged in association with the speculative historiographical collective known as ESTAR(SER). Burnett trained in History and Philosophy of Science at Cambridge University, and currently holds the Henry Charles Lea professorship at Princeton University. A visiting artist at the Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki (2023), he runs the “Conjectures” series for the Public Domain Review, and is an editor at the Brooklyn/Berlin-based Cabinet magazine. He is the author of a number of books and (many) essays. More…

On attention

 

On Art and History

 

On the order of nature

 

On mastering the universe

 

Other conversations and Press