• The Doctrine of the Similar (GIF, GIF, GIF)
• Digital Autonomy: A Response to Hito Steyerl

John Carpenter’s 1982 film, The Thing, is a claustrophobic sci-fi masterpiece, containing all the hallmarks of a great horror film. The film depicts a sinister turn for matter, where the chaos of the replicating, cancerous cell is expanded to the human scale and beyond. In The Thing we… ]]> Sun, 12 Jun 2011 10:36:15 -0700 http://machinemachine.net/text/ideas/everything-on-the-face-of-the-earth http://machinemachine.net/text/ideas/the-doctrine-of-the-similar-gif-gif-gif

In two short essays – written in 1933 – Walter Benjamin argues that primitive language emerged in magical correspondence with the world. The faculty we all exhibit in childhood play, to impersonate and imitate people and things loses its determining power as language gradually takes over from our “non-sensuous” connection with reality. In a break from Saussurian linguistics, Benjamin decries the loss of this “mimetic faculty”, as it becomes further replaced by the “archive of non-sensuous correspondences” we know as writing.

To put it in simpler terms… Where once we read the world, the stars or the entrails of a… ]]> Wed, 25 May 2011 05:21:34 -0700 http://machinemachine.net/text/ideas/the-doctrine-of-the-similar-gif-gif-gif http://machinemachine.net/text/ideas/headless-research

This is an extract from a collaborative text I recently worked on, to be published (soon) in Texte Zur Kunst :

The animal of research, being nourished from its root, springs up from the dirt of discourse, the direction of growth pandering to a supposed head. “Humans see the world through language, but do not see language.” ^[1] What exactly do the bees mean when they pollinate the blossom?

For art meaning tends to be expressed through… ]]> Sun, 15 May 2011 10:26:51 -0700 http://machinemachine.net/text/ideas/headless-research http://machinemachine.net/text/ideas/errors-in-things-and-the-friendly-medium

What is it about a particular media that makes it successful? Drawing a mini history from printing-press smudges to digital compression artefacts this lecture considers the value of error, chance and adaptation in contemporary media. Biological evolution unfolds through error, noise and mistake. Perhaps if we want to maximise the potential of media, of digital text and compressed file formats, we first need to determine their inherent redundancy. Or, more profoundly, to… ]]> Wed, 16 Feb 2011 08:39:59 -0700 http://machinemachine.net/text/ideas/errors-in-things-and-the-friendly-medium http://machinemachine.net/text/ideas/on-text-and-exaptation

(This post was written as a kind of ‘prequel’ to a previous essay, Rancière’s Ignoramus)

‘Text’ originates from the Latin word texere, to weave. A material craft enabled by a human ingenuity for loops, knots and pattern. Whereas a single thread may collapse under its own weight, looped and intertwined threads originate their strength and texture as a network. The textile speaks of repetition and multiplicity, yet it is only once we back away from the tapestry that the larger picture comes into focus.

At an industrial scale textile looms expanded beyond the frame of their human operators. Reducing… ]]> Mon, 06 Dec 2010 14:41:24 -0700 http://machinemachine.net/text/ideas/on-text-and-exaptation http://machinemachine.net/text/ideas/to-crush-a-morlock%E2%80%99s-skull

Although the Time Traveller is an inquisitive type his journey through the ancient museum offers him little insight. The relics are from his future: the arché has all but snapped off from archeology. As he leaves the museum the Time Traveller ponders how best to crush a Morlock’s skull.

The Neanderthal is the most futuristic thing I can think of. Riddled with mythic charm, and soon to have its genes… ]]> Mon, 28 Jun 2010 10:42:00 -0700 http://machinemachine.net/text/ideas/to-crush-a-morlock%E2%80%99s-skull http://machinemachine.net/text/ideas/system-of-enthalpy

Rooted in our language is a bias. It’s a bias that we can hardly be blamed for, based as it is in our conception of ourselves as distinct entities whose existence can be felt, from one moment to the next, through time. Nature appears to move ‘forwards’, the ice-cube melts if left unattended, the scream in the night dissipates into silence.

For very similar reasons we see society as a progressive entity. The 19th Century, Positivist appeal to a human reality that moves towards an ultimate goal still… ]]> Fri, 26 Mar 2010 09:46:47 -0700 http://machinemachine.net/text/ideas/system-of-enthalpy http://machinemachine.net/text/ideas/raising-neanderthals

In northern Spain 49,000 years ago, 11 Neanderthals were murdered. Their tooth enamel shows that each of them had gone through several periods of severe starvation, a condition their assailants probably shared. Cut marks on the bones indicate the people were butchered with stone tools. About 700 feet inside El Sidrön cave, a research team including Lalueza-Fox excavated 1,700 bones from that cannibalistic feast. Much of what is known about Neanderthal genetics comes from those 11 individuals.

Lalueza-Fox does not plan to sequence the entire genome of the El Sidrön Neanderthals. He is interested in specific genes. “I choose genes… ]]> Thu, 11 Mar 2010 09:35:00 -0700 http://machinemachine.net/text/ideas/raising-neanderthals http://machinemachine.net/text/ideas/the-unveiled-divide

The object holds within itself a series of meanings and values, both imminent and latent. The Berlin Wall, long standing as a symbol of closure, restriction and confinement, came down as a symbol of movement, release and freedom. The Berlin Wall embodies each and every one of these meanings, whilst latent within it stir the possibility of yet more, as now, unseen symbolic possibilities.

In Roman law objects belonging to the Gods were ascribed as sacred. Sacred objects exist removed from the world of… ]]> Tue, 10 Nov 2009 12:50:00 -0700 http://machinemachine.net/text/ideas/the-unveiled-divide http://machinemachine.net/text/ideas/movement-of-the-middle

Words, bread, and wine are between us, beings or relations. We appear to exchange them between us though we are connected at the same table or with the same language. They are breast-fed by the same mother. Parasitic exchange, crossed between the logical and the material, can now be explained… Do we ever eat anything else together than the flesh of the word?[...]

Mediations, relations - one can make believe one is lost in this fractal cascade…… ]]> Tue, 30 Jun 2009 09:05:00 -0700 http://machinemachine.net/text/ideas/movement-of-the-middle http://machinemachine.net/text/featured/seeing-centaur

It is written that when the Maya people of The New World were first set upon by the Spanish cavalry it was spiritual confusion that hastened their demise. To their eyes the seething onslaught of man and horse was made of but one, new and terrifying, species of creature. In the West we might call these creatures Centaurs: liminal entities fused of two distinct species. To the Maya the border between God and beast was breached by the Spanish invaders, truly alien beings who in all… ]]> Sun, 14 Jun 2009 14:50:00 -0700 http://machinemachine.net/text/featured/seeing-centaur http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2009/01/obamas-address-to-the-state-of-nonbelief.html

“We know that our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness. We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus - and non-believers.”

Barack Hussein Obama, 20th of January, 2009

(Originally published at 3quarksdaily)

As a British citizen I watched the inauguration speech of America’s 44th President with a warm but distanced interest. But as someone who was brought up in a non-religious family, and has thrived without a belief in a deity, I listened to Barack Obama’s… ]]> Tue, 05 May 2009 08:31:00 -0700 http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2009/01/obamas-address-to-the-state-of-nonbelief.html http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2009/03/the-next-great-discontinuity-part-one.html

Grapholectic Thought and The Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness

(Originally published at 3quarksdaily · Link to Part Two)

“There are things,” Christoph Martin Wieland… contended, “which by their very nature are so dependent upon human caprice that they either exist or do not exist as soon as we desire that they should or should not exist.”…We are, at the very least, reminded that seeing is a talent that needs to be cultivated, as John Berger saliently argued in his popular Ways of Seeing (1972) “…perspective makes the single eye the centre of… ]]> Mon, 04 May 2009 07:17:00 -0700 http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2009/03/the-next-great-discontinuity-part-one.html