http://machinemachine.net/stream/feed en-us http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Sweetcron text@machinemachine.net http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/nov/24/tom-mccarthy-desktop?mobile-redirect=false I must belong to the only generation of writers who've written with all three of inkpen, typewriter and computer. It definitely matters: the technology colours not only the rhythm but the whole logic of what you write. Think of Kafka's obsession with writing machines: the harrow that inscribes the law onto the skin in In the Penal Colony or the mysterious writing desk in Amerika: writing technologies themselves are imbued with terrifying and sacred dimensions, and become the subject, not just the medium, of the story. I used to have a beautiful old German typewriter, that you had to throw… ]]> Sun, 27 Nov 2011 10:34:28 -0700 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/nov/24/tom-mccarthy-desktop?mobile-redirect=false http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/Objects-101-7212 Objects 101 by Roger Sandall What interests me here however is something else—the profoundly paradoxical position of MacGregor himself. When resisting Greek calls for the return of the Elgin Marbles, he is on record as saying that it is his museum’s duty to “preserve the universality of the marbles and to protect them from being appropriated as a nationalistic political symbol.” They belong to mankind, they are part of the human heritage, and though the Greeks may wish to regard them as an integral part of their national identity, the Greeks, alas, must be seen here as the deluded victims… ]]> Mon, 14 Nov 2011 07:59:54 -0700 http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/Objects-101-7212 http://blog.ihobo.com/2011/10/constraint-histories.html Attempts to provide a taxonomy of game genres founder on the lack of consistent criteria, and usually have to be arbitrarily assigned. Connecting ‘shooters’ into a lineage suggests scrolling shooters were direct influences on first person shooters, for instance. But there's no evidence suggesting Zaxxon has any connection with the design of DOOM, or that Space Invaders inspired Zaxxon. As a historical tool, genre categories can provide some useful connections – DOOM certainly did influence GoldenEye 007, for example – but genre cannot be used as a unifying framework for game history because the genre lineages are narrowly valid and… ]]> Wed, 19 Oct 2011 03:25:57 -0700 http://blog.ihobo.com/2011/10/constraint-histories.html http://rhizome.org/editorial/2011/aug/5/keeping-it-online//rhizome-keeping-it-online Keeping it Online (digital art preservation) @rhizomedotorg : http://t.co/UHrkwq4 via @nancygrcia

#digital #online #internet #archive #x ]]> Wed, 17 Aug 2011 09:26:41 -0700 http://rhizome.org/editorial/2011/aug/5/keeping-it-online//rhizome-keeping-it-online http://m.readwriteweb.com/archives/internet_activist_aaron_swartz_indicted_for_data_t.php?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+readwriteweb+%28ReadWriteWeb%29 For a long time, it was the folks who downloaded music or movies illegally that faced the wrath of government prosecutors. So the unsealing of an indictment today against Aaron Swartz, former Reddit-er and founder of Demand Progress, for the illegal download of some 4 million-odd academic journal articles may sound a bit unusual.
Demand Progress has issued a statement suggesting Swartz's actions were akin to "checking too many books out of the library." But the government clearly disagrees as the charges include wire fraud, computer fraud, and unlawfully obtaining information from a protected computer. Schwartz now faces up… ]]> Wed, 20 Jul 2011 04:10:10 -0700 http://m.readwriteweb.com/archives/internet_activist_aaron_swartz_indicted_for_data_t.php?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+readwriteweb+%28ReadWriteWeb%29 http://newhumanist.org.uk/2565/favourite-things What I’ve learned, the hard way, is that the one thing you must never ask a collector is “why?” It’ll get you nowhere. They’ll just stare at you in baffled amazement before returning to contemplation of their most recent acquisition, or dreaming of the next one. These are people who thrive on making classifications, pondering the arrangements of their trophies and annotating them with informative labels. Often their obsession seems to derive from a need to impose order on a chaotic world, from the fear of death and oblivion. The collection will ward off mortality, carrying the illusion of eternity.… ]]> Mon, 11 Jul 2011 04:54:06 -0700 http://newhumanist.org.uk/2565/favourite-things http://www.niemanlab.org/2011/06/is-twitter-writing-or-is-it-speech-why-we-need-a-new-paradigm-for-our-social-media-platforms/ Which begs the question: What is Twitter, actually? (No, seriously!) And what type of communication is it, finally? If we’re wondering why heated debates about Twitter’s effect on information/politics/us tend to be at once so ubiquitous and so generally unsatisfying…the answer may be that, collectively, we have yet to come to consensus on a much more basic question: Is Twitter writing, or is it speech?

Twitter versus “Twitter”
The broader answer, sure, is that it shouldn’t matter. Twitter is…Twitter. It is what it is, and that should be enough. As a culture, though, we tend to… ]]> Thu, 02 Jun 2011 13:19:30 -0700 http://www.niemanlab.org/2011/06/is-twitter-writing-or-is-it-speech-why-we-need-a-new-paradigm-for-our-social-media-platforms/ http://ask.metafilter.com/mefi/186002 I'm writing a paper on (animated) GIFs and am trying to track down some of the most (in)famous. I suppose I am talking memes, but I'm more interested in the GIF as an archaeological reference point. I frequent sites like dump.fm, tumblr etc. so am quite tuned in to the glitchy/kitschy side of GIF culture. How theoretical have people got on these wonders of the web? How does one trace the history of an animated GIF? I have a personal take on this (my paper is only short), but would love to find some well recognised, well lauded… ]]> Mon, 16 May 2011 08:17:15 -0700 http://ask.metafilter.com/mefi/186002 http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20395-digital-legacy-archaeology-of-the-future.html The historians of 2061 will want to study the birth of the world wide web. How on earth will they know where to start?

Today, historians have to piece together the details of their subjects' lives from tiny scraps of evidence. Their successors are more likely to be overwhelmed: the problem will be making sense of our vast digital legacies. What techniques will they use to make sense of this deluge?

Many of us now generate more data than we can manage – think of all those holiday pictures you'll never get round to… ]]> Tue, 03 May 2011 03:12:21 -0700 http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20395-digital-legacy-archaeology-of-the-future.html http://2thewalls.com/journal/2011/1/10/credit-in-the-straight-www-ddddoomed-berger-and-the-image-ag.html [ED: Nearly all of the text in this post is taken from R. Gerald Nelson's independently published, occasionally problematic but more often brilliantly concise treatise DDDDoomed. Anyone concerned with issues of and methods pertaining to digital image dissemination, authorship and context should make an effort to purchase and read this chapbook. I cannot recommend it enough.]

"With new blogs springing up every day, beautiful images & words are springing up with them. I try to credit everything I put on this blog. I know sometimes I fail. Many of the images I feature are scanned by me… ]]> Tue, 15 Mar 2011 08:01:21 -0700 http://2thewalls.com/journal/2011/1/10/credit-in-the-straight-www-ddddoomed-berger-and-the-image-ag.html http://www.hyperjunk.net/?p=22 R. Gerald Nelson’s DDDDoomed essay has been making the rounds lately and it sparked a healthy amount of curiosity and note-taking on my part that I felt I wanted to share with some reactions. The essay is published as the first volume of eight in Nelson’s Making Known Img Ctrl series based out of Minneapolis. The image heavy text is “crafted as a speculative fiction that unfolds from the perspective of a future commentator reflecting back and theorizing about the factors that brought about the dysfunctional state of the contemporary image world.” The highlights and corresponding notes aren’t presented in… ]]> Tue, 15 Mar 2011 07:59:20 -0700 http://www.hyperjunk.net/?p=22 http://www.nybooks.com/articles/21514 Information is exploding so furiously around us and information technology is changing at such bewildering speed that we face a fundamental problem: How to orient ourselves in the new landscape? What, for example, will become of research libraries in the face of technological marvels such as Google?

How to make sense of it all? I have no answer to that problem, but I can suggest an approach to it: look at the history of the ways information has been communicated. Simplifying things radically, you could say that there have been four fundamental changes in information technology since… ]]> Wed, 16 Feb 2011 08:03:34 -0700 http://www.nybooks.com/articles/21514 http://www.nmm.ac.uk/visit/exhibitions/past/william-hodges/william-hodges-1744-1797-the-art-of-exploration In preparing paintings for the exhibition, the head of oil painting conservation noticed usual things about some of them, prompting her to X-ray, among others, 'A view of Pickersgill Harbour, Dusky Bay'.

It was discovered that the rainforest gives way to a startlingly different view – of Antarctic icebergs in a rough sea. Clearly, Hodges had painted the Antarctic and then decided for whatever reason to paint over it – the only known 'oil painting' of the Antarctic. ]]> Wed, 16 Feb 2011 07:58:06 -0700 http://www.nmm.ac.uk/visit/exhibitions/past/william-hodges/william-hodges-1744-1797-the-art-of-exploration http://178.63.252.42/ Download the bbc.closing.sites.archive.torrent file
On Monday 24th January 2011 the BBC announced that it would be restructuring its online department - with 360 job losses and the deletion of 200 of its top level directories (including the websites that live under them - eg http://www.bbc.co.uk/blast). 172 of of those top level directories are due to be deleted within the coming 12 months.
Most of these sites are already 'mothballed', which means that the BBC has discontinued the development of these websites on a day-to-day basis. However with this announcement the BBC has decided to go further and physically… ]]> Thu, 10 Feb 2011 10:08:13 -0700 http://178.63.252.42/ http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/5923737/Geocities_-_The_Torrent This is a collection of Geocities data downloaded by a bunch of people who call themselves ARCHIVE TEAM, who began scraping the Yahoo! Geocities site during a six month period in 2009, before Yahoo! shut down geocities.com on October 26th, 2009. This collection is compressed in a UNIX filesystem with both 7zip archives and tape archives (gtar). If you're a bit of a data tourist and just want to waft in the scent of a web era gone by, please go to one of the Geocities mirrors that were put up in the wake of the end of Geocities. As… ]]> Wed, 10 Nov 2010 03:05:00 -0700 http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/5923737/Geocities_-_The_Torrent http://www.e-flux.com/journal/view/94 by Hito Steyerl

The poor image is a copy in motion. Its quality is bad, its resolution substandard. As it accelerates, it deteriorates. It is a ghost of an image, a preview, a thumbnail, an errant idea, an itinerant image distributed for free, squeezed through slow digital connections, compressed, reproduced, ripped, remixed, as well as copied and pasted into other channels of distribution.

The poor image is a rag or a rip; an AVI or a JPEG, a lumpen proletarian in the class society of appearances, ranked and valued according to its resolution. The… ]]> Thu, 28 Oct 2010 07:27:00 -0700 http://www.e-flux.com/journal/view/94 http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00v4s8v/Night_Waves_Is_the_Book_Dead/ Philip Dodd goes to one of Britain's largest second hand bookshops and is joined by a panel of publishers, authors and an audience of readers for a public debate that tackles the vexed question: Is the book dead? As e-books outsell hardbacks for the first time is reading itself facing a future that is empowered or impoverished?

The venue is Barter Books in Alnwick, Northumberland, which famously occupies a former railway station. Onstage with Philip will be guests writer David Almond, author of the prize-winning novel Skellig, Chris Meade of the Institute for the Future of the… ]]> Thu, 21 Oct 2010 03:10:00 -0700 http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00v4s8v/Night_Waves_Is_the_Book_Dead/ http://www.switched.com/2010/09/09/speaking-without-words-dump-fm-and-ryder-ripps/ If a picture is worth a thousand words, then maybe we should let dump.fm do the talking. The image-based chat service is the brainchild of Ryder Ripps and the result of his collaboration with Scott Ostler of MIT Exhibit and Tim Baker of Delicious, all three part of the ever-growing group of young artists raised in a digital age.

Ripps describes dump.fm as a "platform for real-time image communication." He says, "In a way, it is an iteration of both the chat room and the image board, as it uses pictures to create conversation." The site is… ]]> Sat, 11 Sep 2010 04:25:00 -0700 http://www.switched.com/2010/09/09/speaking-without-words-dump-fm-and-ryder-ripps/ http://pornfortheblind.org/ Porn for the Blind is a not-for-profit organization dedicated to producing audio descriptions of sample movie clips from adult web sites. This service is provided free of charge. ]]> Mon, 16 Aug 2010 02:27:00 -0700 http://pornfortheblind.org/ http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/25/magazine/25privacy-t2.html When historians of the future look back on the perils of the early digital age, Stacy Snyder may well be an icon. The problem she faced is only one example of a challenge that, in big and small ways, is confronting millions of people around the globe: how best to live our lives in a world where the Internet records everything and forgets nothing — where every online photo, status update, Twitter post and blog entry by and about us can be stored forever. With Web sites like LOL Facebook Moments, which collects and shares embarrassing personal revelations from Facebook… ]]> Sun, 25 Jul 2010 07:15:00 -0700 http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/25/magazine/25privacy-t2.html