MachineMachine /stream - tagged with benjamin http://machinemachine.net/stream/feed en-us http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Sweetcron therourke@gmail.com WAYS OF SEEING (first episode) 1/4 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LnfB-pUm3eI&feature=youtube_gdata ]]> Tue, 23 Aug 2011 15:52:22 -0700 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LnfB-pUm3eI&feature=youtube_gdata Information Wants to be Consumed http://userwww.sfsu.edu/~rlrutsky/RR/Consumption.pdf  Although information spreads, virus-like, through replication, this replication, as Walter Benjamin foresaw, involves a dispersion that allows images or data to be seen in different places, in different contexts (what Benjamin (1969) called “exhibition value”). It is, however, only through the process of consumption that this reproduction and dissemination of data can occur. Consumption, in short, is the means by which information, whether expensive or free, reproduces and spreads. Information, in fact, depends upon consumption for its very existence. Without being consumed, it ceases to be information in any practical sense, becoming merely a static and inaccessible knowledge, an eternal… ]]> Wed, 03 Aug 2011 06:00:18 -0700 http://userwww.sfsu.edu/~rlrutsky/RR/Consumption.pdf Digital Autonomy http://art-research.co.uk/digital-autonomy-a-reponse-to-hito-steyerl

“Is an ephemeral image, a moment in a streaming video, a thing? Or if the image is frozen as a still, is it now a thing? Is a dream, a city, a sensation, a derivative, an ideology, a decay, a kiss? I haven’t the least idea.”

Extract from David Miller, Materiality : An Introduction [1]

In A Thing Like You and Me, Hito Steyerl plays out her ongoing obsession with the copy, skirting briefly over her wider, yet more implicit concern: the digital. Echoing the work of Bruno Latour, Steyerl acknowledges the materiality by which… ]]> Sat, 11 Jun 2011 04:02:00 -0700 http://art-research.co.uk/digital-autonomy-a-reponse-to-hito-steyerl/is-an-ephemeral-image-a-moment-in-a-streaming-video-a The Doctrine of the Similar (GIF GIF GIF) 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 Walter Benjamin, Doctrine of the Similar http://www.scribd.com/doc/19792369/Walter-Benjamin-Doctrine-of-the-Similar/walter-benjamin-doctrine-of-the-similar

"Walter Benjamin, Doctrine of the Similar" #mimesis #similitude #language #philosophy #perception

]]> Mon, 16 May 2011 08:06:59 -0700 http://www.scribd.com/doc/19792369/Walter-Benjamin-Doctrine-of-the-Similar Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media by Walter Benjamin http://www.librarything.com/work/book/72715348/work-of-art-in-the-age-of-its-technological-reproducibility-and-other-writings-on-media-by-walter-benjamin

Harvard University Press (2008), Paperback, 448 pages

]]> Wed, 27 Apr 2011 01:45:58 -0700 http://www.librarything.com/work/book/72715348/work-of-art-in-the-age-of-its-technological-reproducibility-and-other-writings-on-media-by-walter-benjamin Inside Code: A Conversation with Dr. Lane DeNicola and Seph Rodney http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2010/06/inside-code-a-conversation.html
posted by Daniel Rourke

A couple of weeks ago I was invited to take part in a panel discussion on London based, arts radio station, Resonance FM. It was for The Thread, a lively show that aims to use speech and discussion as a tool for research, opening up new and unexpected angles through the unravelling of conversation.

The Thread's host, London Consortium researcher Seph Rodney, and I were lucky enough to share the discussion with Dr. Lane DeNicola,…

]]> Sun, 13 Jun 2010 21:25:00 -0700 http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2010/06/inside-code-a-conversation.html Giorgio Agamben - What is a Paradigm - Lecture, 2002 http://www.egs.edu/faculty/giorgio-agamben/articles/what-is-a-paradigm/ ...we all make use of paradigms in our work, but do we really know what a paradigm is, and what does it mean to use a paradigm in philosophy, in the human sciences, or even in art? These are the questions I will try to answer today. Feuerbach once wrote that the philosophical element in each work is its Entvicklungsfahigkeit, literally, its capability to be developed. If a work, be it a work of science or art or scholarship has some value, it will contain this philosophical element. It is something which remains unsaid within the work but which demands… ]]> Fri, 30 Apr 2010 06:39:00 -0700 http://www.egs.edu/faculty/giorgio-agamben/articles/what-is-a-paradigm/ Technologies of Culture: The Archive http://www.brynmawr.edu/visualculture/journal/t_theArchive.shtml "'To read what was never written.' Such reading is the most ancient: reading before all languages, from the entrails, the stars, or dances. Later the mediating link of a new kind of reading, of runes and hieroglyphs, came into use. It seems fair to suppose that these were the stages by which the mimetic gift, which was once the foundation of occult practices, gained admittance to writing and language. In this way language may be seen as the highest level of mimetic behavior and the most complete archive of nonsensuous similarity: a medium into which the earlier powers of mimetic… ]]> Wed, 24 Feb 2010 08:38:00 -0700 http://www.brynmawr.edu/visualculture/journal/t_theArchive.shtml De-constructing 'code' (picking apart its assumptions) http://ask.metafilter.com/mefi/144810 De-constructing 'code': I am looking for philosophical (from W. Benjamin through to post-structuralism and beyond) examinations of 'code'. That both includes the assumptions contained in the word 'code' and any actual objects or subjects that code is connected to - including, but not limited to: computer programming, cyphers, linguistics, genetics etc. I am looking to question the assumptions of 'code'. Perhaps a specific example of a theorist de-constructing the term.

I am currently knee deep in an examination of certain practices and assumptions that have arisen from digital media/medium and digital practice (art and making in the era of… ]]> Tue, 02 Feb 2010 07:35:00 -0700 http://ask.metafilter.com/mefi/144810 The Work of the Moving Image in the Age of its Digital Corruptibility http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2009/12/the-work-of-the-moving-image-in-the-age-of-its-digital-corruptibility.html

by Daniel Rourke

"The cinema can, with impunity, bring us closer to things or take us away from them and revolve around them, it suppresses both the anchoring of the subject and the horizon of the world... It is not the same as the other arts, which aim rather at something unreal or a tal. With cinema, it is the world which becomes its own image, and not an image which becomes world."

Giles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement Image

Take 12 images and splice them end to…

]]> Sun, 27 Dec 2009 22:06:00 -0700 http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2009/12/the-work-of-the-moving-image-in-the-age-of-its-digital-corruptibility.html