“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 http://www.newstatesman.com/ideas/2011/04/viruses-essay-pattern Biology used to be about plants, animals and insects, but five great revolutions have changed the way that scientists think about life: the invention of the microscope, the systematic classification of the planet's living creatures, evolution, the discovery of the gene and the structure of DNA. Now, a sixth is on its way - mathematics.

Maths has played a leading role in the physical sciences for centuries, but in the life sciences it was little more than a bit player, a routine tool for analysing data. However, it is moving towards centre stage, providing new understanding of… ]]> Wed, 11 May 2011 03:32:59 -0700 http://www.newstatesman.com/ideas/2011/04/viruses-essay-pattern 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.scribd.com/doc/6447057/David-Foster-Wallace-on-FX-Porn What's the difference between a Hollywood special-effects blockbuster like "Terminator 2" and a hard-core porn film? Very little, claims novelist, essayist and footnote fetishist David Foster Wallace.

1990s moviegoers who have sat clutching their heads in both awe and disappointment at movies like "Twister" and "Volcano" and "The Lost World" can thank James Cameron's "Terminator 2: Judgment Day" for inaugurating what's become this decade's special new genre of big-budget film: Special Effects Porn. "Porn" because, if you substitute F/X for intercourse, the parallels between the two genres become so obvious they're eerie. Just like hard-core cheapies, movies… ]]> Tue, 18 Jan 2011 04:57:21 -0700 http://www.scribd.com/doc/6447057/David-Foster-Wallace-on-FX-Porn http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2010/11/15/secular-body/ Is there a secular body? Or, in somewhat different terms, is there a particular configuration of the human sensorium—of sensibilities, affects, embodied dispositions—specific to secular subjects, and thus constitutive of what we mean by “secular society”? What intrigues me about this question is that, despite its apparent simplicity, the path toward an answer seems not at all clear. For example, are the scholarly sensibilities and the modes of affective attunement that find expression here elements of a secular habitus? What would be indicated by calling such expressive habits “secular”?

Clearly, they have been learned in a secular… ]]> Fri, 03 Dec 2010 09:47:00 -0700 http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2010/11/15/secular-body/ 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://gli.tc/h/blog/?p=133 The idea of noise is spreading…. From music into art into politics….
Why? As a synonym of avant-garde: noise as the unexpected, the dissonant and dissident. Its transgressiveness, which is mostly philosophical, has been misunderstood as subversion, a rule-breaking.
Noise is defined in opposition; to meaning, to sound, to music, and, even to noises. But once claimed in its own right, it is more of a parallel universe where it is hard to find transgression, or make it happen.
As noise is not about just finding noises and playing them. That is noise becoming music.
… ]]> Wed, 08 Sep 2010 03:33:00 -0700 http://gli.tc/h/blog/?p=133 http://nplusonemag.com/cave-painting Lanchester allowed that computer games would never tell us as much about character as other forms of narrative, but pointed out two great virtues of the form: “The first is visual: the best games are already beautiful, and I can see no reason why the look of video games won’t match or surpass that of cinema. The second is to do with this sense of agency, that the game offers a world in which the player is free to act and to choose.” And both points are right. The best games do look great, and we do have a lot… ]]> Fri, 03 Sep 2010 06:29:00 -0700 http://nplusonemag.com/cave-painting http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/jun/20/internet-everything-need-to-know * News
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The internet: Everything you ever need to know

In spite of all the answers the internet has given us, its full potential to transform our lives remains the great unknown. Here are the nine key steps to understanding the most powerful tool of our age – and where it's taking us

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* John Naughton
*]]> Mon, 21 Jun 2010 03:38:00 -0700 http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/jun/20/internet-everything-need-to-know http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2010-06-10-wagner-en.html Analytic philosophy has a complex history of more than one hundred years and this movement is so variegated that it can hardly be characterized by a single feature. Most of those who have tried to do so either were not aware of its diversity or considered only some part of its history. For example, it is sometimes believed that analytic philosophy is committed to a thoroughly anti-metaphysical stance. Such a belief may be rooted in some of the famous pronouncements of the logical empiricists, in the philosophical method put forward by Wittgenstein in his Tractatus Logico-philosophicus, or in the fact… ]]> Sun, 13 Jun 2010 23:56:00 -0700 http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2010-06-10-wagner-en.html http://harpers.org/archive/2007/02/0081387 Consider this tale: a cultivated man of middle age looks back on the story of an amour fou, one beginning when, traveling abroad, he takes a room as a lodger. The moment he sees the daughter of the house, he is lost. She is a preteen, whose charms instantly enslave him. Heedless of her age, he becomes intimate with her. In the end she dies, and the narrator—marked by her forever—remains alone. The name of the girl supplies the title of the story: Lolita.

The author of the story I've described, Heinz von Lichberg, published his tale… ]]> Sat, 29 May 2010 02:00:00 -0700 http://harpers.org/archive/2007/02/0081387 http://machinemachine.net/text/out-loud/audio-essay-on-pharaohs-cults-and-parasitism

audio essay : On Pharaohs, Cults and Parasitism (The Condition of Division)

Originally broadcast on Resonance 104.4 FM as part of Antepress’ Digestives series, Monday 24th May 2010

[Audio clip: view full post to listen]

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