Bitter Batman

Peace Fish

(by Shintaro Kago)

Priorities

nevver:

The Cephalopoda

“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.anu.edu.au/hrc/first_and_last/works/realer.htm There is a seductive image of contemporary culture circulating today. Our world, Jean Baudrillard tells us, has been launched into hyperspace in a kind of postmodern apocalypse. The airless atmosphere has asphyxiated the referent, leaving us satellites in aimless orbit around an empty center. We breathe an ether of floating images that no longer bear a relation to any reality whatsoever.1 That, according to Baudrillard, is simulation: the substitution of signs of the real for the real.2 In hyperreality, signs no longer represent or refer to an external model. They stand for nothing but themselves, and refer only to other… ]]> Tue, 08 Mar 2011 10:46:32 -0700 http://www.anu.edu.au/hrc/first_and_last/works/realer.htm 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.scribd.com/doc/38073480/J-G-Ballard-reviews-Chris-Marker-s-La-Jetee This review appeared in New Worlds in 1966 and as far as I can tell is currently unavailable anywhere else. ]]> Fri, 24 Sep 2010 07:38:00 -0700 http://www.scribd.com/doc/38073480/J-G-Ballard-reviews-Chris-Marker-s-La-Jetee http://gli.tc/h/blog/?p=194 [in continuation/response to Rosa’s post responding to Kyle's post responding to Evan's post]

Inherent in glitch art is a denial for codification. Attempts to [con/de]fine this phenomenon, which by it’s very nature will always be in flux, can be easily dismissed as futile. At the same time glitch art is something specific: Bob Ross’ mountain ranges is not glitch art – Cory Arcangel’s Data Diaries is. Points in Iman Moradi’s thesis were problematic, but it laid [contributed to] the foundation for a conversation which sought to get a handle on things – it was followed by further… ]]> Sat, 11 Sep 2010 05:29:00 -0700 http://gli.tc/h/blog/?p=194 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://machinemachine.soup.io/post/66133348/Uranium-Ore

Uranium Ore

We are always in compliance with Section 13 from part 40 of the NRC Nuclear Regulatory Commission rules and regulations and Postal Service regulations specified in 49 CFR 173.421 for activity limits of low level radioactive materials. Item will be shipped in accordance with Postal Service activity limits specified in Publication 52.

first issue of rattle journal

I have an article in the first issue of rattle journal, available now

The background to this research

Everybody loves giraffes, and god knows they've been covered on Tet Zoo enough times (see the links below). And something that's been mentioned many times is the alleged inability of giraffes to swim, or even to float. There are several specific comments on this in the literature (e.g., Shortridge 1934, Goodwin 1954, MacClintock 1973, Wood 1982); Crandall (1964) mentioned a case where a captive giraffe escaped from a carrying crate, fell off the end of a jetty, and immediately sank in the Hudson River (incidentally, dead giraffes have… ]]> Sat, 12 Jun 2010 09:50:00 -0700 http://scienceblogs.com/tetrapodzoology/2010/06/giraffe_flotation_dynamics.php http://machinemachine.soup.io/post/58501112/Neutrinos-are-some-of-the-most-abundant

Neutrinos are some of the most abundant yet mysterious particles in our universe. Every second 50 trillion of them fly through our bodies without so much as a trace. Their neutral electric charge and miniscule mass allow neutrinos to pass through ordinary matter practically undisturbed.

This characteristic of neutrinos also makes the tiny particles frustratingly difficult to detect. It is no surprise, then, that scientists must go to great extremes to build a functional neutrino detector. Often the equipment must be buried beneath a mountain or submerged in an ultra-deep lake to isolate the… ]]> Tue, 01 Jun 2010 03:56:00 -0700 http://machinemachine.soup.io/post/58501112/Neutrinos-are-some-of-the-most-abundant http://www.metafilter.com/mefi/87272 Corey Arcangel is perhaps the internet's most infamous hack, masher-upper, digi/net artist. His work stands for a growing culture of artists who run wildly through animated GIF landscapes populated with corrupted data-compressed bunny rabbits and tinny, MIDI renditions of Savage Garden ballads. As the Lisson Gallery, London, opens its archives to Arcangel's curatorial eye, could digi/net art be set to infect the real, fleshy world, like a rampant Conficker Worm? Has YouTube become the truest reflection of our anthropological selves? Are… ]]> Tue, 08 Dec 2009 06:44:50 -0700 http://www.metafilter.com/mefi/87272 http://www.kingcosmonaut.de/lmb/#73 It is an internet radio, a cyberspace shuttle, and a kind of archive. LMB takes you on a journey through an almost forgotten web that is loud, colorful, often "personal", and doesn't care about standards. Though it might be forgotten by many, some parts of it are still there, waiting to be explored. And maybe we can learn something along the way. What? LMB plays a continous stream of MIDI music. However these aren't just random tunes, instead the songs are taken from websites where they are being played as background music. While playing a song the LMB cyberspace shuttle… ]]> Tue, 08 Dec 2009 04:04:00 -0700 http://www.kingcosmonaut.de/lmb/#73 http://www.cookingissues.dreamhosters.com/uploads/Bacon_and_Hams_Foldout_Pig.html Fold out, fold out again. Observe the organs: flank or groin, lumbar vertebrae, jejunum and deum ]]> Fri, 04 Dec 2009 09:43:00 -0700 http://www.cookingissues.dreamhosters.com/uploads/Bacon_and_Hams_Foldout_Pig.html 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/things/simulating-kim-jong-il

Will the real Kim Jong Il please stand up?

The idea of Kim Jong Il has become commodity. There is a reality inside North Korea, and there is another outside. Which is real and which is simulation?

For the past half decade an excess of images, simulations and caricatures of the North Korean leader have bombarded us. The media of excess has repeated the mantra of simulation in bold headlines, in news-print and digital text : “Is… ]]> Fri, 06 Nov 2009 10:28:00 -0700 http://machinemachine.net/text/things/simulating-kim-jong-il