MachineMachine /stream - tagged with media http://machinemachine.net/stream/feed en-us http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Sweetcron text@machinemachine.net Cross-section of a tree played like a record on a turntable http://boingboing.net/2012/01/19/cross-section-of-a-tree-played.html?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter/cross-section-of-a-tree-played-like-a-record-on-a-turntable-boing-boing Cross section of a tree played like a record on a turntable (via @boingboing) http://t.co/GRnvPszB ]]> Thu, 19 Jan 2012 08:54:06 -0700 http://boingboing.net/2012/01/19/cross-section-of-a-tree-played.html?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter/cross-section-of-a-tree-played-like-a-record-on-a-turntable-boing-boing The Dark Sides of Our Digital Self http://www.theemotionmachine.com/the-dark-sides-of-our-digital-self/the-dark-sides-of-our-digital-self RT @furtherfield: The Dark Sides of Our #Digital Self - http://t.co/C9JyB0O9 ]]> Sun, 18 Dec 2011 04:51:26 -0700 http://www.theemotionmachine.com/the-dark-sides-of-our-digital-self/the-dark-sides-of-our-digital-self The Constraint Histories of Digital Games 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 “Seriality for All”: The Role of Protocols and Standards in Critical Theory http://nedrossiter.org/?p=286 For many years, philosophers have been casting doubt on the common identification with meaning and signification as the primary human response mechanisms to the world. If we wish to understand anything about how our complex technical society is made up, we must pay attention to the underlying structures that surround us, from industry norms to building regulations, software icons and internet protocols. Yet our ordinary understanding of the world resists this very idea. If we call for another society, with more equality and style, it is not enough to think differently; the very framework of that thinking must be negated… ]]> Sat, 24 Sep 2011 16:36:53 -0700 http://nedrossiter.org/?p=286 Is New Media Accepted in the Art World? Domenico Quaranta’s Media, New Media, PostMedia http://www.artfagcity.com/2011/08/30/is-new-media-accepted-in-the-art-world-domenico-quarantas-media-new-media-postmedia/ Do institutions and galleries have a growing interest in New Media? Two weeks ago, I identified the art “internet bubble” at The L Magazine, a trend that’s currently giving new media the spot light. Not everyone sees new media the same way though. Domenico Quaranta, an Italian writer and curator previously best known to this blog for “Holy Fire“, a dubiously themed new media exhibition in Brussels that included only “collectible” work, being one such example. Quaranta’s followed up the 2008 exhibition by writing a whole book on the subject of New Media — “Media, New Media, PostMedia” — one core theme being… ]]> Mon, 12 Sep 2011 00:22:06 -0700 http://www.artfagcity.com/2011/08/30/is-new-media-accepted-in-the-art-world-domenico-quarantas-media-new-media-postmedia/ Is New Media Accepted in the Art World? Domenico Quaranta’s Media, New Media, PostMedia http://www.artfagcity.com/2011/08/30/is-new-media-accepted-in-the-art-world-domenico-quarantas-media-new-media-postmedia/ Do institutions and galleries have a growing interest in New Media? Two weeks ago, I identified the art “internet bubble” at The L Magazine, a trend that’s currently giving new media the spot light. Not everyone sees new media the same way though. Domenico Quaranta, an Italian writer and curator previously best known to this blog for “Holy Fire“, a dubiously themed new media exhibition in Brussels that included only “collectible” work, being one such example. Quaranta’s followed up the 2008 exhibition by writing a whole book on the subject of New Media — “Media, New Media, PostMedia” — one core theme being… ]]> Fri, 02 Sep 2011 15:07:15 -0700 http://www.artfagcity.com/2011/08/30/is-new-media-accepted-in-the-art-world-domenico-quarantas-media-new-media-postmedia/ Digital tendencies http://articles.boston.com/2011-08-07/bostonglobe/29862127_1_computer-art-art-supplies-modern-art From 1961 to 1973, a loosely organized group of artists and scientists coalesced around the radical idea that the emerging technology of the computer could be used to make a different kind of art. Known simply as the New Tendencies, this heterogeneous movement included dozens of men and women from the far reaches of the industrialized world. Often working under collective monikers such as Equipo 57 or Grupo Anonima, most of them were as ambivalent about individual fame as they were about the artistic status of their activities, which they preferred to call “research.”

However they saw… ]]> Fri, 12 Aug 2011 04:59:28 -0700 http://articles.boston.com/2011-08-07/bostonglobe/29862127_1_computer-art-art-supplies-modern-art Accuracy takes power: one man's 3GHz quest to build a perfect SNES emulator http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2011/08/accuracy-takes-power-one-mans-3ghz-quest-to-build-a-perfect-snes-emulator.ars Emulators for playing older games are immensely popular online, with regular arguments breaking out over which emulator is best for which game. Today we present another point of view from a gentleman who has created the Super Nintendo emulator bsnes. He wants to share his thoughts on the most important part of the emulation experience: accuracy.

It doesn't take much raw power to play Nintendo or SNES games on a modern PC; emulators could do it in the 1990s with a mere 25MHz of processing power. But emulating those old consoles accurately—well, that's another challenge entirely; accurate… ]]> Thu, 11 Aug 2011 04:25:22 -0700 http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2011/08/accuracy-takes-power-one-mans-3ghz-quest-to-build-a-perfect-snes-emulator.ars Digital Decay (2001): by Bruce Sterling http://variablemedia.net/pdf/Sterling.pdf/digital-decay-2001-by-bruces-quotentropy-requires-no-maintenance-entropy-has-its-own-poetryquot-httptcoa87gldl-x #Digital Decay, 2001: by @bruces "Entropy requires no maintenance. #Entropy has its own poetry." http://t.co/A87gLDL #x ]]> Wed, 10 Aug 2011 09:59:32 -0700 http://variablemedia.net/pdf/Sterling.pdf/digital-decay-2001-by-bruces-quotentropy-requires-no-maintenance-entropy-has-its-own-poetryquot-httptcoa87gldl-x Content-free prose: The latest threat to writing or the next big thing? http://blog.oup.com/2011/07/content-free-prose/ There’s a new online threat to writing. Critics of the web like to blame email, texts, and chat for killing prose. Even blogs—present company included—don’t escape their wrath. But in fact the opposite is true: thanks to computers, writing is thriving. More people are writing more than ever, and this new wave of everyone’s-an-author bodes well for the future of writing, even if not all that makes its way online is interesting or high in quality.

But two new digital developments, ebook spam and content farms, now threaten the survival of writing as we know it. ]]> Mon, 25 Jul 2011 02:46:50 -0700 http://blog.oup.com/2011/07/content-free-prose/ #Don't Follow Twitter Art http://www.thelmagazine.com/newyork/dont-follow-twitter-art/Content?oid=2145066 Twitter art bums me out. Fine, it’s a new medium that we don’t know what to do with yet, but it's receiving a growing amount of attention and most of it is bad. Between Creative Time’s Twitter artwork commissions and a recent ARTnews feature on social media, there’s enough conversation on the subject to start the complaining. Let me lead the way.

I’ll begin with painter and veteran online news maverick Joy Garnett’s self-described social-media performance #LostLibrary. In spirit, the concept is generous: each day Garnett gives followers a chance to pick up a curated selection of… ]]> Wed, 06 Jul 2011 09:23:19 -0700 http://www.thelmagazine.com/newyork/dont-follow-twitter-art/Content?oid=2145066 Knowledge, not the way you knew it http://mastersofmedia.hum.uva.nl/2011/06/13/knowledge-not-the-way-you-knew-it-studying-the-impact-of-wikipedia-on-the-reception-of-knowledge/ 17.000.000 articles. 91.000 active contributors. 270 languages.

No matter what words one would choose to describe Wikipedia, numbers cannot speak but the truth: Wikipedia, which was set out as an “experiment” in 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, nowadays constitutes the largest free, collaboratively authored encyclopedia in the world.

There is a more important aspect however, that numbers won’t reveal: Wikipedia stopped being an encyclopedia a long time ago. Rather, it has grown into a socio-cultural phenomenon that changed – and keeps changing- radically the way knowledge is received, produced and disseminated. ]]> Tue, 28 Jun 2011 16:11:04 -0700 http://mastersofmedia.hum.uva.nl/2011/06/13/knowledge-not-the-way-you-knew-it-studying-the-impact-of-wikipedia-on-the-reception-of-knowledge/ Cory Arcangel Goes Old School http://www.brooklynrail.org/2011/06/artseen/webbed-outcory-arcangel-goes-old-school Arcangel’s conflicted relationship  with technology drives his artistic practice and pervades Pro Tools, the artist’s first solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art. At 33, Arcangel will be the youngest artist ever to receive an entire floor for new work. The exhibition features product demonstrations of mostly outdated technologies Ataris, Commodores, Pen Plotter Printers, to express suspicions about contemporary digital culture. The show is conspicuously absent of the Internet, ironic given Arcangel’s prolific body of web-art: no YouTube mash-ups of Lolcats playing Schoenberg, or digitally altered photographs morphing Paris Hilton into Macaulay Culkin and vice versa, or browser-based… ]]> Mon, 06 Jun 2011 15:11:05 -0700 http://www.brooklynrail.org/2011/06/artseen/webbed-outcory-arcangel-goes-old-school A Medium for the Masses http://www.cityonahillpress.com/2011/05/05/a-medium-for-the-masses/ The word “meme” first appeared in Richard Dawkins’ 1976 book “The Selfish Gene.” Dawkins defined a meme as being any sort of idea that spreads from person to person within a culture and catches fire. It played on the notion of a gene, as both genes and memes multiply with human-to-human contact. As UC Santa Cruz computer science professor Gerald Moulds put it, “Every idea that manages to self-replicate is a meme.” Internet memes are much the same thing. They spread from website to website, from community to community, from user to user across the Web, mutating and bonding together,… ]]> Mon, 06 Jun 2011 02:25:06 -0700 http://www.cityonahillpress.com/2011/05/05/a-medium-for-the-masses/ Is Twitter writing, or is it speech? Why we need a new paradigm for our social media platforms 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/ Technology Provides an Alternative to Love http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/29/opinion/29franzen.html Let me toss out the idea that, as our markets discover and respond to what consumers most want, our technology has become extremely adept at creating products that correspond to our fantasy ideal of an erotic relationship, in which the beloved object asks for nothing and gives everything, instantly, and makes us feel all powerful, and doesn’t throw terrible scenes when it’s replaced by an even sexier object and is consigned to a drawer.
To speak more generally, the ultimate goal of technology, the telos of techne, is to replace a natural world that’s indifferent to our wishes —… ]]> Mon, 30 May 2011 02:03:04 -0700 http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/29/opinion/29franzen.html The glorious GIF renaissance http://www.slate.com/id/2270819/ GIFs (the name stands for graphics interchange format and can be pronounced with either a hard or soft G) began life in the mid-'80s, image files so efficiently compressed that sluggish Internet connections (which is to say, every connection back then) could download them speedily. When most people use the term GIF today, however, they mean it as shorthand for animated GIFs. Animated GIFs are synonymous with the Internet's mid-'90s, pre-Flash era, when individuals and major corporations alike festooned Web sites with flickering borders, banners, and graphics, all playing on tight, endless loops. More recently, animated GIFs became key chintzy… ]]> Tue, 17 May 2011 02:46:40 -0700 http://www.slate.com/id/2270819/ The Art of the Accident : Institute for the Unstable Media http://www.v2.nl/publishing/the-art-of-the-accident Failure and malfunction are inherent in all technological products. In The Art of the Accident, the concept of “accident” contains not just the idea that each machine brings with it its own form of disaster but also the suggestion that in a world of network technologies the old distinction between timeless form and time-dependent processes is becoming increasingly unclear.

Ars accidentalis recognizes the creative potential of the accident, the fall, and the instability of digital media. The book maps the transformation of space, time bodies, machines and architectures through the conceptual and noninstrumental use of the computer. ]]> Sun, 15 May 2011 06:04:52 -0700 http://www.v2.nl/publishing/the-art-of-the-accident Technology Of Writing http://vos.ucsb.edu/browse.asp?id=2733 Technology of/on/about writing: A huge list of resources ]]> Wed, 11 May 2011 11:03:29 -0700 http://vos.ucsb.edu/browse.asp?id=2733 Takeshi Murata: Get Your Ass To Mars http://tumblr.machinemachine.net/post/5240178214

Takeshi Murata: Get Your Ass To Mars

If men really are from Mars, then Takeshi Murata’s new exhibition Get Your Ass To Mars at Ratio 3 in San Francisco might give us a sneak peak of some of the planets’ potential portraiture. Favoring work that cancross over different platforms, Murata moves away from the vivid animations that he’s known for, unveiling a new series of pigment prints using imagery rendered entirely on the computer.

These prints, set in a virtual space, incorporate found objects including VHS tapes, ripe fruit, skulls and helmets, cracked iPhones, musical instruments, and beer… ]]> Fri, 06 May 2011 02:36:02 -0700 http://tumblr.machinemachine.net/post/5240178214