“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://infiniteglitch.com/ Every day an incomprehensible number of new digital media files are uploaded to hosting sites across the internet. Far too many for any one person to consume. Infinite Glitch is a stream-of-conciousness representation of this overwhelming flood of media, its fractured and degraded sounds and images reflecting how little we as an audience are able to retain from this daily barrage.

Infinite Glitch is an automated system that generates an ever-changing audio/video stream from the constantly increasing mass of media files freely available on the web. Source audio and video files are ripped from a variety of… ]]> Wed, 09 Mar 2011 06:50:45 -0700 http://infiniteglitch.com/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2873004/ According to this view, ancient viruses, as with the ones today, could only make copies of themselves by succesfully infecting a host. So they become engines of innovation, using every possible dodge to get their genetic payload inside the host cell. In an early, RNA-protein world, there would not be enzymes to degrade DNA, so a virus encoded by DNA would have a big survival advantage. This suggests a scenario in which a clever parasite brings along DNA plus the means of copying DNA-- a different parasite at least for bacteria and archaea/eukaryotes-- and hijacks the cell's existing interpretation equipment.… ]]> Wed, 02 Mar 2011 07:32:46 -0700 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2873004/ http://ian-andrews.org/texts/postdig.html What is it that constitutes (a) post-digital art, and how can it be thought in terms of aesthetic theory – or even post-aesthetic theory?

In one sense, post-digital(1) refers to works that reject the hype of the so-called digital revolution.  The familiar digital tropes of purity, pristine sound and images and perfect copies are abandoned in favour of errors, glitches and artefacts.  And in another sense (as in the term post-modernism) it refers to the continuation or completion of that trajectory.  Post-digital music incudes a number of sub-genres: glitch, clicks & cuts, microsound, headphonics, etc.  All are,… ]]> Sun, 27 Feb 2011 05:57:48 -0700 http://ian-andrews.org/texts/postdig.html http://www.americanscientist.org/bookshelf/pub/getting-better-all-the-time Kelly argues that all technologies, from the stone ax to the computer chip, should be seen as a collectivity—the technium, which is “the greater, global, massively interconnected system of technology vibrating around us” and includes “culture, art, social institutions, and intellectual creations of all types.” He coins the term because he wishes to emphasize the idea of technology as an overarching entity that constitutes the equivalent of an evolving “seventh kingdom of life,” one that “predated our humanness.” Indeed, the “root of the technium can be traced back to the life of an atom.” A bird’s nest and a wooden… ]]> Tue, 22 Feb 2011 13:03:18 -0700 http://www.americanscientist.org/bookshelf/pub/getting-better-all-the-time http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/28/health/28cancer.html Often thought of as a modern disease, cancer has always been with us. Where scientists disagree is on how much it has been amplified by the sweet and bitter fruits of civilization. Over the decades archaeologists have made about 200 possible cancer sightings dating to prehistoric times. But considering the difficulties of extracting statistics from old bones, is that a little or a lot?

A recent report by two Egyptologists in the journal Nature Reviews: Cancer reviewed the literature, concluding that there is “a striking rarity of malignancies” in ancient human remains.

“The rarity… ]]> Mon, 27 Dec 2010 16:38:00 -0700 http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/28/health/28cancer.html http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/hillis_master10/hillis_master10_index.html We make a mistake when we think of cancer as a noun. It is not something you have, it is something you do. Your body is probably cancering all the time. What keeps it under control is a conversation that is happening between your cells, and the language of that conversation is proteins. Proteomics will allow us to listen in on that conversation, and that will lead to much better way to treat cancer.

Hillis continues..."We misunderstand cancer by making it a noun. Instead of saying, "My house has water", we say, "My plumbing is leaking." Instead… ]]> Thu, 23 Sep 2010 05:06:00 -0700 http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/hillis_master10/hillis_master10_index.html http://blog.modernmechanix.com/2006/08/15/how-nuclear-radiation-can-change-our-race/ This is a remarkably uninformed article about what effect a huge nuclear war would have upon the human race. The author seems to think that the radiation would create a race of bald, big brained super humans (Homo Superior) with no wisdom teeth and only four toes on each foot. Depending on the number and disposition of these new super humans they would either a) kill all the normal humans, b) be killed by all the normal humans, c) enslave the humans, or d) co-operate with humans and help them. Of course this all relies on the well known evolutionary… ]]> Sat, 06 Jun 2009 09:36:00 -0700 http://blog.modernmechanix.com/2006/08/15/how-nuclear-radiation-can-change-our-race/