What is it about a particular media that makes it successful? Drawing a mini history from printing-press smudges to digital compression artefacts this lecture considers the value of error, chance and adaptation in contemporary media. Biological evolution unfolds through error, noise and mistake. Perhaps if we want to maximise the potential of media, of digital text and compressed file formats, we first need to determine their inherent redundancy. Or, more profoundly, to… ]]> Wed, 16 Feb 2011 08:39:59 -0700 http://machinemachine.net/text/ideas/errors-in-things-and-the-friendly-medium http://coventryopenmedia.wordpress.com/schedule/ The concept of openness is often employed as part of a radical critique of the closed-off worlds of what might be called ‘traditional media’. It is variously used to urge for the right to transparency, the ethics of sharing, the value of re-use and the benefits of connecting.

This series of research seminars will explore various aspects of openness. Special attention will be given to the benefits and drawbacks of openness, and to the many possibilities openness offers for the future of media production, use and critique. ]]> Wed, 16 Feb 2011 07:54:36 -0700 http://coventryopenmedia.wordpress.com/schedule/ http://rhizome.org/editorial/3964 The starting point of the book is that the label “New Media Art” does not identify an art genre or an art movement, and cannot be viewed – as it usually is – as a simple medium-based definition. On the contrary, a work of art – whether based on technology or not – is usually classed as New Media Art when it is produced, exhibited and discussed in a specific “art world,” the world of New Media Art. This art world came into being as a cultural niche in the Sixties and Seventies, and became a bona fide art world… ]]> Wed, 12 Jan 2011 10:44:34 -0700 http://rhizome.org/editorial/3964 http://www.digicult.it/digimag/article.asp?id=1794 Professor of New Media Art at the University of California, both artist and graphic designer, Lev Manovich does not need further presentation. His first book “The language of New Media” (it came out in Italy in 2002 in the Olivares Edition) was one of the main reference points for many theorists, artists, communicators and designers, that were already well settled down in the “new technology” sector. Ten years later, thanks to the digital diffusion, grammar was already consolidated in the capitalism era and Lev Manovich decided to analyze and study that which today is seen as our “interface with the… ]]> Mon, 13 Dec 2010 19:12:00 -0700 http://www.digicult.it/digimag/article.asp?id=1794 http://machinemachine.net/text/ideas/on-text-and-exaptation

(This post was written as a kind of ‘prequel’ to a previous essay, Rancière’s Ignoramus)

‘Text’ originates from the Latin word texere, to weave. A material craft enabled by a human ingenuity for loops, knots and pattern. Whereas a single thread may collapse under its own weight, looped and intertwined threads originate their strength and texture as a network. The textile speaks of repetition and multiplicity, yet it is only once we back away from the tapestry that the larger picture comes into focus.

At an industrial scale textile looms expanded beyond the frame of their human operators. Reducing… ]]> Mon, 06 Dec 2010 14:41:24 -0700 http://machinemachine.net/text/ideas/on-text-and-exaptation http://machinemachine.net/text/arts/the-clock

Language is not what it is because it has meaning… It is a fragmented nature, divided against itself and deprived of its original transparency by admixture; it is a secret that carries within itself, though near the surface, the decipherable signs of what it is trying to say. It is at the same time a buried revelation and a revelation that is gradually being restored to ever greater clarity.

Michel Foucault, The Order of Things

Every Thing has to end, but not so its fragments. Energy flows amongst systems. It constitutes as it destroys, but never does energy… ]]> Fri, 05 Nov 2010 10:11:00 -0700 http://machinemachine.net/text/arts/the-clock http://www.openculture.com/2010/11/in_praise_of_copying_grab_a_free_copy.html Just a quick fyi: If you head over to the Harvard University Press web site, you can grab a free copy of Marcus Boon’s new book, In Praise of Copying, which makes the case that “copying is an essential part of being human, that the ability to copy is worthy of celebration, and that, without recognizing how integral copying is to being human, we cannot understand ourselves or the world we live in.” Boon is a writer, journalist and Associate Professor in the English Literature department at York University, Toronto. You can download a free copy of his book in… ]]> Wed, 03 Nov 2010 08:26:00 -0700 http://www.openculture.com/2010/11/in_praise_of_copying_grab_a_free_copy.html 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=402 by Alejandro Schianchi

An error seems to be that which gets between the ideal being and the real being; the error appears to be a singularity, a Non-being that transforms and distorts the Being. Audiovisual techniques, technologies, devices and media try to suppress errors; however, an ideological and aesthetic possibility hides behind the use of errors.

1. Introduction

An error, a failure, or an accident connotes something that is bad, wrong and inappropriate. The purpose of this work is to demonstrate the positive aspect of errors that take place in the… ]]> Tue, 26 Oct 2010 02:52:00 -0700 http://gli.tc/h/blog/?p=402 http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/2010/10/books-electronic-publishing/ Above all, the translation of books into digital formats means the destruction of boundaries. Bound, printed texts are discrete objects: immutable, individual, lendable, cut off from the world. Once the words of a book appear onscreen, they are no longer simply themselves; they have become a part of something else. They now occupy the same space not only as every other digital text, but as every other medium too. Music, film, newspapers, blogs, videogames—it’s the nature of a digital society that all these come at us in parallel, through the same channels, consumed simultaneously or in seamless sequence. ]]> Sun, 24 Oct 2010 17:05:00 -0700 http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/2010/10/books-electronic-publishing/ http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00v4s8v/Night_Waves_Is_the_Book_Dead/ Philip Dodd goes to one of Britain's largest second hand bookshops and is joined by a panel of publishers, authors and an audience of readers for a public debate that tackles the vexed question: Is the book dead? As e-books outsell hardbacks for the first time is reading itself facing a future that is empowered or impoverished?

The venue is Barter Books in Alnwick, Northumberland, which famously occupies a former railway station. Onstage with Philip will be guests writer David Almond, author of the prize-winning novel Skellig, Chris Meade of the Institute for the Future of the… ]]> Thu, 21 Oct 2010 03:10:00 -0700 http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00v4s8v/Night_Waves_Is_the_Book_Dead/ http://brianholmes.wordpress.com/2009/01/19/book-materials/ by Brian Holmes

===> INTRODUCTIONS

-The Affectivist Manifesto:

Artistic Critique for the 21st Century

-Toward the New Body:

Marcelo Expósito’s “Entre Sueños“

-Recapturing Subversion:

Twenty Twisted Rules for the Culture Game

.

===> POTENTIALS

01-Network Maps, Energy Diagrams:

Structure and Agency in the Global System

02-Do-It-Yourself Geopolitics:

Global Protest and Artistic Process

03-The Potential Personality:

… ]]> Wed, 20 Oct 2010 16:46:00 -0700 http://brianholmes.wordpress.com/2009/01/19/book-materials/ http://gli.tc/h/blog/?p=349 gli.tc/h art in Chicago ]]> Sat, 09 Oct 2010 05:32:00 -0700 http://gli.tc/h/blog/?p=349 http://canopycanopycanopy.com/9/mao__king_kong__and_the_future_of_the_book In 2004, Bob Stein founded the Institute for the Future of the Book, with the goal of finding new models for publishing as it moved from the page to the screen, from the enclosed world of the individual reader to the networked one of the Internet. While innovative for its own time, the Institute’s mission built on Stein’s decades of experience exploring the frontiers of electronic publishing, whether with Atari, the Criterion Collection, or Voyager. Long before the popularization of the Internet, the tools that Stein developed for publishing with floppy disks, CD-ROMs, and LaserDiscs laid the groundwork for dramatic… ]]> Wed, 08 Sep 2010 03:37:00 -0700 http://canopycanopycanopy.com/9/mao__king_kong__and_the_future_of_the_book http://chronicle.com/article/Will-the-Book-Survive/124115/ Over the next 10 years, scientific experts will be dealing with "extreme weather." No one knows how weird and dangerous it will get.

Moscow already faces Bahrain-like temperatures. Downpours swamp a fifth of Pakistan. President Mohamed Nasheed, of the Maldives, worries enough about future sea levels to hold a cabinet meeting underwater in scuba gear. (Don't miss this on YouTube!)

Parallel thinking should apply to a phenomenon of greater concern to readers here: "extreme academe." Think of it as the hysterical upgrading of ugly visions of the future already found in polite critiques of… ]]> Wed, 01 Sep 2010 11:17:00 -0700 http://chronicle.com/article/Will-the-Book-Survive/124115/ http://www.bspcn.com/2010/06/11/5-things-old-media-still-doesnt-get-about-the-web/ Earlier this week, the New York Times company forced the iPad Pulse News Reader app to be pulled from the App Store. The reason? It took the Times’ RSS feed and put it inside its own app.

To be clear, the RSS feed in question was a headline, a one-sentence introduction and a link to the full story on the NYT site. That’s it. Worse? Steve Jobs highlighted the app earlier during his WWDC keynote – and the NYT itself wrote a glowing review of the app just a few days before.

As mystifying… ]]> Thu, 17 Jun 2010 04:06:00 -0700 http://www.bspcn.com/2010/06/11/5-things-old-media-still-doesnt-get-about-the-web/