MachineMachine /stream - tagged with paper

Computing Machinery and Intelligence (by Alan Turing)

Mon, 31 Oct 2011 06:53:59 -0700

I propose to consider the question, "Can machines think?" This should begin with definitions of the meaning of the terms "machine" and "think." The definitions might be framed so as to reflect so far as possible the normal use of the words, but this attitude is dangerous, If the meaning of the words "machine" and "think" are to be found by examining how they are commonly used it is difficult to escape the conclusion that the meaning and the answer to the question, "Can machines think?" is to be sought in a statistical survey such as a Gallup poll. But…

Post-Artifact Books and Publishing

Wed, 15 Jun 2011 08:50:47 -0700

We will always debate:
the quality of the paper, the pixel density of the display;
the cloth used on covers, the interface for highlighting;
location by page, location by paragraph.

But really, who cares? 3

Hunting surface analogs between the printed and the digital book is a dangerous honeypot. There is a compulsion to believe the magic of a book lies in its surface.

In reality, the book worth considering consists only of relationships. Relationships between ideas and recipients. Between writer and reader. Between readers and other readers…

Flash Symposium at Birkbeck, 24th May 2011

Tue, 17 May 2011 14:26:13 -0700

Ideal for the commute, the lunch-hour, the stolen moment: shortness necessitates the perfect user-friendly format, arguably suited to the fast paced nature of everyday contemporary urban living. At the same time such compression of structure and content allows for moments of haiku-like contemplation. This symposium has been curated to celebrate all that is great about the short form.

The first half will feature five minute papers on short forms, from fiction to poetry, from comics to GIFs. The speakers are research students from across the humanities and colleges of the University of London. The second half will…

Jacques Ranciere: What Medium Can Mean

Sat, 12 Mar 2011 02:55:38 -0700

I will present some remarks here on the use of the notion of medium in art theory and the light cast on this notion by the case of photography. The notion of medium is in fact much more complex than it appears at first. Theorizations of medium as the crucial element of artistic modernity bring two apparently opposite senses of the word into play. First, we understand the word ‘medium’ as ‘that which holds between’: between an idea and its realization, between a thing and its reproduction. The medium thus appears as an intermediary, as the means to an end or the agent of an…

The interface and the machine

Mon, 10 Jan 2011 04:53:12 -0700

Being that this conference is about public interfaces, it would be evidently meaningful to talk about interfaces, machines and humans. But instead of examining the present multifaceted overwhelming and immense quantity of interfaces that daily calls for our attention, I will try to examine the relationship between the machine and the interface in a media archaeological perspective, that will, hopefully, point towards the physicality of the machine, in contrast to the symbolic ordering that is prevailing in the current understanding of interface.

In the introduction to this conference it is being stated that “in the case of…

Do writers need paper?

Sun, 24 Oct 2010 17:05:00 -0700

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.

Ancient death-grip leaf scars reveal ant–fungal parasitism

Thu, 19 Aug 2010 08:40:00 -0700

Parasites commonly manipulate host behaviour, and among the most dramatic examples are diverse fungi that cause insects to die attached to leaves. This death-grip behaviour functions to place insects in an ideal location for spore dispersal from a dead body following host death. Fossil leaves record many aspects of insect behaviour (feeding, galls, leaf mining) but to date there are no known examples of behavioural manipulation. Here, we document, to our knowledge, the first example of the stereotypical death grip from 48 Ma leaves of Messel, Germany, indicating the antiquity of this behaviour. As well as probably being the first…

Critical Code Studies

Mon, 21 Jun 2010 03:30:00 -0700

by Mark C. Marino

The computer does not understand what it says. Literally speaking, the computer does not even interpret that code. When the function is called, the computer will print (output) the list of the two atoms (as symbolic units are called in Lisp) "Hello" and "World." The single quotation marks tell the computer not to interpret the words "Hello" and "World" (as the double quotation marks do in this sentence). With this distinction, language becomes divided between the operational code and data. The computer here merely shuffles the words as so many strings of data.…

The Ship Argo

Sun, 09 May 2010 12:37:00 -0700

Mr. Daniel posted a photo:

Extract from 'Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes', page 46

On The Media: Transcript of "Panoramic View"

Tue, 27 Apr 2010 06:42:00 -0700

Writer Dave Eggers’ publishing house, McSweeney’s, recently released a one-off newspaper called Panorama. The 328-page paper was meant as a celebration of the print form and a demonstration of why newspapers are still uniquely relevant in the digital era. Brooke interviewed Dave live onstage in Washington DC, and asked him about the future of print.

"the peace tape"

Sat, 19 Dec 2009 08:55:00 -0700