Sarah Perry is a contributing editor of Ribbonfarm. Nouns for human beings – “people” or “person” – conjure in the mind a snapshot of the surface appearance of humans. Using nouns like “people” subtly encourages thinking about people as frozen in time, doing nothing in particular.

My Selfie in 3D!. Millions of Selfies; to hang, supported by its base, key rings, necklaces, bracelets, earrings, and much more! Buy now at www.myselfiein3d.co.uk!

Live AV performance registration that I did during Syndrom 3.X @ Static Gallery, Liverpool, January 2015. Featuring some video images by Alexandra Gorczynski, and my remixed sounds from the track Professional Grin by Knalpot. Sound mastering by Sandor Caron.

93 Minutes of 4K footage shot from the Bow of the Container Ship Gunhilder Maersk as she traverses the South China Sea from Vietnam to China. Shot and assembled in 4K as a single take with no frame-breaks.

This video is the technical test of a number of long single take films I will be uploading to You Tube over the next few months. All shot and graded in glorious 4K. Please subscribe or follow on twitter to catch their release.

This footage was captured as part of the Unknown Fields 2014 Summer Expedition.

www.tobysmith.com www.unknownfieldsdivision.com

Simultaneously experience every episode from Season 1 of the sitcom 'Friends'.

too many errors in this one, even for me!

We all have at one point.

Let your curiosity get the best of you. http://youtu.be/yOhR8CCKOHM

The frontier of science is a wild and lawless place. Like all badlands, it attracts visionaries, charlatans and the dispossessed. Far from the jurisdiction of law enforcers, isolated communities cluster together and thrive in quiet obscurity. No group however, is quite so strange as the bio-hackers.

Systems that can identify emotions in images of faces might soon collate millions of peoples' reactions to events and could even replace opinion polls

IF THE computers we stare at all day could read our faces, they would probably know us better than anyone.

That vision may not be so far off. Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab are developing software that can read the feelings behind facial expressions. In some cases, the computers outperform people. The software could lead to empathetic devices and is being used to evaluate and develop better adverts.

But the commercial uses are just "the low-hanging fruit", says Rana el Kaliouby, a member of the Media Lab's Affective Computing group. The software is getting so good and so easy to use that it could collate millions of peoples' reactions to an event as they sit watching it at home, potentially replacing opinion polls, influencing elections and perhaps fuelling revolutions.

With regard to the relativity of value, Karl Marx expressed this function of ideology in the clearest terms in Volume I of Capital: "... one man is king only because other men stand in the relation of subjects to him. They, on the contrary, imagine that they are subjects because he is king" (Karl Marx, Capital, vol. I. London: Penguin, 1974, p. 63).

It is up to us to translate Marx's dialectical insight into a couple of simple formulas, according to which

the balance of your influence is positive if you have more followers than the number of people you, yourself, follow this influence resides not in the one followed but in the recognition of her followers Now, to "unfollow" or to "unfriend" someone is a huge insult, a gesture that breaks the distorted looking glass of ideology and demonstrates the power of the follower over the one followed. No wonder, then, that the media treat celebrities unsubscribing from the feeds of other celebrities as newsworthy events!

Sexual objectification has been well studied, but most of the research is about looking at the effects of this objectification. "What's unclear is, we don't actually know whether people at a basic level recognize sexualized females or sexualized males as objects," says Philippe Bernard of Université libre de Bruxelles in Belgium. Bernard cowrote the new paper with Sarah Gervais, Jill Allen, Sophie Campomizzi, and Olivier Klein. Psychological research has worked out that our brains see people and objects in different ways. For example, while we're good at recognizing a whole face, just part of a face is a bit baffling. On the other hand, recognizing part of a chair is just as easy as recognizing a whole chair.

A single cell, such as a bacterium, is the simplest thing that can be alive. In addition to the materials from which it is constructed, it needs three features: a way of capturing energy (a metabolism), a way of reproducing (genes or something like genes) and a membrane that lets in what needs to come in and keeps out the rest.

To most of us data mining goes something like this: tons of data is collected, then quant wizards work their arcane magic, and then they know all of this amazing stuff. But, how? And what types of things can they know? Here is the truth: despite the fact that the specific technical functioning of data mining algorithms is quite complex -- they are a black box unless you are a professional statistician or computer scientist -- the uses and capabilities of these approaches are, in fact, quite comprehensible and intuitive.

For the most part, data mining tells us about very large and complex data sets, the kinds of information that would be readily apparent about small and simple things. For example, it can tell us that "one of these things is not like the other" a la Sesame Street or it can show us categories and then sort things into pre-determined categories. But what's simple with 5 datapoints is not so simple with 5 billion datapoints.

Over the past two millennia, "runaway" communities have put the "friction of terrain" between themselves and the people who remained in the lowlands, he writes. The highland groups adopted a swidden agriculture system (sometimes known, pejoratively, as "slash and burn"), shifting fields from place to place, staggering harvests, and relying on root crops to hide their yields from any visiting tax collectors. They formed egalitarian societies so as not to have leaders who might sell them out to the state. And they turned their backs on literacy to avoid creating records that central governments could use to carry out onerous policies like taxation, conscription, and forced labor.

Scott's thesis puts people who have been an afterthought in Asian-area studies in the spotlight. Moreover, he "manages to give them more agency than most scholars have been able to attribute to them," says Prasenjit Duara, a professor of humanities at the National University of Singapore.

Björk's forthcoming Biophilia is an album. It's also an iPad app suite featuring interactive programs for each of its 10 songs... and a treatise on the natural world that involves everything from immense planets to tiny atoms... and a traveling exhibition that showcases one-of-a-kind instruments including a 10-foot bass-playing pendulum... and it's also an educational tool that aims to offer a modern take on music education, replacing notation and by-the-book theory with instinct and creativity. Biophilia-- due out later this year on One Little Indian/Nonesuch-- is many things.

Interview with Nick Bostrom

Our long track record of survival–humans have been around for about 100,000 years–gives us some assurance that the natural risks have been rather small.

If they have not ended human history until now, they are unlikely to have that effect in the near future. So the risks we should really worry about come from new developments. They introduce new factors with a lot of statistical uncertainty, and we cannot be confident that their risks are manageable. The potential of human action to do good and evil is larger than it has ever been before. We know that we can affect the global system. We can travel around the world in a matter of hours. We can affect the global climate. World wars have already happened. We can already foresee that new technologies might be developed in the coming century that would further expand our power over nature and over ourselves. We might even be able to change human nature itself.

by Hito Steyerl

A standard way of relating politics to art assumes that art represents political issues in one way or another. But there is a much more interesting perspective: the politics of the field of art as a place of work.1 Simply look at what it does—not what it shows. Amongst all other forms of art, fine art has been most closely linked to post-Fordist speculation, with bling, boom, and bust. Contemporary art is no unworldly discipline nestled away in some remote ivory tower. On the contrary, it is squarely placed in the neoliberal thick of things. We cannot dissociate the hype around contemporary art from the shock policies used to defibrillate slowing economies. Such hype embodies the affective dimension of global economies tied to ponzi schemes, credit addiction, and bygone bull markets.

Who owns the data in that cloud has been the subject of ferocious debate. It’s not all stored in one place, of course — our lives are tracked and documented by a diffuse assortment of entities that includes private companies like Google and Visa, as well as governmental agencies like the IRS, the Department of Education, and the Census Bureau. Up to now, the public conversation on this kind of data has taken the form of an argument about privacy rights, with legal scholars, computer scientists, and others arguing for tighter restrictions on how our data is used by companies and the government, and consumer advocates instructing us on how to prevent our information from being collected and misused. But a small group of thinkers is suggesting an entirely new way of understanding our relationship with the data we generate. Instead of arguing about ownership and the right to privacy, they say, we should be imagining data as a public resource: 

Offsets images automatically to create simple, but effective glitches