“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://www.anu.edu.au/hrc/first_and_last/works/realer.htm There is a seductive image of contemporary culture circulating today. Our world, Jean Baudrillard tells us, has been launched into hyperspace in a kind of postmodern apocalypse. The airless atmosphere has asphyxiated the referent, leaving us satellites in aimless orbit around an empty center. We breathe an ether of floating images that no longer bear a relation to any reality whatsoever.1 That, according to Baudrillard, is simulation: the substitution of signs of the real for the real.2 In hyperreality, signs no longer represent or refer to an external model. They stand for nothing but themselves, and refer only to other… ]]> Tue, 08 Mar 2011 10:46:32 -0700 http://www.anu.edu.au/hrc/first_and_last/works/realer.htm http://stock.mrfootage.com/Disaster_Disaster_reenactments_panic_people_31_footage.php Men in lab coats race across streets, meet up with kids. Kids into building. Panic in streets. People running from cover. Montage of panic. Panic in streets. Flying saucer blasts buildings. Loud speaker blasts warning to crowd ]]> Tue, 28 Sep 2010 07:00:00 -0700 http://stock.mrfootage.com/Disaster_Disaster_reenactments_panic_people_31_footage.php http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2009/06/i-discovered-the-ants.html

by Daniel Rourke

I discovered the ants trailing like gunpowder across my kitchen floor. Before I had time to think I had vacuumed up a thousand. Yet they kept coming, tending to resurge where last I had punished them; coursing like a rainless cloud on the exact same trajectory each time.

Somewhere unseen to me a billowing sack of protoplasm with the head of a Queen was giving birth to its hundredth clone of the day. But unlike its brethren… ]]> Sun, 14 Jun 2009 23:22:00 -0700 http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2009/06/i-discovered-the-ants.html http://www.metafilter.com/mefi/50098 As the Pentagon ousts plans to turn insects into cyber war machines you'd be forgiven for asking the question: Where does the real digital end and the faked life begin? Are we simulating life synthetically? or just speeding up an entirely natural process? Technologically engineered life is here to stay. Its not far fetched to speculate that simulacra may become all there is. ]]> Wed, 15 Mar 2006 21:09:26 -0700 http://www.metafilter.com/mefi/50098