Takeshi Murata: Get Your Ass To Mars

If men really are from Mars, then Takeshi Murata’s new exhibition Get Your Ass To Mars at Ratio 3 in San Francisco might give us a sneak peak of some of the planets’ potential portraiture. Favoring work that cancross over different platforms, Murata moves away from the vivid animations that he’s known for, unveiling a new series of pigment prints using imagery rendered entirely on the computer.

These prints, set in a virtual space, incorporate found objects including VHS tapes, ripe fruit, skulls and helmets, cracked iPhones, musical instruments, and beer… ]]> Fri, 06 May 2011 02:36:02 -0700 http://tumblr.machinemachine.net/post/5240178214 http://onlyagame.typepad.com/only_a_game/2011/03/prop-theory-in-a-nutshell.html Any time we interact with a representative art work – be it a painting, a sculpture, a song, a novel, a comic, a play, a film, or a game – it involves the exercise of our imagination, and as such we can see this deployment of our imagination as a game (in the manner of a child’s game of make-believe). Looking at a painting, we imagine we are perceiving what is depicted; listening to a song we imagine the story or sentiments mentioned in the lyrics and invoked by the music; reading a novel or comic or watching a film… ]]> Thu, 10 Mar 2011 10:31:38 -0700 http://onlyagame.typepad.com/only_a_game/2011/03/prop-theory-in-a-nutshell.html 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according to Baudrillard, is simulation: the substitution of signs of the real for the real.2 In hyperreality, signs no longer represent or refer to an external model.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://journal.benbashford.com/post/3029509797 Shanzai is the name used for a huge black market industry that (currently) specialises in making fake mobile phones in small factories. Basements. We’re not talking about a few phones either. The volume is terrifying. According to CCID Consulting in 2007 an estimated 150 million phones - 20% of the 750 million devices produced in China - were counterfeit or off brand.

Initially carbon copies of the genuine article, more recent shanzai phones sometimes add eccentric new features to meet the demands of the market and can produce them far quicker than the genuine manufacturers can adapt… ]]> Mon, 31 Jan 2011 16:29:00 -0700 http://journal.benbashford.com/post/3029509797 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-12012082 It could be one of the most ambitious computer projects ever conceived.

An international group of scientists is aiming to create a simulator that can replicate everything happening on Earth - from global weather patterns and the spread of diseases to international financial transactions or congestion on Milton Keynes' roads.

Nicknamed the Living Earth Simulator (LES), the project aims to advance the scientific understanding of what is taking place on the planet, encapsulating the human actions that shape societies and the environmental forces that define the physical world.

"Many problems we… ]]> Sat, 08 Jan 2011 08:50:13 -0700 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-12012082 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://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2010/09/29/geoff-mcghee-data-journalism/ What bad writing has to do with war casualties and traffic over North America.

It’s no secret we have a data visualization fetish, but that’s not just because we like looking at pretty pictures; it’s because we believe the discipline is an important sensemaking mechanism for today’s data deluge, a new kind of journalism that helps frame the world and what matters in it in a visual, compelling, digestible way. Stanford’s Geoff McGhee, an online journalist specializing in multimedia and information design, tends to agree. His excellent Journalism in the Age of Data explores data visualization as… ]]> Thu, 30 Sep 2010 16:19:00 -0700 http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2010/09/29/geoff-mcghee-data-journalism/ http://www.esri.com/news/arcuser/0610/nospin.html If the earth stood still, the oceans would gradually migrate toward the poles and cause land in the equatorial region to emerge. This would eventually result in a huge equatorial megacontinent and two large polar oceans. The line that delineates the areas that hydrologically contribute to one or the other ocean would follow the equator if the earth was a perfect ellipsoid. However, due to the significant relief of both the continents and the ocean floor, the hypothetical global divide between the areas that hydrologically contribute to one or another ocean deviates from the equator significantly. Analogous to the well-known… ]]> Mon, 16 Aug 2010 02:51:00 -0700 http://www.esri.com/news/arcuser/0610/nospin.html http://www.techeblog.com/index.php/tech-gadget/black-hole-simulation Get sucked in ]]> Sun, 14 Feb 2010 05:03:00 -0700 http://www.techeblog.com/index.php/tech-gadget/black-hole-simulation http://www.we-make-money-not-art.com/archives/2010/01/-tatjana-hallbaum-in-between.php Manipulating Reality presents a selection of 23 artistic approaches that work through photography and video to develop possible models of reality. Its aim is not to understand whether photographs can convey reality but how this can occur. The works exhibited represent different artistic strategies addressing the construction, reflection or distortion of reality in images. In addition to investigating the value of documentary photography today, many of the artists presented reflect in part the conditions of the tool of photography and adopt known artistic techniques such as collage, presentation in model form, abstraction and the assemblage of different elements. ]]> Fri, 29 Jan 2010 17:00:00 -0700 http://www.we-make-money-not-art.com/archives/2010/01/-tatjana-hallbaum-in-between.php http://machinemachine.net/text/things/simulating-kim-jong-il

Will the real Kim Jong Il please stand up?

The idea of Kim Jong Il has become commodity. There is a reality inside North Korea, and there is another outside. Which is real and which is simulation?

For the past half decade an excess of images, simulations and caricatures of the North Korean leader have bombarded us. The media of excess has repeated the mantra of simulation in bold headlines, in news-print and digital text : “Is… ]]> Fri, 06 Nov 2009 10:28:00 -0700 http://machinemachine.net/text/things/simulating-kim-jong-il http://www.nextnature.net/?p=3361 This essay aims to increase our understanding of simulations and their impact on our notion of reality. Following on some observations regarding the dominant role of visual representations in our culture, I will argue that we are now living in a society, in which simulations are often more influential, satisfying and meaningful than the things they are presumed to represent. Media technologies play a fundamental role in our cycle of meaning construction. This is not necessarily a bad thing, nor is it entirely new. Yet, it has consequences for our concepts of virtual and real, which are less complementary, than… ]]> Mon, 20 Apr 2009 15:22:00 -0700 http://www.nextnature.net/?p=3361 http://www.physorg.com/news152210728.html A new brain-imaging study is shedding light on what it means to "get lost" in a good book — suggesting that readers create vivid mental simulations of the sounds, sights, tastes and movements described in a textual narrative while simultaneously activating brain regions used to process similar experiences in real life. "Psychologists and neuroscientists are increasingly coming to the conclusion that when we read a story and really understand it, we create a mental simulation of the events described by the story," says Jeffrey M. Zacks, study co-author and director of the Dynamic Cognition Laboratory at Washington University in St.… ]]> Thu, 29 Jan 2009 07:04:00 -0700 http://www.physorg.com/news152210728.html