This mini-paper was given at the Escapologies symposium, at Goldsmiths University, on the 5th of December

Daniel Defoe’s 1719 novel Robinson Crusoe centres on the shipwreck and isolation of its protagonist. The life Crusoe knew beyond this shore was fashioned by Ships sent to conquer New Worlds and political wills built on slavery and imperial demands. In writing about his experiences, Crusoe orders his journal, not by the passing of time, but by the objects produced in his labour. A microcosm of the market hierarchies his seclusion removes him from: a tame herd of goats, a musket and gunpowder, sheafs of… ]]> Wed, 07 Dec 2011 09:50:14 -0700 http://machinemachine.net/text/research/a-mark-on-crusoes-island http://www.metafilter.com/mefi/104691 Solaris, Stanislaw Lem's 1961 masterpiece, has finally been translated directly into English. The current print version, in circulation for over 4 decades, was the result of a double-translation. Firstly from Polish to French, in 1966, by Jean-Michel Jasiensko. This version was then taken up by Joanna Kilmartin and Steve Cox who hacked together an English version in 1970. Lem, himself a fluent English speaker, was always scathing of the double translation. Something he believed added to the universal misunderstanding of his greatest work. After the relsease of two film versions of the… ]]> Sun, 19 Jun 2011 05:29:33 -0700 http://www.metafilter.com/mefi/104691 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/jun/15/first-direct-translation-solaris The first ever direct translation into English of the Polish science fiction author Stanislaw Lem's most famous novel, Solaris, has just been published, removing a raft of unnecessary changes and restoring the text much closer to its original state.

Telling of humanity's encounter with an alien intelligence on the planet Solaris, the 1961 novel is a cult classic, exploring the ultimate futility of attempting to communicate with extra-terrestrial life. The only English edition to date is Joanna Kilmartin and Steve Cox's 1970 version, which was translated from a French version which Lem himself described as poor.
… ]]> Thu, 16 Jun 2011 15:07:40 -0700 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/jun/15/first-direct-translation-solaris http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2011/05/hitchens-201105 Four hundred years ago, just as William Shakespeare was reaching the height of his powers and showing the new scope and variety of the English language, and just as “England” itself was becoming more of a nation-state and less an offshore dependency of Europe, an extraordinary committee of clergymen and scholars completed the task of rendering the Old and New Testaments into English, and claimed that the result was the “Authorized” or “King James” version. This was a fairly conservative attempt to stabilize the Crown and the kingdom, heal the breach between competing English and Scottish Christian sects, and bind… ]]> Tue, 12 Apr 2011 15:57:36 -0700 http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2011/05/hitchens-201105 http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/print/1969/12/north-korea-8217-s-digital-underground/8414/ The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is the very archetype of a “closed society.” It ranks dead last—196th out of 196 countries—in Freedom House’s Freedom of the Press index. Unlike the citizens of, say, Tunisia or Egypt, to name two countries whose populations recently tapped the power of social media to help upend the existing political order, few North Koreans have access to Twitter, Facebook, or YouTube. In fact, except for a tiny elite, the DPRK’s 25 million inhabitants are not connected to the Internet. Televisions are set to receive only government stations. International radio signals are routinely jammed, and… ]]> Wed, 09 Mar 2011 07:11:43 -0700 http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/print/1969/12/north-korea-8217-s-digital-underground/8414/ http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/article7171739.ece The King James Bible is a book that attracts superlatives. To David Norton it is “the most important book in English religion and culture”, to Gordon Campbell “the most celebrated book in the English-speaking world” and “the most enduring embodiment of Scripture in the English language”. To Robert Carroll and Stephen Prickett it is simply the Bible translation that defines Bible translations: “All other versions still exist, as it were, in its shadow. It has shaped, formed and moulded the language with which the others must speak”.

No one present at the birth of the KJB, least… ]]> Fri, 11 Feb 2011 04:43:31 -0700 http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/article7171739.ece 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://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.guardian.co.uk/science/blog/2010/sep/17/television-television I like the BBC test card, because it's a wonderful example of how practical industrial design can develop into an enigmatic work of art. But even better is knowing that the image isn't just art, it has an objective purpose worked into it, a secret meaning that reveals itself under scrutiny. The architecture of industrial design is filled with these subtle codes, and together they create a world around us filled with hidden meaning.

If we look at the BBC test cards, the colours and patterns framing Carole have a fairly obvious purpose, providing reference points for… ]]> Fri, 17 Sep 2010 04:40:00 -0700 http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/blog/2010/sep/17/television-television http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/07/100719-science-technology-computers-lost-languages-translate-bible-hebrew/ A new computer program has quickly deciphered a written language last used in Biblical times—possibly opening the door to "resurrecting" ancient texts that are no longer understood, scientists announced last week.

Created by a team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the program automatically translates written Ugaritic, which consists of dots and wedge-shaped stylus marks on clay tablets. The script was last used around 1200 B.C. in western Syria.

Written examples of this "lost language" were discovered by archaeologists excavating the port city of Ugarit in the late 1920s. It took until 1932 for… ]]> Tue, 20 Jul 2010 03:56:00 -0700 http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/07/100719-science-technology-computers-lost-languages-translate-bible-hebrew/ http://www.ranadasgupta.com/notes.asp?note_id=53 We are all here to speak about the virtue of masters. I wrote a work called The Ignorant Master. Therefore it falls to me to defend on this subject the most apparently unreasonable of positions: the first virtue of the master is that of ignorance. My book tells the history of a professor, Joseph Jacoto, who created a scandal in the Holland and France of the 1830s by proclaiming that uneducated people could learn on their own without a master to explain things to them, and that masters, on their side, could teach the things they themselves did not know.… ]]> Wed, 23 Jun 2010 09:48:00 -0700 http://www.ranadasgupta.com/notes.asp?note_id=53 http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2010/05/the-opposition-paradigm-together-again-for-the-first-time.html

by Daniel Rourke

figure i : he stands opposite his rivals

You are the only one who can never see yourself apart from your image. In the reflection of a mirror, or the pigment of the photograph you entertain yourself. Every gaze you cast is mediated by a looking apparatus, by an image you must stand alongside. The gaze welcomes itself as a guest. The eye…