MachineMachine /stream - tagged with uk http://machinemachine.net/stream/feed en-us http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Sweetcron therourke@gmail.com A Conversation with film-maker Adam Curtis http://www.e-flux.com/journal/in-conversation-with-adam-curtis-part-i/ Since the early 1990s Adam Curtis has made a number of serial documentaries and films for the BBC using a playful mix of journalistic reportage and a wide range of avant-garde filmmaking techniques. The films are linked through their interest in using and reassembling the fragments of the past—recorded on film and video―to try and make sense of the chaotic events of the present. I first met Adam Curtis at the Manchester International Festival thanks to Alex Poots, and while Curtis himself is not an artist, many artists over the last decade have become increasingly interested in how his films… ]]> Sun, 12 Feb 2012 05:36:52 -0700 http://www.e-flux.com/journal/in-conversation-with-adam-curtis-part-i/ Barbarians on the Thames http://www.city-journal.org/2011/21_4_otbie-british-riots.html/barbarians-on-the-thames-by-theodore-dalrymple-city-journal Barbarians on the Thames : A postmortem of the British riots http://t.co/WzF5lhtZ ]]> Thu, 08 Dec 2011 10:36:18 -0700 http://www.city-journal.org/2011/21_4_otbie-british-riots.html/barbarians-on-the-thames-by-theodore-dalrymple-city-journal On A History of the World in 100 Objects http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/Objects-101-7212 Objects 101 by Roger Sandall What interests me here however is something else—the profoundly paradoxical position of MacGregor himself. When resisting Greek calls for the return of the Elgin Marbles, he is on record as saying that it is his museum’s duty to “preserve the universality of the marbles and to protect them from being appropriated as a nationalistic political symbol.” They belong to mankind, they are part of the human heritage, and though the Greeks may wish to regard them as an integral part of their national identity, the Greeks, alas, must be seen here as the deluded victims… ]]> Mon, 14 Nov 2011 07:59:54 -0700 http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/Objects-101-7212 The Segway Looter http://tumblr.machinemachine.net/post/8816535922

The Segway Looter

]]> Fri, 12 Aug 2011 02:05:00 -0700 http://tumblr.machinemachine.net/post/8816535922 The London Riots: On Consumerism coming Home to Roost http://www.social-europe.eu/2011/08/the-london-riots-on-consumerism-coming-home-to-roost/ These are not hunger or bread riots. These are riots of defective and disqualified consumers.
Revolutions are not staple products of social inequality; but minefields are. Minefields are areas filled with randomly scattered explosives: one can be pretty sure that some of them, some time, will explode – but one can’t say with any degree of certainty which ones and when. Social revolutions being focused and targeted affairs, one can possibly do something to locate them and defuse in time. Not the minefield-type explosions, though. In case of the minefields laid out by soldiers of one army you can… ]]> Tue, 09 Aug 2011 15:32:53 -0700 http://www.social-europe.eu/2011/08/the-london-riots-on-consumerism-coming-home-to-roost/ Violence at the Edge: Tottenham, Athens, Paris http://www.criticallegalthinking.com/?p=4142 "The everyday experience of liberal capitalism rests upon the violent defence of the boundaries against the other that the system itself produces. That banal and pacifying phrase ‘social exclusion’ allows us to forget the material experience of exclusion and the subjectivities that it tends to generate." ]]> Tue, 09 Aug 2011 04:39:01 -0700 http://www.criticallegalthinking.com/?p=4142 When the King Saved God 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 UK government acts to prevent arrest of Pope http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/295022 The UK government is said to have set in motion a law change that will prevent the Pope from being arrested when he visits the country in September.
Officials in Whitehall – the UK government’s administrative offices – are said to be worried over plans by the atheist authors Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens to have Pope Benedict arrested for crimes against humanity, because of his alleged cover-up of priestly assaults on children.
“Mr Dawkins, the atheist campaigner, and Mr Hitchens, an atheist author, asked human rights lawyers in April to put together a case for charging the… ]]> Sun, 25 Jul 2010 07:14:00 -0700 http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/295022 Writing off the UK's last palaeographer http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2010/feb/09/writing-off-last-palaeographer-university Dry, dusty and shortly to be dead. Palaeographers are used to making sense of fragments of ancient manuscripts, but King's College London couldn't have been plainer when it announced recently that it was to close the UK's only chair of palaeography. From ­September, the current holder of the chair, Professor David Ganz, will be out of a job, and the subject will no longer exist as a separate academic discipline in British universities. Its survival will now depend entirely on the whim of classicists and medievalists studying in other fields.

The decision took everyone by ­surprise. "It… ]]> Sat, 29 May 2010 10:04:00 -0700 http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2010/feb/09/writing-off-last-palaeographer-university The Opposition Paradigm (Together Again for the First Time) http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2010/05/the-opposition-paradigm-together-again-for-the-first-time.html

figure i : he stands opposite his rivals

Clegg, Cameron, Brown : Brown's Last Prime Minister's Questions

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…

]]> Sun, 16 May 2010 21:15:00 -0700 http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2010/05/the-opposition-paradigm-together-again-for-the-first-time.html Whitechapel - Volatile Dispersal: Festival of Art Writing http://www.whitechapelgallery.org/shop/product/category_id/27/product_id/385?session_id=1258455028383f96137d95bc221d98b5ce7b7b0bfb Saturday 21 November, 6pm - 11pm Showcasing UK artists and writers, this parley-based event speculates on the materialisation and dematerialisation of art writing through newly commissioned works, together with readings drawn from open submission. The event is hosted by Maria Fusco with Book Works and structured around issue three of The Happy Hypocrite, themed ‘Volatile Dispersal: Speed and Reading’. A specially produced publication is available on the day, published by Book Works. New commissions include a lecture, readings, performances and installations by Adam Chodzko, Ruth Ewan, Babak Ghazi, Beatrice Gibson, Nathaniel Mellors, and Gail Pickering, together with The Known Unknowns,… ]]> Sat, 21 Nov 2009 05:43:00 -0700 http://www.whitechapelgallery.org/shop/product/category_id/27/product_id/385?session_id=1258455028383f96137d95bc221d98b5ce7b7b0bfb Gravity Sucks at the BFI http://www.we-make-money-not-art.com/archives/2009/07/gravity-sucks.php Simon Faithfull's exhibition Gravity Sucks and his recent talk at the British Film Institute focuses largely around his examination of that most elementary of forces we experience. What Wikipedia calls a "consequence of the curvature of spacetime which governs the motion of inertial objects" and what we call gravity. In what has come to be sometimes called Gravity Art, there is actually a couple of artists who have chosen to use it as their medium, often in somewhat beautiful yet futile actions, "heroic failures". Among these however, there's different directions of movement, namely down (submission) and up (escape). The most… ]]> Mon, 27 Jul 2009 18:04:00 -0700 http://www.we-make-money-not-art.com/archives/2009/07/gravity-sucks.php Traversing the Altermodern: Tate Britain’s 4th Triennial http://spacecollective.org/Rourke/4692/Traversing-the-Altermodern-Tate-Britains-4th-Triennial In one of the most uncanny revelations in science fiction, the protagonist of H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine awakes from his anthropic slumber: the museum is filled with artefacts not from his past, but from his future. From here the very notion of history, of memorandum, retrospection and the artefact is called into question. The Time Traveller has become lost not in space, but in time, and nothing will ever be straightforward again.

Like the Time Traveller I too am a wanderer of ancient museums in unfathomable lands. From… ]]> Wed, 18 Feb 2009 19:58:00 -0700 http://spacecollective.org/Rourke/4692/Traversing-the-Altermodern-Tate-Britains-4th-Triennial Lewis Carroll in Numberland http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/01/books/review/Paulos-t.html Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, better known as Lewis Carroll, was a mathematician at Oxford University for most of his life. His fanciful “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” and “Through the Looking Glass” are quite familiar to us, as, to a lesser extent, are his photographs of young children. In “Lewis Carroll in Numberland,” the distinguished British mathematician Robin Wilson has filled a perceived gap in the writings about Carroll by describing in a straightforward, jabberwocky-free fashion the author’s mathematical accomplishments, both professional and popular. ]]> Wed, 04 Feb 2009 11:17:00 -0700 http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/01/books/review/Paulos-t.html