MachineMachine /stream - tagged with value http://machinemachine.net/stream/feed en-us http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Sweetcron therourke@gmail.com A Thomasson is any kind of "useless and defunct object attached to someone's property and aesthetically maintained" http://www.theatlanticcities.com/design/2012/05/useless-and-defunct-city-objects-are-named-thomassons/2075/ ...according to Akasegawa's definition. A publisher's blurb states that this includes the "doorknob in a wall without a door, that driveway leading into an unbroken fence, that strange concrete... thing sprouting out of your sidewalk with no discernible purpose." Learn more about what makes a Thomasson in the video below, which includes quixotic footage of real-life examples like a stairway ending in a window. The artist, who's birth name is Katsuhiko Akasegawa, picked the word in tribute to Gary Thomasson, an American baseball player who whiffed on so many balls during his 1980s stint with the Yomiuri Giants that the… ]]> Wed, 23 May 2012 00:36:14 -0700 http://www.theatlanticcities.com/design/2012/05/useless-and-defunct-city-objects-are-named-thomassons/2075/ Marx at 193 http://www.lrb.co.uk/v34/n07/john-lanchester/marx-at-193/john-lanchester-marx-at-193-lrb-5-april-2012 Marx at 193 : http://t.co/VUOlefTJ via @LRB ]]> Thu, 29 Mar 2012 15:17:18 -0700 http://www.lrb.co.uk/v34/n07/john-lanchester/marx-at-193/john-lanchester-marx-at-193-lrb-5-april-2012 The Enlightenment, Naturalism, And The Secularization Of Values http://secularhumanism.org/index.php?section=fi&page=kors_32_3/council-for-secular-humanism The Enlightenment, Naturalism, And The Secularization Of Values : http://t.co/VVPManIW cc @tomcolls ]]> Tue, 20 Mar 2012 11:20:24 -0700 http://secularhumanism.org/index.php?section=fi&page=kors_32_3/council-for-secular-humanism "Models of communication are…not merely representations of communication but representations for..." http://tumblr.machinemachine.net/post/17947545876 “Models of communication are…not merely representations of communication but representations for communication: templates that guide, unavailing or not, concrete processes of human interaction, mass and interpersonal.”

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James Carey, Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society

The Shannon and Weaver Model - The Late Age of Print

 ]]> Mon, 20 Feb 2012 08:21:08 -0700 http://tumblr.machinemachine.net/post/17947545876 The meaning of monsters, magic and miracles http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/public/article869724.ece Monsters demonstrate, monsters alert us: whether or not the etymologies relating the word to both “monstro” (I show) and “moneo” (I warn), are correct, monsters act as a moral compass. The physical prodigy becomes a test of ethics and, in the move between literal and figurative, displays the crucial role fictions play in the establishment of value and the common sense. Or, one might say in the era when the Humanities are under such stress, thinking with monsters shows how an understanding of Nature, and of medicine, law and custom is impossible without cultural expression. ]]> Thu, 09 Feb 2012 11:33:07 -0700 http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/public/article869724.ece Evolution and Innovation http://theeuropean-magazine.com/352-dyson-george/353-evolution-and-innovation/george-dyson-evolution-and-innovation-information-is-cheap-meaning-is-expensive-the-european-magazine George Dyson: “Information Is Cheap, Meaning Is Expensive” http://t.co/wKQfp6rP ]]> Sat, 29 Oct 2011 15:55:49 -0700 http://theeuropean-magazine.com/352-dyson-george/353-evolution-and-innovation/george-dyson-evolution-and-innovation-information-is-cheap-meaning-is-expensive-the-european-magazine Is mental time travel what makes us human? http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/public/article807136.ece A stonishing animals show up everywhere these days. Cooperative apes, grief-stricken elephants, empathetic cats and dogs crowd our bookshop shelves. It’s all the rage to plumb the cognitive and emotional depths of the animal world, rejecting sceptics’ sneers of “anthropomorphism” to insist that we’re finally coming to see animals for who they really are: not so different from us. Pushing against this tide of animal awe is a competing cultural trope, the relentless seeking of human superiority. It’s from this second camp that Michael C. Corballis, a professor emeritus of psychology from New Zealand, has written The Recursive Mind: The… ]]> Fri, 28 Oct 2011 10:32:53 -0700 http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/public/article807136.ece Meaning/time=? [e-flux on Coked-Out, Motherless Robots] http://www.artfagcity.com/2011/09/29/meaningtime-e-flux-on-coked-out-motherless-robots/ Are we moving too fast for meaning? That’s the argument put together by Franco Berardi in his essay Time, Acceleration, and Violence, published on e-flux. It’s the latest in an expanding body of “are we moving too fast for…?” thinking, with meaning-as-victim following truth-as-victim (Zygmunt Bauman), character-as-victim (Richard Sennett), and promiscuity-as-victim (Miquel Brown). But does it make any sense? From what I understand, Berardi’s argument is that among the many ills caused by capitalism’s constant acceleration is an “inflation of meaning.” The increased production of symbols – aided, one assumes, by greater productivity among symbol-creators – has had roughly the… ]]> Thu, 29 Sep 2011 07:29:59 -0700 http://www.artfagcity.com/2011/09/29/meaningtime-e-flux-on-coked-out-motherless-robots/ How Can We Understand Code as a "Critical Artifact"? http://henryjenkins.org/2011/09/how_can_we_understand_code_as.html The working definition for Critical Code Studies (CCS) is "the application of humanities style hermeneutics to the interpretation of computer source code." However, lately, I have found it more useful to explain the field to people as the analysis of technoculture (culture as imbricated with technology) through the entry point of the source code of a particular digital object. The code is not the ends of the analyses, but the beginning. Critical Code Studies finds code meaningful not as text but "as a text," an artifact of a digital moment, full of hooks for discussing digital culture and programming communities.… ]]> Wed, 21 Sep 2011 04:23:48 -0700 http://henryjenkins.org/2011/09/how_can_we_understand_code_as.html How Can We Understand Code as a "Critical Artifact"? http://henryjenkins.org/2011/09/how_can_we_understand_code_as.html The working definition for Critical Code Studies (CCS) is "the application of humanities style hermeneutics to the interpretation of computer source code." However, lately, I have found it more useful to explain the field to people as the analysis of technoculture (culture as imbricated with technology) through the entry point of the source code of a particular digital object. The code is not the ends of the analyses, but the beginning. Critical Code Studies finds code meaningful not as text but "as a text," an artifact of a digital moment, full of hooks for discussing digital culture and programming communities.… ]]> Tue, 20 Sep 2011 10:26:12 -0700 http://henryjenkins.org/2011/09/how_can_we_understand_code_as.html Humanism / After Humanism http://www.iasc-culture.org/publications_article_2011_Summer_sennet.php n this essay, I want to explore some dimensions of what the term “humanism” means—what it meant in the past and what it means today. In particular, I would like to consider the relation of displacement and humanism—a cultural ideal on the one hand, a social fact on the other. The two seem to have nothing in common. Yet I want to argue that they do; at the dawn of the modern era, a person’s capacity to manage and master displacement formed part of the humanist project, and, I argue, it continues to do so today, but on very different… ]]> Thu, 11 Aug 2011 11:30:24 -0700 http://www.iasc-culture.org/publications_article_2011_Summer_sennet.php Secularism and Its Discontents http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2011/08/15/110815crat_atlarge_wood?currentPage=all These are theological questions without theological answers, and, if the atheist is not supposed to entertain them, then, for slightly different reasons, neither is the religious believer. Religion assumes that they are not valid questions because it has already answered them; atheism assumes that they are not valid questions because it cannot answer them. But as one gets older, and parents and peers begin to die, and the obituaries in the newspaper are no longer missives from a faraway place but local letters, and one’s own projects seem ever more pointless and ephemeral, such moments of terror and incomprehension seem… ]]> Tue, 09 Aug 2011 15:57:04 -0700 http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2011/08/15/110815crat_atlarge_wood?currentPage=all Information Wants to be Consumed http://userwww.sfsu.edu/~rlrutsky/RR/Consumption.pdf  Although information spreads, virus-like, through replication, this replication, as Walter Benjamin foresaw, involves a dispersion that allows images or data to be seen in different places, in different contexts (what Benjamin (1969) called “exhibition value”). It is, however, only through the process of consumption that this reproduction and dissemination of data can occur. Consumption, in short, is the means by which information, whether expensive or free, reproduces and spreads. Information, in fact, depends upon consumption for its very existence. Without being consumed, it ceases to be information in any practical sense, becoming merely a static and inaccessible knowledge, an eternal… ]]> Wed, 03 Aug 2011 06:00:18 -0700 http://userwww.sfsu.edu/~rlrutsky/RR/Consumption.pdf The Pathology of Collecting http://newhumanist.org.uk/2565/favourite-things What I’ve learned, the hard way, is that the one thing you must never ask a collector is “why?” It’ll get you nowhere. They’ll just stare at you in baffled amazement before returning to contemplation of their most recent acquisition, or dreaming of the next one. These are people who thrive on making classifications, pondering the arrangements of their trophies and annotating them with informative labels. Often their obsession seems to derive from a need to impose order on a chaotic world, from the fear of death and oblivion. The collection will ward off mortality, carrying the illusion of eternity.… ]]> Mon, 11 Jul 2011 04:54:06 -0700 http://newhumanist.org.uk/2565/favourite-things Inside the Box: Notes From Within the European Artistic Research Debate http://e-flux.com/journal/view/233 The debate over artistic research, particularly its appeal to scientificity, often rests on defining one’s terms. Thus, an examination of some of the keywords deployed might be instructive, especially when their circulation is grounded on an imprecision inherent in language. The connotative meaning of a word, if I may be forgiven for stating the obvious, can diverge greatly from what are often contradictory origins, allowing ideology to reify itself on a lexical level. Let’s examine the word science itself. It derives both from the Latin, scientia, “to know”—but also from the Greek, scienzia, “to split, rend or cleave.” That art… ]]> Thu, 16 Jun 2011 03:13:52 -0700 http://e-flux.com/journal/view/233 Depicting Relationships: The limits of language http://eis-blog.ucsc.edu/2011/05/depicting-relationships-the-limits-of-language/ The heart of the english sentence (and equivalent sentential forms in other natural languages) lies in connecting ideas together and creating meaning. Like placing two portals from the recent hit sequel by Valve, you are changing the space without necessarily adding or subtracting from it. You’re using what’s already there, but rearranging it; repurposing it. Relying on a complex process of disambiguation to carry through your novel contribution to the whole of spoken or written utterances (as you learn in English grammar classes).

Have you ever considered words to be a bit constraining? I am a self… ]]> Sun, 29 May 2011 15:28:54 -0700 http://eis-blog.ucsc.edu/2011/05/depicting-relationships-the-limits-of-language/ The Doctrine of the Similar (GIF GIF GIF) http://machinemachine.net/text/ideas/the-doctrine-of-the-similar-gif-gif-gif

In two short essays – written in 1933 – Walter Benjamin argues that primitive language emerged in magical correspondence with the world. The faculty we all exhibit in childhood play, to impersonate and imitate people and things loses its determining power as language gradually takes over from our “non-sensuous” connection with reality. In a break from Saussurian linguistics, Benjamin decries the loss of this “mimetic faculty”, as it becomes further replaced by the “archive of non-sensuous correspondences” we know as writing.

To put it in simpler terms… Where once we read the world, the stars or the entrails of a… ]]> Wed, 25 May 2011 05:21:34 -0700 http://machinemachine.net/text/ideas/the-doctrine-of-the-similar-gif-gif-gif Japanese people need our solidarity, not a blame game http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/10324/ The earthquake confirms that a pre‑Enlightenment urge to blame human greed for natural disasters is making a comeback.

The Japanese proverb ‘fix the problem, not the blame’ captures an attitude towards life that has served Japan well in the post-Hiroshima era. It makes a powerful point, which is that looking for someone or something to blame is often a time-consuming exercise that rarely has positive outcomes. Whereas nothing can be done about an unfortunate event that has already occurred, we can mobilise our creative powers to fix problems that stare us in the face. History shows that… ]]> Sat, 26 Mar 2011 13:48:19 -0700 http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/10324/ How to Make Anything Signify Anything http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/40/sherman.php It is unlikely that Bacon’s cipher system was ever used for the transmission of military secrets, in the seventeenth century or in the twentieth. But for roughly a century from 1850, it set the world of literature on fire. A passion for puzzles, codes, and conspiracies fuelled a widespread suspicion that Shakespeare was not the author of his plays, and professional and amateur scholars of all sorts spent extraordinary amounts of time, energy, and money combing Renaissance texts in search of signatures and other messages that would reveal the true identity of their author. Even after the recent publication of… ]]> Thu, 10 Feb 2011 17:17:39 -0700 http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/40/sherman.php Biosemiotics: Searching for meanings in a meadow http://www.newscientist.com/mobile/article/mg20727741.200-biosemiotics-searching-for-meanings-in-a-meadow.html Are signs and meanings just as vital to living things as enzymes and tissues? Liz Else investigates a science in the making EVERY so often, something shows up on the New Scientist radar that we just can't identify easily. Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Is it a brand new type of flying machine that we are going to have to study closely? That was our reaction when we first heard about a small conference held in June at the philosophy department of the Portuguese Catholic University in Braga. There, a group of biologists, neuroscientists, philosophers, information technologists… ]]> Fri, 27 Aug 2010 01:08:00 -0700 http://www.newscientist.com/mobile/article/mg20727741.200-biosemiotics-searching-for-meanings-in-a-meadow.html