MachineMachine /stream

Link

Marclay assembled his edit in hour-long chunks, the 24-hour cycle giving him enormous scope, but also confining him to a minute-by-minute grid. “A 10.01 clip has to be within that…

Link

It’s time. The winged chariot at my back, and all that. Taking a seat on one of the comfortable couches at the National Gallery in Ottawa, I mentally strap myself…

Link

With children so easy to embrace robotics, it’s clear that there’s a ton of potential for integrating intelligent technologies into learning environments. Besides, the idea of “exploring and creating” sounds…

Link

Isak Gerson is spiritual leader of the world's newest religion, Kopimism, devoted to file-sharing. On 5 January the Church of Kopimism was formally recognised as a religion by the Swedish…

Link

Lars von Trier’s latest has been overshadowed by the director’s ill-judged comments at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival. This is a pity because, as Film Quarterly Writer-at-Large NINA POWER and…

Link

Games don’t do storytelling well because they can’t deliver the four key components of story. There is no hero. Time is in the control of the player, not the creator.…

Link

Why, though, to begin with, did stigmata materialize in 13th-century Italy? Part of the answer seems to lie in the theological trends of the time. The Catholic Church of St.…

Link

Attempts to provide a taxonomy of game genres founder on the lack of consistent criteria, and usually have to be arbitrarily assigned. Connecting ‘shooters’ into a lineage suggests scrolling shooters…

Link

The high arts of literature and music stand in a curious relationship to one another, at once securely comfortable and deeply uneasy – rather like a long-term marriage. At the…

Link

As a both a scientist and a humanist myself, I have struggled to understand different claims to knowledge, and I have eventually come to a formulation of the kind of…

Link

SF has changed over the span of time I am talking about—from the 1950s (the era of the development of nuclear power, jet airplanes, the space race, and the computer)…

Link

Are the pessimistic cultural criticists (from Jean Baudrillard to Paul Virilio) justified in their claim that cyberspace ultimately generates a kind of proto-psychotic immersion into an imaginary universe of hallucinations,…

Link

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…

Link

“Faster.” Could any other word better capture the reigning paradox of our age? The world today—whether measured in technological or ecological terms—appears to be changing more rapidly than ever before.…

Link

The crowd-sourced, wikinomic cloud is the new, new thing that all management consultants are now telling their clients to embrace. Yet the cloud is not a new thing at all.…

Link

In this view belonging to a religion involves accepting a set of beliefs, which are held before the mind and assessed in terms of the evidence that exists for and…

Link

Some of the evidence has been under our nose all along. Conventional history has long shown that, in many ways, we have been getting kinder and gentler. Cruelty as entertainment,…

Link

Was theory a gigantic hoax? On the contrary. It was the only salvation, for a twenty year period, from two colossal abdications by American thinkers and writers. From about 1975…

Link

Was theory a gigantic hoax? On the contrary. It was the only salvation, for a twenty year period, from two colossal abdications by American thinkers and writers. From about 1975…

Link

The internet finally seems to have made a dint in New York's institutional art world. Cory Arcangel, an artist who began his career manipulating old computer technologies and critiquing web…

Link

By comparing individual DNA letters in multiple modern human genomes with those in the Neanderthal genome, the date of that interbreeding has now been pinned down to 65,000–90,000 years ago.…