culture items › MachineMachine /stream

Otlet was the first to imagine all the world’s knowledge as one vast “web,” connected by “links” and accessed remotely through desktop screens, and because of this he can be…

April 22 2010, 2:39am | Comments

Link Time Traveler Caught in Museum Photo? | forgetomori

It’s the short description for the photograph shown at the virtual Bralorne Pioneer Museum, from British Columbia, Canada. The image can be seen specifically on this page (scroll down to…

April 20 2010, 3:40pm | Comments

Writing from 3quarksdaily Communicating the Body \ Interpreting the Code

April 18 2010, 9:21pm | Comments

Link Video games can never be art

Having once made the statement above, I have declined all opportunities to enlarge upon it or defend it. That seemed to be a fool's errand, especially given the volume of…

April 18 2010, 3:47pm | Comments

Link The Saturnine Age and the Modern Genius

When a modern person thinks of artistic genius, they imagine an individual. Some have quantified genius by standardized exams – for example, the I.Q. test – but most know a…

April 9 2010, 3:40am | Comments

Link Semiotics for Beginners: Codes

In 1972 NASA sent into deep space an interstellar probe called Pioneer 10. It bore a golden plaque. The art historian Ernst Gombrich offers an insightful commentary on this: The…

April 6 2010, 12:14pm | Comments

Link Voyager 1 and 2's Infinite Playlist

Selected by a committee chaired by Carl Sagan, these songs were etched into a 12-inch, gold-plated copper record that was placed aboard the two spaceships in 1977

April 6 2010, 12:07pm | Comments

Link Next Big Thing - Literary Scholars Turn to…

This layered process of figuring out what someone else is thinking — of mind reading — is both a common literary device and an essential survival skill. Why human beings…

April 6 2010, 12:04pm | Comments

Link Conceiving God: the Cognitive Origin and Evolution of…

Atheists like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens confront the faithful head-on, but there may be another way to dispel religious beliefs. I am not so sure about this. In my…

April 4 2010, 6:56am | Comments

Link The Soul of the Scientist of Man

ow does the character of the scientist differ from that of the humanist? The past century has seen an acceleration in the “scientization” of the humanities. The roots of this…

April 4 2010, 6:54am | Comments

Link Ignoring the mainstream, spreading enthusiasm for difficult music…

Chris Bohn is the editor of London-based monthly music magazine The Wire. Subtitled “Adventures in Modern Music”, the magazine has covered the alternative, the underground, the experimental, the avant-garde and…

March 29 2010, 8:51am | Comments

Link 'A Thousand Years of Non Linear History' :…

A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History is one the most intelligent, stimulating, and rewarding books I have read in a long time - it even surpasses De Landa's previous War…

March 24 2010, 10:25am | Comments

Link Avatar and the Flight from Reality

In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story “The Artist of the Beautiful” (1844), a prototypical nerd with few social graces and no head for business turns a watchmaker’s shop into an artist’s…

March 21 2010, 12:55pm | Comments

Link If Odysseus Had GPS

When Robinson Crusoe was stranded on a tropical island he did pretty well for himself, all things considered. But to the rest of the world he was as good as…

March 21 2010, 12:54pm | Comments

Link Two podcasts about sound art

"Starting with the precedents set by Charles Ives and John Cage, VARIATIONS presents the principal milestones of Sampling Music, looking at examples from 20th century composition, popular art and the…

March 21 2010, 12:48pm | Comments

Link Is "Science Fiction Humanism" A Contradiction In Terms?

People talk about science fiction as the literature of humanism. But actually, science fiction's explorations put it into conflict with humanism's tenets. The best science fiction questions the nature of…

March 10 2010, 10:54am | Comments

Link The 'Basic' Plots in Literature

Q: I’ve heard there are only 7 (or 5, 20, 36…) basic plots (or themes) in all of literature. What are they? A: People often say that there are only…

March 9 2010, 4:35pm | Comments

Link Chtodelat? / What is to be done?

Chto delat? / What is to be done? was founded in early 2003 in Petersburg by a workgroup of artists, critics, philosophers, and writers from Petersburg, Moscow, and Nizhny Novgorod…

March 9 2010, 11:10am | Comments

Link An evolutionary biologist on religion: Spirit level

WHEREVER their investigations lead, all analysts of religion begin somewhere. And in the final lines of his densely but skilfully packed account of faith from the viewpoint of evolutionary biology,…

March 7 2010, 4:52pm | Comments

Link Human Culture Plays a Role in Natural Selection

As with any other species, human populations are shaped by the usual forces of natural selection, like famine, disease or climate. A new force is now coming into focus. It…

March 2 2010, 5:38pm | Comments

Link Should We Clone Neanderthals?

If Neanderthals ever walk the earth again, the primordial ooze from which they will rise is an emulsion of oil, water, and DNA capture beads engineered in the laboratory of…

March 1 2010, 4:58am | Comments

Link Publishing: The Revolutionary Future

Though Gutenberg's invention made possible our modern world with all its wonders and woes, no one, much less Gutenberg himself, could have foreseen that his press would have this effect.…

February 24 2010, 10:51am | Comments

Metafilter Sacrifice, speech, writing and art Sacrifice, speech, writing and art: I am interested in the different ways in which a sacrifice, a sacrament, a spoken word and a written word act as signifiers.…

February 24 2010, 6:28am | Comments

Writing from 3quarksdaily Avatar: We're Not in Kansas Anymore!

February 21 2010, 10:25pm | Comments

Link A Reporter at Large: The Interpreter

In the wake of the controversy that greeted his paper, Everett encouraged scholars to come to the Amazon and observe the Pirahã for themselves. The first person to take him…

February 21 2010, 5:00pm | Comments

Link Code is Law

Every age has its potential regulator, its threat to liberty. Our founders feared a newly empowered federal government; the Constitution is written against that fear. John Stuart Mill worried about…

February 7 2010, 10:20am | Comments

Metafilter De-constructing 'code' (picking apart its assumptions) De-constructing 'code': I am looking for philosophical (from W. Benjamin through to post-structuralism and beyond) examinations of 'code'. That both includes the assumptions contained in the word 'code'…

February 2 2010, 7:35am | Comments

Link Lunar Archaeology

In a meeting today in Sacramento, commissioners might vote to register items left behind on the moon by Apollo astronauts "as an official State Historical Resource," the L.A. Times reports.…

January 29 2010, 2:33pm | Comments

Link For The Love Of Culture

In early 2002, the filmmaker Grace Guggenheim--the daughter of the late Charles Guggenheim, one of America’s greatest documentarians, and the sister of the filmmaker Davis Guggenheim, who made An Inconvenient…

January 27 2010, 3:17pm | Comments

Wikipedia Other The Other or constitutive other (also referred to as othering) is a key concept in continental philosophy, opposed to the Same. It refers, or attempts to refer, to…

January 26 2010, 2:48pm | Comments

Link The World Question Center 2010: How is the…

Read any newspaper or magazine and you will notice the many flavors of the one big question that everyone is asking today. Or you can just stay on the page…

January 8 2010, 10:55am | Comments

Wikipedia Cargo cult A cargo cult is a type of religious practice that may appear in traditional tribal societies in the wake of interaction with technologically advanced cultures. The cults are…

January 8 2010, 10:51am | Comments

Link When the Meganovel Shrank

It seems significant, somehow, that Infinite Jest—the big buzzy signature meganovel of the nineties—was set at the end of the aughts. Most of the book’s action appears to take place…

January 8 2010, 6:21am | Comments

Link The Radio as an Apparatus of Communication

by Bertolt Brecht In our society one can invent and perfect discoveries that still have to conquer their market and justify their existence; in other words discoveries that have not…

January 6 2010, 8:16am | Comments

Link Evidence of Everything Exploding

A surreal webgame, littered with explosive potentialities. Help the arrow escape influential pages from historical art movements.

January 5 2010, 8:54am | Comments

Link Art Fag City » The Best of Web…

Here’s a better model for year-end link lists: Only chose one link! I asked 18 of my favorite professionals to do just this, leaving the subject matter completely at their…

January 3 2010, 4:59am | Comments

Link Digital Technology is Not the End of Artistic…

The Wall Street Journal’s Terry Teachout thinks future generations will consider itunes, youtube, and Kindle a more important cultural development than anything it distributes. He’s right to point out the…

December 23 2009, 4:49am | Comments

Link When Will White People Stop Making Movies Like…

Critics have called alien epic Avatar a version of Dances With Wolves because it's about a white guy going native and becoming a great leader. But Avatar is just the…

December 23 2009, 3:24am | Comments