MachineMachine /stream

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Emulators for playing older games are immensely popular online, with regular arguments breaking out over which emulator is best for which game. Today we present another point of view from…

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When you visit the History of Computer Chess exhibit at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, the first machine you see is "The Turk." In 1770, a Hungarian…

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Imagine you are falling. But there is no ground. Many contemporary philosophers have pointed out that the present moment is distinguished by a prevailing condition of groundlessness.1 We cannot assume…

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Michel Serres: We are in the middle of an extraordinary human and environmental transformation, without really being aware of it, one that can only perhaps be compared with the Renaissance,…

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Son of a barge man, Michel Serres joined the Ecole Navale in 1949 and the Ecole Normale supérieure in 1952 where he obtained the aggregation of philosophy in 1955. From…

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My new book Shock Value: How a few Eccentric Outsiders Gave Us Nightmares, Conquered Hollywood and Invented Modern Horror, explores how horror went mainstream by revisiting the golden age that…

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In Delete, Mayer-Schönberger traces the history of such external memories – cave paintings, scrolls, photographic slides, diaries – and their importance to the flourishing of human knowledge. "Since the early…

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17.000.000 articles. 91.000 active contributors. 270 languages. No matter what words one would choose to describe Wikipedia, numbers cannot speak but the truth: Wikipedia, which was set out as an…

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From the July 1982 issue of Omni. As with all the other commissioned pieces I wrote for the Arts section of that magazine, this originally ran without a title; I’ve…

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"If there has been no spiritual change of kind / Within our species since Cro-Magnon Man . . ." The poet Louis MacNeice was voicing a commonplace that was accepted…

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We will always debate: the quality of the paper, the pixel density of the display; the cloth used on covers, the interface for highlighting; location by page, location by paragraph.…

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Arcangel’s conflicted relationship  with technology drives his artistic practice and pervades Pro Tools, the artist’s first solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art. At 33, Arcangel will be…

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GIFs (the name stands for graphics interchange format and can be pronounced with either a hard or soft G) began life in the mid-'80s, image files so efficiently compressed that…

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Humanity's profound impact on this planet is hard to deny, but is it big enough to merit its own geological epoch? This is the question facing geoscientists gathered in London…

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by Hito Steyerl What happens to identification at this point? Who can we identify with? Of course, identification is always with an image. But ask anybody whether they’d actually like…

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The daring German filmmaker Werner Herzog once walked a thousand miles to propose to a woman. He once plotted to firebomb his leading man's house and once ate his own…

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Just as this is an age of great wealth inequality, it is also an age of great inequality of knowledge or, more exactly, factual information. For all its democratic potential,…

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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”…

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In science fiction, ghosts in machines always appear as malfunctions, glitches, interruptions in the normal flow of things. Something unexpected appears seemingly out of nothing and from nowhere. Through a…

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A remarkable feature of the commentary on today's economic troubles is that, despite constant reference to the Great Depression of the 1930s, as well as to the many downturns since…

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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…

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JUST AS IN OUR DAY a fervid minority denounces the digitization of literary experience, fifteenth-century literati responded to their own depredations. In 1492, Johannes Trithemius, Abbot of Sponheim, wrote De…

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Gleick makes his case in a sweeping survey that covers the five millenniums of humanity’s engagement with information, from the invention of writing in Sumer to the elevation of information…

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This year marks the 40th anniversary of Creeper, the world’s first computer virus. From Creeper to Stuxnet, the last four decades saw the number of malware instances boom from 1,300…

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Is studying the brain a good way to understand the mind? Does psychology stand to brain anatomy as physiology stands to body anatomy? In the case of the body, physiological…