MachineMachine /stream

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Georges Bataille (1897-1962) was by profession a librarian at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. In his off hours, however, he was also a fringe Surrealist, vanguard intellectual, and writer of…

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Technology of/on/about writing: A huge list of resources

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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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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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If you try to describe the living processes of the cell in a rather more living language than is typically found in the literature of molecular biology — if you…

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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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I will present some remarks here on the use of the notion of medium in art theory and the light cast on this notion by the case of photography. The notion…

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Any time we interact with a representative art work – be it a painting, a sculpture, a song, a novel, a comic, a play, a film, or a game –…

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There is a seductive image of contemporary culture circulating today. Our world, Jean Baudrillard tells us, has been launched into hyperspace in a kind of postmodern apocalypse. The airless atmosphere…

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The views of machinery which we are thus feebly indicating will suggest the solution of one of the greatest and most mysterious questions of the day. We refer to the…

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Kelly argues that all technologies, from the stone ax to the computer chip, should be seen as a collectivity—the technium, which is “the greater, global, massively interconnected system of technology…

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We human beings persist in thinking of ourselves as a unique species, endowed with special insight into a universe that we can manipulate. In fact, this notion is based on…

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Neuroscientists have yet to find anything in the brain they are happy calling consciousness, and philosophers are far from agreement over a way of talking about what happens after we…

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Who is the common reader now? I do not think there is any way to evade a simple answer to this question. Common readers—which is to say the great majority…

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(Michel Foucault, 1967) The great obsession of the nineteenth century was, as we know, history: with its themes of development and of suspension, of crisis, and cycle, themes of the…

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The starting point of the book is that the label “New Media Art” does not identify an art genre or an art movement, and cannot be viewed – as it…

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Although the analysis of geek community as a recursive public sharing social imaginary of openness, and a moral order of freedom, is a valid frame to understand geek culture through…

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What if the best thing art has to offer is freedom from choice? There’s a reason it’s high praise, not criticism, to say that a film or a piece of…

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Is there a secular body? Or, in somewhat different terms, is there a particular configuration of the human sensorium—of sensibilities, affects, embodied dispositions—specific to secular subjects, and thus constitutive of…

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We're hard-wired to turn our lives into stories - how will we cope with the dizzying digital fictions of the future, ask John Bickle and Sean Keating "We are our…

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Two years ago, I appeared on a panel, ‘Myths of a Near Future’, with writer Bruce Sterling and V. Vale of RE/Search Publications to discuss the work of J.G. Ballard.…

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By now, nearly everyone with a passing interest in science or religion is familiar with Stephen Jay Gould’s description of the two disciplines as “non-overlapping magisteria” with separate domains —…

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by Mary Midgley Does the term "humanism" really stand for a new and better form of religion? If so, what is that religion? Or is it something designed as a…

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This text was originally delivered by Werner Herzog as a speech in Milano, Italy, following a screening of his film “Lessons of Dark­ness” on the fires in Kuwait. He was…

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The general consensus of the contemporary mass media is that the return of religion has emerged as the most important factor in global politics and culture today. Now, those who…

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Trolleyology encapsulates the deepest tensions in our moral outlook. To tease out our moral intuitions, philosophers have come up with ever more ingenious scenarios. The trolley is usually racing towards…