MachineMachine /stream

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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…

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The history of science can be viewed as the recasting of phenomena that were once thought to be accidents as phenomena that can be understood in terms of fundamental causes…

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As scientists began to build a database of human DNA in the 1990s, it became possible to test these ideas with genes. In his talk, Paabo described how he and…

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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,…

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For many years, philosophers have been casting doubt on the common identification with meaning and signification as the primary human response mechanisms to the world. If we wish to understand…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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What will the digital world look like in ten years?  The trends are already clear. Capacities in bandwidth and storage will continue on their exponential path.  The explosion in the…

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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…

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 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…

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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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Interview with Nick Bostrom Our long track record of survival–humans have been around for about 100,000 years–gives us some assurance that the natural risks have been rather small. If they…

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Visitors enter the dark, gargantuan room and take up postures of reverence in front of a massive screen, which towers 40 feet above them. They take off their shoes at…

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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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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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Failure and malfunction are inherent in all technological products. In The Art of the Accident, the concept of “accident” contains not just the idea that each machine brings with it…

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Mr. James Winters at A Replicated Typo pointed me to a short hypothesis paper, Neanderthal-human Hybrids. This paper argues that selective mating of Neandertal males with females of human populations which…

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I admit it. I'm a junkie for animated gifs. The animated gif has a deservedly mixed reputation. It's a vestige of the early web, a grainy reminder of badly animated…

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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,…