reference items › MachineMachine /stream

We need to understand what philosophers in the Middle Ages, from Italy to India to China, already understood perfectly well: Money is not a thing, and is certainly not a…

April 5 2011, 1:36am | Comments

Link The Font of the Hand

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…

March 24 2011, 5:23pm | Comments

Link Jacques Ranciere: What Medium Can Mean

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…

March 12 2011, 2:55am | Comments

Link Infinite Glitch.com

Every day an incomprehensible number of new digital media files are uploaded to hosting sites across the internet. Far too many for any one person to consume. Infinite Glitch is…

March 9 2011, 6:50am | Comments

Link The Digital Humanities: Beyond Computing

The field of the digital humanities embraces various scholarly activities in the humanities that involve writing about digital media and technology as well as being engaged in digital media production.…

March 2 2011, 7:36am | Comments

Link The Library in the New Age

Information is exploding so furiously around us and information technology is changing at such bewildering speed that we face a fundamental problem: How to orient ourselves in the new landscape?…

February 16 2011, 8:03am | Comments

Link Open Media (lecture series schedule)

The concept of openness is often employed as part of a radical critique of the closed-off worlds of what might be called ‘traditional media’. It is variously used to urge…

February 16 2011, 7:54am | Comments

Link Modern art was CIA 'weapon'

FOR DECADES in art circles it was either a rumour or a joke, but now it is confirmed as a fact. The Central Intelligence Agency used American modern art -…

November 1 2010, 3:57pm | Comments

Link In Defense of the Poor Image

by Hito Steyerl The poor image is a copy in motion. Its quality is bad, its resolution substandard. As it accelerates, it deteriorates. It is a ghost of an image,…

October 28 2010, 7:27am | Comments

Link The Off-Modern Mirror

by Svetlana Boym Critic and writer Viktor Shklovsky proposes the figure of the knight’s move in chess that follows “the tortured road of the brave,” preferring it to the master-slave…

October 13 2010, 9:49am | Comments

Link The Anthropology of Hackers

A "hacker" is a technologist with a love for computing and a "hack" is a clever technical solution arrived through a non-obvious means. It doesn't mean to compromise the Pentagon,…

October 1 2010, 9:08am | Comments

Link Planet Zoo

Look, I wouldn’t trade the 21st century for any other. We have toilet paper and vitamin-fortified milk and a measles vaccine. We can buy avocados in Fairbanks in January. But…

September 27 2010, 5:15am | Comments

Link …glitches without borders (contd.) « GlitchBlog

[in continuation/response to Rosa’s post responding to Kyle's post responding to Evan's post] Inherent in glitch art is a denial for codification. Attempts to [con/de]fine this phenomenon, which by it’s…

September 11 2010, 5:29am | Comments

Video

June 15 2010, 2:35pm | Comments

Link Small is Beautiful: a discussion with AAAARG architect…

One of my favorite websites is the semi-obscure digital library known as AAAARG (don’t even try googling. You just get pirate-themed sites). The site is a sundry collection of critical…

June 1 2010, 2:08pm | Comments

Findings The Ship Argo

May 9 2010, 12:37pm | Comments

Link Giorgio Agamben - What is a Paradigm -…

...we all make use of paradigms in our work, but do we really know what a paradigm is, and what does it mean to use a paradigm in philosophy, in…

April 30 2010, 6:39am | Comments

Wikipedia Steganography Steganography is the art and science of writing hidden messages in such a way that no one, apart from the sender and intended recipient, suspects the existence of…

April 22 2010, 2:50am | Comments

Link Inside the Mundaneum

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 '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 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 Your Reality is out of Date

These slow-changing facts are what I term “mesofacts.” Mesofacts are the facts that change neither too quickly nor too slowly, that lie in this difficult-to-comprehend middle, or meso-, scale. Often,…

March 5 2010, 6:14am | 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 How Google’s Algorithm Rules the Web

The story of Google’s algorithm begins with PageRank, the system invented in 1997 by cofounder Larry Page while he was a grad student at Stanford. Page’s now legendary insight was…

March 1 2010, 4:56am | 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

Wikipedia Coriolis effect In physics, the Coriolis effect is an apparent deflection of moving objects when they are viewed from a rotating reference frame. For example, consider two children on opposite…

January 20 2010, 6:57am | Comments

Link From Eternity to Here

The arrow of time points in one direction only, from past to present to future. Now there's a fact—rather like Wittgenstein's observation "A is the same thing as A"—that is…

January 12 2010, 3:15am | 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 The cognitive benefits of time-space synaesthesia

SYNAESTHESIA is a neurological condition in which there is a merging of the senses, so that activity in one sensory modality elicits sensations in another. Although first described by Francis…

December 7 2009, 6:11pm | Comments

Wikipedia Profanity The original meaning of the adjective profane (Latin: "in front of", "outside the temple") referred to items not belonging to the church, e.g. "The fort is the oldest…

November 30 2009, 8:12am | Comments

Link How we read: an investigation

A classical, although often implicit, view in social science is that the human brain, unlike that of other animals, is a learning machine which can adapt to essentially any novel…

November 23 2009, 8:55am | Comments

Link The Library in the New Age

Information is exploding so furiously around us and information technology is changing at such bewildering speed that we face a fundamental problem: How to orient ourselves in the new landscape?…

October 31 2009, 5:19am | Comments

Wikipedia Postliterate Society A postliterate society is a hypothetical society wherein multimedia technology has advanced to the point where literacy, the ability to read written words, is no longer necessary. Many…

August 6 2009, 1:34pm | Comments

Link From Book to Anti-Book

by Harry Polkinhorn - To arrive at a theoretical understanding of artists' books, it is perhaps best to begin, as Richard Kostelanetz points out in his essay entitled "Book Art,"…

July 7 2009, 9:25am | Comments

Link Michel Serres's Milieux

Mediation means that which stands, comes or moves between things otherwise separated or opposed. Serres’s work has never ceased to meditate upon mediation in every possible sense: as arbitration; moderation;…

June 23 2009, 2:38pm | Comments

Link Luis Camnitzer: Art and Literacy | Journal /…

[T]his theory—that if one wants to be able to write something, one should know how it is written—has some logic to it. It forces one first to read, then to…

March 23 2009, 4:00pm | Comments

Link wikipedia before wikipedia | if:book

I've been reading Tom McArthur's Worlds of Reference: lexicography, learning and language from the clay tablet to the computer, a history of dictionaries, encyclopedias and reference materials published in 1986.…

March 13 2009, 5:48am | Comments

Link Immaterial Labour in the Digital Economy | Eleni…

The Internet, arguably the most influential digital medium, has sparked an explosion of debate throughout recent years, regarding its economic, political and social status; a space where its structure is…

March 13 2009, 5:45am | Comments

Link Fallacy of misplaced concreteness | Wikipedia

In the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, one commits the fallacy of misplaced concreteness when one mistakes an abstract belief, opinion or concept about the way things are for a…

March 12 2009, 6:08pm | Comments

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