theory items › MachineMachine /stream

Twitter Links Speculative Realism Pathfinder

Speculative Realism reading list

January 19 2012, 3:50am | Comments

The Internet may well have its downsides, but it also has the potential to make us collectively smarter, according to open-science advocate Michael Nielsen. In Reinventing Discovery: The New Era…

January 13 2012, 3:41am | Comments

Link Lars von Trier’s “Melancholia”: A Discussion

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…

January 11 2012, 6:07am | Comments

Link It’s Only Humanist

To me it tastes like a desire to locate man’s place in a world that he perceives primarily with the aid of machines. The art of the Greeks has been…

January 4 2012, 10:16am | Comments

Link Meaning/time=? [e-flux on Coked-Out, Motherless Robots]

Are we moving too fast for meaning? That’s the argument put together by Franco Berardi in his essay Time, Acceleration, and Violence, published on e-flux. It’s the latest in an…

September 29 2011, 7:29am | Comments

Metafilter Crusoe film adaptations and *that* footprint Robinson Crusoe film adaptations. Which are the best ones? Also, that footprint... For a project I am working on, I want to isolate the moment in Robinson Crusoe…

September 29 2011, 5:31am | Comments

Link “Seriality for All”: The Role of Protocols and…

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…

September 24 2011, 4:36pm | Comments

Link How Can We Understand Code as a "Critical…

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…

September 21 2011, 4:23am | Comments

Link How Can We Understand Code as a "Critical…

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…

September 20 2011, 10:26am | Comments

Twitter Links Slavoj Zizek - How to Read Lacan - Troubles with the Real: Lacan as a Viewer…

Slavoj Zizek on how to read Lacan (hint: watch #Alien and #TheThing) : http://t.co/m8CjaBV #horror #SciFi #theory #cinema #x

September 12 2011, 11:32am | Comments

Link Is New Media Accepted in the Art World?…

Do institutions and galleries have a growing interest in New Media? Two weeks ago, I identified the art “internet bubble” at The L Magazine, a trend that’s currently giving new…

September 12 2011, 12:22am | Comments

Link The Battle Over Zomia

Over the past two millennia, "runaway" communities have put the "friction of terrain" between themselves and the people who remained in the lowlands, he writes. The highland groups adopted a…

September 5 2011, 5:20am | Comments

Twitter Links How to Read Lacan - Troubles with the Real: Lacan as a Viewer of Alien

by Slavoj Zizek For any avid cinema-goer, it is difficult to avoid the feeling that he has already seen all this. Lacan's description not…

September 5 2011, 12:41am | Comments

Link Is New Media Accepted in the Art World?…

Do institutions and galleries have a growing interest in New Media? Two weeks ago, I identified the art “internet bubble” at The L Magazine, a trend that’s currently giving new…

September 2 2011, 3:07pm | Comments

Twitter Links Contemporary art does not account for that which is taking place

Liam Gillick at e_flux Contemporary art does not account for that which is taking place

September 1 2011, 1:00am | Comments

Biblio The Logic of Life by Francois Jacob

August 31 2011, 7:31am | Comments

Link Death Is Not the End (Long Live theory!)

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…

August 30 2011, 9:08am | Comments

Twitter Links Book review - Media, New Media, Postmedia - we make money not art

Media, New Media, Postmedia - mapping the postmedia perspective : http://j.mp/nX8rlH Book #Review #Postmedia #digital #art #theory #x

August 30 2011, 2:58am | Comments

Twitter Links Media, New Media, Postmedia

Mapping the postmedia perspective Book #Review #Postmedia #digital #art #theory

August 30 2011, 2:58am | Comments

Link Death Is Not the End (Long Live theory!)

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…

August 18 2011, 1:48am | Comments

Link Humanism / After Humanism

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…

August 11 2011, 11:30am | Comments

Tumblr (Quote) Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community

“The novelty of the coming politics is that it will no longer be a struggle for the conquest or control of the State, but a struggle between the State and the non-state (humanity), an insurmountable disjunction between whatever…

August 9 2011, 4:27pm | Comments

Tumblr (Quote) Michel Serres, The Natural Contract

“Suppose two speakers, determined to contradict each other. As violent as their confrontation may be, as long as they are willing to continue the discussion they must speak a common language in order for the dialogue to take…

August 9 2011, 5:36am | Comments

Link Michel Serres's Milieux

There is a Yiddish expression used in London which always gives me a little jolt of pleasure whenever I hear it. ‘In mitten drinnen’ corresponds to German ‘In mitten darin’,…

August 2 2011, 4:49am | Comments

Link Internet Activist Aaron Swartz Indicted for Data Theft:…

For a long time, it was the folks who downloaded music or movies illegally that faced the wrath of government prosecutors. So the unsealing of an indictment today against Aaron…

July 20 2011, 4:10am | Comments

Link In Free Fall: A Thought Experiment on Vertical…

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…

July 19 2011, 2:49am | Comments

Link The Neolithic Age is over!

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,…

July 12 2011, 1:36am | Comments

Link Michel Serres on the word 'human'

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…

July 6 2011, 3:15pm | Comments

Link Knowledge, not the way you knew it

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…

June 28 2011, 4:11pm | Comments

Link How Catholicism made Marshall McLuhan one of the…

APPROPRIATELY ENOUGH, a century after his birth in 1911, Marshall McLuhan has found a second life on the Internet. YouTube and other sites are a rich repository of McLuhan interviews,…

June 20 2011, 9:16am | Comments

Link Inside the Box: Notes From Within the European…

The debate over artistic research, particularly its appeal to scientificity, often rests on defining one’s terms. Thus, an examination of some of the keywords deployed might be instructive, especially when…

June 16 2011, 3:13am | Comments

Link Post-Artifact Books and Publishing

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.…

June 15 2011, 8:50am | Comments

Miscellanous Projects Digital Autonomy

June 11 2011, 4:02am | Comments

Link Reading revolutions: Online digital text and implications for…

While the Internet is a text-saturated world, reading online screens tends to be significantly different from reading printed text. This review essay examines literature from a variety of disciplines on…

June 6 2011, 1:36pm | Comments

Link Georges Bataille Electronic Library

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…

June 1 2011, 4:18pm | Comments

Portfolio The Doctrine of the Similar (GIF GIF GIF)

May 25 2011, 5:21am | Comments

Metafilter GIF Archaeology I'm writing a paper on (animated) GIFs and am trying to track down some of the most (in)famous. I suppose I am talking memes, but I'm more interested…

May 16 2011, 8:17am | Comments

Link The Art of the Accident : Institute for…

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…

May 15 2011, 6:04am | Comments