MachineMachine /stream

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Dry, dusty and shortly to be dead. Palaeographers are used to making sense of fragments of ancient manuscripts, but King's College London couldn't have been plainer when it announced recently…

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We can’t stop talking about Jonathan Lethem’s essay in this month’s Harper’s. If you haven’t read it, you really should. Nothing that follows in this post will be nearly as…

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When one plays most videogames there is a tacit understanding that one is entering into a fictional world – the term virtual world, is often deployed to mean exactly this.…

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If the planet needs us to speed up information, and slow down matter, what does this mean for the complex relationship between information and nature? There is a growing awareness…

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...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…

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Writer Dave Eggers’ publishing house, McSweeney’s, recently released a one-off newspaper called Panorama. The 328-page paper was meant as a celebration of the print form and a demonstration of why…

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Traditionally, publishers have sold books to stores, with the wholesale price for hardcovers set at fifty per cent of the cover price. Authors are paid royalties at a rate of…

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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…

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"'To read what was never written.' Such reading is the most ancient: reading before all languages, from the entrails, the stars, or dances. Later the mediating link of a new…

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A surreal webgame, littered with explosive potentialities. Help the arrow escape influential pages from historical art movements.

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In the summer of 1899, whilst alone in his Colorado Springs laboratory working with his magnifying transmitter, the inimitable Nikola Tesla observed a series of unusual rhythmic signals which he…

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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…

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It’s not too often that legacy media learns a new mass communication tool along with its audience. But that’s exactly what’s going on now because of Google Wave. Although it’s…

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The Known Unknowns is a scheduled cycle of continuous readings running parallel to Volatile Dispersal: Festival of Art Writing, an evening organised by Maria Fusco and Book Works at Whitechapel…

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Another binary myth fundamental to Western culture is the eternally popular hubris/nemesis complex. According to this idea, those who transgress against the natural order always get their just desserts. Hubris…

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A twitter user who logs and archives every key he presses on his computer keyboard: 39doc↵of↵↓↵↓↵↓↵ar↓↵it was runningoh ok↵this morning the code i was writing↵last night i mentioned it was…

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In all the traditional approaches to pedagogy, both in art and in literacy, the possibility of perceiving the transitional nature of the space produced by text or image—the common space…

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Dresden Codak's handy comic-chart of '42 Essential Third-Act Twists' for writers.

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Tickets £25/£20 (two day) £15/£10 (one day) Available from the Gallery Lobby Desk or Ticketweb: 08444 77 1000 www.ticketweb.co.uk The Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2009 is an open-air structure, so please…

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In his article, Heidegger explains the essence of art in terms of the concepts of being and truth. He argues that art is not only a way of expressing the…

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After author David Foster Wallace committed suicide last September, his longtime agent, Bonnie Nadell, found herself lost in a maze of words. Scattered on two different computers and in hard…

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By now the arguments are familiar: Facebook is ruining our social relationships; Google is making us dumber; texting is destroying the English language as we know it. We're facing a…