MachineMachine /stream

Code is Law

Sun, 07 Feb 2010 10:20:00 -0700

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 the regulation by social norms in nineteenth-century England; his book On Liberty is written against that regulation. Many of the progressives in the twentieth century worried about the injustices of the market. The reforms of the market, and the safety nets that surround it, were erected in response. This regulator is code—the software and hardware that make cyberspace as it is. This code, or architecture, sets the terms on which…

De-constructing 'code' (picking apart its assumptions)

Tue, 02 Feb 2010 07:35:00 -0700

De-constructing 'code': I am looking for philosophical (from W. Benjamin through to post-structuralism and beyond) examinations of 'code'. That both includes the assumptions contained in the word 'code' and any actual objects or subjects that code is connected to - including, but not limited to: computer programming, cyphers, linguistics, genetics etc. I am looking to question the assumptions of 'code'. Perhaps a specific example of a theorist de-constructing the term.

I am currently knee deep in an examination of certain practices and assumptions that have arisen from digital media/medium and digital practice (art and making in the era of…

Drift

Tue, 02 Feb 2010 04:09:00 -0700

I drift, half awake, half asleep. Moving through the city I recall but have never been to.

This film was made using a digital stills camera to create a stop motion animation.

This video is an evolution of an earlier work/technique called Still Moving
vimeo.com/3619284

I think the shot of the Barbican tower is my favourite (its the shot shown in the thumbnail)

Cast: mustardcuffins

Manipulating Reality - How Images Redefine the World

Fri, 29 Jan 2010 17:00:00 -0700

Manipulating Reality presents a selection of 23 artistic approaches that work through photography and video to develop possible models of reality. Its aim is not to understand whether photographs can convey reality but how this can occur. The works exhibited represent different artistic strategies addressing the construction, reflection or distortion of reality in images. In addition to investigating the value of documentary photography today, many of the artists presented reflect in part the conditions of the tool of photography and adopt known artistic techniques such as collage, presentation in model form, abstraction and the assemblage of different elements.

Lunar Archaeology

Fri, 29 Jan 2010 14:33:00 -0700

In a meeting today in Sacramento, commissioners might vote to register items left behind on the moon by Apollo astronauts "as an official State Historical Resource," the L.A. Times reports. After all, "California law allows listing historical resources beyond the state's borders—even if it's more than 238,000 miles away." Some of the 5,000 pounds of stuff Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin abandoned at Tranquility Base was purposeful: a seismic detector to record moonquakes and meteorite impacts; a laser-reflection device to make precise distance measurements between Earth and the moon; a U.S. flag and commemorative plaque. Some was unavoidable: Apollo 11's…

Leonardo da Vinci's Resume

Fri, 29 Jan 2010 14:31:00 -0700

From the Codex Atlanticus, this is a letter that Leonardo da Vinci wrote in 1482 to the Duke of Milan advertising his services as a "skilled contriver of instruments of war". From the translation: 6. I have means by secret and tortuous mines and ways, made without noise, to reach a designated spot, even if it were needed to pass under a trench or a river. So, Leonardo was pretty much Q from the Bond films or Lucius Fox from Batman. But the artist was in there as well...at the bottom of his list, stuck in almost as an afterthought:…

Listen to wiredradio.co.uk tonight at 5pm when much unheard music you shall hear

Fri, 29 Jan 2010 06:28:00 -0700

therourke: Listen to wiredradio.co.uk tonight at 5pm when much unheard music you shall hear

iPad is The Revolutionary #7 Amazing Magical Machine. The Styles Steve say: "iPad is device to identify apps who spend more than before."

Wed, 27 Jan 2010 16:12:00 -0700

therourke: iPad is The Revolutionary #7 Amazing Magical Machine. The Styles Steve say: "iPad is device to identify apps who spend more than before."

For The Love Of Culture

Wed, 27 Jan 2010 15:17:00 -0700

In early 2002, the filmmaker Grace Guggenheim--the daughter of the late Charles Guggenheim, one of America’s greatest documentarians, and the sister of the filmmaker Davis Guggenheim, who made An Inconvenient Truth-decided to do something that might strike most of us as common sense. Her father had directed or produced more than a hundred documentaries. Some of these were quite famous (Nine from Little Rock). Some were well-known even if not known to be by him (Monument to a Dream, the film that plays at the St. Louis arch). Some were forgotten but incredibly important for understanding American history in the…

BBC - The Secret Life of Chaos (2010) (Part 1/6)

Tue, 26 Jan 2010 16:30:00 -0700

Other

Tue, 26 Jan 2010 14:48:00 -0700

The Other or constitutive other (also referred to as othering) is a key concept in continental philosophy, opposed to the Same. It refers, or attempts to refer, to that which is 'other' than the concept being considered. The term often means a person other than oneself, and is often capitalised. The Other is singled out as different.

On Seeing (an Imitation)

Sun, 24 Jan 2010 22:04:00 -0700

by Daniel Rourke

“Mimesis here is not the representation of one thing by another, the relation of resemblance or of identification between two beings, the reproduction of a product of nature by a product of art. It is not the relation of two products but of two productions. And of two freedoms... 'True' mimesis is between two producing subjects and not between two produced things.”

Jacques Derrida, Economimesis

As the day drew closer to its end so I strained…

Philip K. Dick: A 'plastic' paradox

Sun, 24 Jan 2010 18:06:00 -0700

When, one evening in 1976, Philip K. Dick invited Tim Powers to his Fullerton apartment, the Cal State student expected the kind of night he often passed with the science-fiction titan: a wide-ranging conversation, fueled by wine and beer, about religion, philosophy and Beethoven. The night began the usual way. But it took a strange turn as Dick's wife, Tessa, and her brother began grabbing lamps and chairs. "She and her brother were carrying things out of the house," recalls Powers. "I said, 'Phil, they're taking stuff, is this OK?' " " 'Powers, let me give you some advice, in…

/noise on 22nd January 2010 / theme = Brian Eno inspired

Fri, 22 Jan 2010 13:38:00 -0700

Podcast: January 22nd 2010 / theme = Brian Eno inspired

[Audio clip: view full post to listen]

Subscribe: via iTunes

Listen to wiredradio.co.uk tonight at 5pm for a Brian Eno themed / inspired hour of music and nonsense

Fri, 22 Jan 2010 07:08:00 -0700

therourke: Listen to wiredradio.co.uk tonight at 5pm for a Brian Eno themed / inspired hour of music and nonsense

Coriolis effect

Wed, 20 Jan 2010 06:57:00 -0700

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 sides of a spinning roundabout (carousel), who are throwing a ball to each other. From the children's point of view, the ball's path is curved sideways by the Coriolis effect. From the thrower's perspective, the deflection is to the right with anticlockwise carousel rotation (viewed from above). Deflection is to the left with clockwise rotation. Newton's laws of motion govern the motion of an object in an inertial frame of reference. When…

Eric Duyckaerts, Kant (Part 1)

Wed, 20 Jan 2010 06:47:00 -0700

Cast: Argosy

Bonobo chimp plays Pac-Man

Sun, 17 Jan 2010 05:00:00 -0700

Transitzone/ Against an Aesthetics of Noise

Fri, 15 Jan 2010 05:38:00 -0700

Ray Brassier – My stance is not particularly original: it’s indebted to the work of several more genuinely original philosophers. The confluence of their influence in my thinking represents my attempt to address what I see as the fundamental issue facing contemporary philosophy: how does human experience fit into the world described by science? Contemporary philosophers can be sorted into two basic camps: in the first, there are those who want to explain science in terms of human experience; in the second, there are those who want to explain human experience in terms of science. The former argue that science…

The Inner Touch

Fri, 15 Jan 2010 04:57:00 -0700

The Inner Touch by Daniel Heller-Roazen

Recently added as "reference".

Description:Choice Outstanding Academic Title, 2008. and Winner, 2008 Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies.

The Inner Touch presents the archaeology of a single sense: the sense of being sentient. Aristotle was perhaps the first to define this faculty when in his treatise On the Soul he identified a sensory power, irreducible to the five senses, by which animals perceive that they are perceiving: the simple "sense," as he wrote, "that we are seeing and hearing." After him, thinkers returned, time and again, to define and redefine this curious sensation. The classical Greek and Roman philosophers as well as the medieval Arabic, Hebrew, and Latin thinkers who followed them all investigated a power they called "the common sense," which one ancient author likened to "a kind of inner touch, by which we are able to grasp ourselves." Their many findings were not lost with the waning of the Middle Ages. From Montaigne and Francis Bacon to Locke, Leibniz, and Rousseau, from nineteenth-century psychiatry and neurology to Proust and Walter Benjamin, the writers and thinkers of the modern period have turned knowingly and unknowing to the terms of older traditions in exploring the perception that every sensitive being possesses of its life.

The Inner Touch reconstructs and reconsiders the history of this perception. In twenty-five concise chapters that move freely among ancient, medieval, and modern cultures, Daniel Heller-Roazen investigates a set of exemplary phenomena that have played central roles in philosophical, literary, psychological, and medical accounts of the nature of animal existence. Here sensation and self-sensation, sleeping and waking, aesthetics and anesthetics, perception and apperception, animal nature and human nature, consciousness and unconsciousness, all acquire a new meaning.

The Inner Touch proposes an original, elegant, and far-reaching philosophical inquiry into a problem that has never been more pressing: what it means to feel that one is alive.

Distributed for Zone Books

Reader: Daniel Rourke