MachineMachine /stream - imported from 3quarksdaily.writing http://machinemachine.net/stream/feed en-us http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Sweetcron text@machinemachine.net Avatar: We're Not in Kansas Anymore! http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2010/02/avatar-were-not-in-kansas-anymore.html

by Daniel Rourke

3D! According to the film industry, to director James 'billions at the box-office' Cameron, Avatar is the first 'true' 3D movie. It takes the experience of cinema to the next (natural?) level, and it does it in a way that makes the movie industry gasp. According to the industry, Avatar is the 3D film that other film makers will be watching for years to come; Avatar is the Citizen Kane of 3D cinema.

It is at this point that I could repudiate this position,…

]]> Sun, 21 Feb 2010 22:25:00 -0700 http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2010/02/avatar-were-not-in-kansas-anymore.html On Seeing (an Imitation) http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2010/01/on-seeing-an-imitation.html

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

Enlarged pupil (an eye with iritis)
As the day drew closer to its end so I strained…
]]> Sun, 24 Jan 2010 22:04:00 -0700 http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2010/01/on-seeing-an-imitation.html The Work of the Moving Image in the Age of its Digital Corruptibility http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2009/12/the-work-of-the-moving-image-in-the-age-of-its-digital-corruptibility.html

by Daniel Rourke

"The cinema can, with impunity, bring us closer to things or take us away from them and revolve around them, it suppresses both the anchoring of the subject and the horizon of the world... It is not the same as the other arts, which aim rather at something unreal or a tal. With cinema, it is the world which becomes its own image, and not an image which becomes world."

Giles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement Image

Take 12 images and splice them end to…

]]> Sun, 27 Dec 2009 22:06:00 -0700 http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2009/12/the-work-of-the-moving-image-in-the-age-of-its-digital-corruptibility.html Mapping The Cracks: Thinking Subjects as Book Objects http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2009/11/mapping-the-cracks-part-two.html

In Part One of this article I wrote about the instability of the art-object. How its meaning moves, and inevitably cracks. In this follow-up I ponder text, the book, page and computer screen. Are they as stable as they appear? And how can we set them in motion?

Part Two

"There’s a way, it seems to me, that reality’s fractured right now, at least the reality that I live in. And the difficulty about... writing about that reality is that text is very linear and it’s very unified, and... I, anyway, am constantly on the lookout for…

]]> Sun, 01 Nov 2009 22:02:00 -0700 http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2009/11/mapping-the-cracks-part-two.html Mapping the Cracks: Art-Objects in Motion http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2009/10/mapping-the-cracks-part-i.html

Part One

by Daniel Rourke

"The spacetime of the lightcones and the fermions and scalar are connected to the chocolate grinder. The chocolate grinder receives octonionic structure from the water wheel."

- Tony Smith, Valdosta Museum Website

The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, EvenIn 1927 Marcel Duchamp's The Large Glass was broken in transit. The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, Duchamp's title for the piece, depicts a mechanical Bride in its upper…

]]> Sun, 04 Oct 2009 21:04:00 -0700 http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2009/10/mapping-the-cracks-part-i.html On Being in Japan and Elsewhere http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2009/09/on-being-in-japan-and-elsewhere.html

by Daniel Rourke

Japan. That's where I am. With the rice-triangles and the tatami-mats and row upon row of vending machines. In a country where serving others is paramount, and where holidays are something that other people do, I find myself being served - on holiday... I am the ultimate gaijin 1 and every ticket I buy and photo I take seems to confirm this. I came to see Japan. But now I realise that the culture of seeing has been commodified into an experience in itself, and perhaps not an…

]]> Sun, 06 Sep 2009 21:05:00 -0700 http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2009/09/on-being-in-japan-and-elsewhere.html The Tinkerer http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2009/08/the-tinkerer.html

This is an extract from a work in progress... a short story, perhaps. Let me know what you Think.

Tinkering with his iron fragments the stooping figure beads in sweat so as this heat won’t extinguish him. Seven steps astride him pink-lipped petals set the wind a moving; seeds at depth force Earth versus its sky; a honey coloured beetle arranges its deathbed, a future in revolt against the flowers. These meadows offer little for the tinkerer, since not a war’s been fought amongst them for such an age as all that’s left is ruby rust. Still, he cricks…

]]> Sun, 09 Aug 2009 21:10:00 -0700 http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2009/08/the-tinkerer.html Desire Paths: Reading, Memory and Inscription http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2009/07/desire-paths-reading-memory-and-inscription.html

by Daniel Rourke

This article is an edifice, a mockery of the freedom needed to create it. It is rigid, it is linear. Its sentences end only to lead onwards to the next, pulling the reader's eye through a series of limited, and limiting pathways. And yet, reading does not have to be this way. In the process of writing this article little time was spent laying out the path of words you now follow to their conclusion. The process of writing is non-linear, perhaps more like a network of ideas spanning out from nodes…

]]> Sun, 12 Jul 2009 22:35:00 -0700 http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2009/07/desire-paths-reading-memory-and-inscription.html I discovered the ants http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2009/06/i-discovered-the-ants.html

by Daniel Rourke

I discovered the ants

I discovered the ants trailing like gunpowder across my kitchen floor. Before I had time to think I had vacuumed up a thousand. Yet they kept coming, tending to resurge where last I had punished them; coursing like a rainless cloud on the exact same trajectory each time.

Somewhere unseen to me a billowing sack of protoplasm with the head of a Queen was giving birth to its hundredth clone of the day. But unlike its brethren…

]]> Sun, 14 Jun 2009 23:22:00 -0700 http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2009/06/i-discovered-the-ants.html A Bomb Won't Go Off Here http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2009/05/a-bomb-wont-go-off-here.html

by Daniel Rourke

 
A bomb won't go off here... (Click to enlarge)

Y: I like the use of the past tense. Saying “weeks before” sets up the seen* as a narrative.

X: Oh yeah.

Y: It’s almost like the story’s not ended, like we now are still part of the story.

X: And that there’s people there all the time.

Y: That they are always on this street.

X: Yeah, in that little square. And they’ve always all got long,…

]]> Sun, 17 May 2009 21:15:00 -0700 http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2009/05/a-bomb-wont-go-off-here.html The Next Great Discontinuity: The Data Deluge http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2009/04/the-next-great-discontinuity-part-two.html In only a handful of years the human has gone from merely dipping into the database to becoming an active component in a human-cloud of data. The interface has begun to reflect back upon us, turning each of us into a node in a vast database bigger than any previous material object. Gone are the days when clusters of galaxies had to a catalogued by an expert and entered into a linear taxonomy. Now, the same job is done by the crowd and the interface, allowing a million galaxies to be catalogued by amateurs in the same time it would… ]]> Mon, 20 Apr 2009 03:11:00 -0700 http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2009/04/the-next-great-discontinuity-part-two.html The Next Great Discontinuity: Grapholectic Thought and the Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2009/03/the-next-great-discontinuity-part-one.html Of course my mini-history of scientific revolution should not be taken itself as a “truth”. I draw it as a parable of progress, as one silken thread leading back through time’s circular labyrinth to my very own Ariadne. What I do maintain though, is that all great moves in human thought have come at the expense of a perceptual circle. That, if science, sociology, economics - or any modern system of knowledge - is to move beyond the constraints of its circle it must first decentre the “single eye”. ]]> Mon, 23 Mar 2009 02:38:00 -0700 http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2009/03/the-next-great-discontinuity-part-one.html Writing (Hyper)text and Image http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2009/02/writing-hypertext-and-image-a-polyptychal-discursion.html A Polyptychal Discursion: This text, designed with its own concerns in mind, diverges on many trajectories, crossing over itself, intersecting its arguments and statements with images and forms which question the traditional logic of the essay. This text will become enabled not through a writer's statements, but through a reader's response. A spiral of concepts ruptures the words, burrowing underneath the palimpsest, pulling you, the reader, into the written phrase. Response is required of any reading. The internet is a form capable of allowing a reader's response to influence the writer's trajectory; to send the written back into itself, melding… ]]> Mon, 23 Feb 2009 08:07:00 -0700 http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2009/02/writing-hypertext-and-image-a-polyptychal-discursion.html Obama's Address to the State of Non-belief http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2009/01/obamas-address-to-the-state-of-nonbelief.html As a British citizen I watched the inauguration speech of America's 44th President with a warm but distanced interest. But as someone who was brought up in a non-religious family, and has thrived without any belief in a deity, I listened to Barack Obama's words with fascination, concern and hope. Obama's message to his nation and the greater world was one of inclusion. A broad ranging speech during which America's new leader threw his arms wide around those who believe in America, and even wider around those who perhaps do not ]]> Mon, 26 Jan 2009 00:52:00 -0700 http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2009/01/obamas-address-to-the-state-of-nonbelief.html In Another city another me is writing http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2008/12/in_another_city_another_me_is_writing.html Take this article, for example. It is an unwinding spring of phonic sounds, encoded into a series of arbitrary symbols, stretching from left to right within an imaginary frame projected onto the surface of your computer screen. Here lies the perfect example of an artefact with intention behind it. A series of artefacts in fact, positioned by my mind and placed within a certain context (i.e. 3QD: a fascinating and widely read blog). As a collection, as an article, its intention is easy to distinguish. I wanted to say something, so I wrote an article, which I hoped would be… ]]> Mon, 29 Dec 2008 11:52:00 -0700 http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2008/12/in_another_city_another_me_is_writing.html