MachineMachine /stream - tagged with archive https://machinemachine.net/stream/feed en-us http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss LifePress therourke@gmail.com <![CDATA[This artist claims you can torrent a blockchain’s worth of NFTs - The Verge]]> https://www.theverge.com/2021/11/18/22790131/nft-bay-pirating-digital-ownership-piracy-crypto-art-right-click

In what may be one of the better pieces of performance art this year, Australian Geoffrey Huntley has created a website that promises to let you torrent an entire blockchain’s worth of NFTs.

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Thu, 25 Nov 2021 01:51:35 -0800 https://www.theverge.com/2021/11/18/22790131/nft-bay-pirating-digital-ownership-piracy-crypto-art-right-click
<![CDATA[Please Stop Calling Things Archives | Perspectives on History | AHA]]> https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/january-2021/please-stop-calling-things-archives-an-archivists-plea

Various disciplinary “archival turns” over the course of the past few decades have resulted in a tendency towards the over-casual use of the word “archive” as a shorthand to refer to, well, just about anything.

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Wed, 31 Mar 2021 07:56:06 -0700 https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/january-2021/please-stop-calling-things-archives-an-archivists-plea
<![CDATA[Collecting in the Age of Digital Reproduction - Casey REAS - Medium]]> https://medium.com/@REAS/collecting-in-the-age-of-digital-reproduction-ab0640a42fe6

In the art market, almost everything sold is an object such as a drawing, a painting, a sculpture, an installation, or a photograph, but there are some exceptions. These deviations may include a contract, a set of instructions, a digital video file, or a software file.

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Wed, 11 Sep 2019 04:28:29 -0700 https://medium.com/@REAS/collecting-in-the-age-of-digital-reproduction-ab0640a42fe6
<![CDATA[This Professor Has Documented 2,000 Soda Machines in Video Games - Waypoint]]> https://waypoint.vice.com/en_us/article/ywq9pm/soda-machines-videogames

In 2016, Marshall University professor Jason Morrissette was playing Batman: Arkham Knight. While sneaking around the shadows, Morrissette stumbled upon a soda machine. Like many games, Akrham Knight doesn’t feature any real-life soda products; that’d cost money.

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Tue, 13 Mar 2018 08:02:45 -0700 https://waypoint.vice.com/en_us/article/ywq9pm/soda-machines-videogames
<![CDATA[On Material Entanglements: an Interview with Morehshin Allahyari]]> http://additivism.org/post/154581978099

On Material Entanglements: an Interview with Morehshin Allahyari Although we both live in the bay area, I got to Morehshin Allahyari’s work through an internet rabbit hole. Some months ago I picked up ‘Cyclonopedia’ by Reza Negarestani and got pretty engrossed by the book’s mix of fact and fiction. The story suggests that petrol functions as a lubricant necessary to spread an ancient evil throughout the world eventually leading into what he calls a desertification of the earth. a place where all will be flattened and ready for some sort of re-boot.

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Sat, 17 Dec 2016 00:52:10 -0800 http://additivism.org/post/154581978099
<![CDATA[There's Now a Search Engine for Every Animated GIF From GeoCities | Motherboard]]> http://motherboard.vice.com/read/theres-now-a-search-engine-for-every-animated-gif-from-geocities

Remember the good old days™? When Bill Clinton was President, when average monthly rent was around $645, and when Yahoo’s acquisition of GeoCities shot the dream of personal websites into the stratosphere? What a simpler, kinder time.

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Thu, 27 Oct 2016 12:48:08 -0700 http://motherboard.vice.com/read/theres-now-a-search-engine-for-every-animated-gif-from-geocities
<![CDATA[Google's Cultural Institute is making art and museums searchable for everyone | WIRED UK]]> http://www.wired.co.uk/article/google-cultural-institute-art-museums ]]> Sun, 17 Jul 2016 04:33:04 -0700 http://www.wired.co.uk/article/google-cultural-institute-art-museums <![CDATA[What’s the Value of Recreating the Palmyra Arch with Digital...]]> http://additivism.org/post/143110811665

What’s the Value of Recreating the Palmyra Arch with Digital Technology?Seven months after ISIS destroyed Palmyra’s 1,800-year-old Arch of Triumph, the structure has risen once more — but this time 2,800 miles away from the ancient city, in London’s bustling Trafalgar Square.

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Wed, 20 Apr 2016 05:51:49 -0700 http://additivism.org/post/143110811665
<![CDATA[In the Name of Humanity | Limn]]> http://limn.it/in-the-name-of-humanity/

The total archive is already here, Balázs Bodó finds it hidden in the shadows and run by pirates. As I write this in August 2015, we are in the middle of one of the worst refugee crises in modern Western history.

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Sun, 06 Mar 2016 07:20:02 -0800 http://limn.it/in-the-name-of-humanity/
<![CDATA[In Acts of Resistance, Artists and Scholars Digitally...]]> http://additivism.org/post/138179286271

In Acts of Resistance, Artists and Scholars Digitally Reconstruct the Past In the past year alone, members of ISIS have marred cultural treasures in Iraq and Syria, taking sledgehammers and drills to statues at the Mosul Museum and delivering numerous blows to the ancient site of Palmyra, including its 1,800-year-old Arch of Triumph.

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Wed, 27 Jan 2016 15:40:00 -0800 http://additivism.org/post/138179286271
<![CDATA[The Fine Art of Forgery - The Atlantic]]> http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/07/art-forgery/395282/

In the radiant blue chamber of the ZPrinter 850, a skull is born. An ink-jet arm moves across a bed of gypsum powder, depositing a layer of liquid that binds the powder together in the shape of a cranial cross-section.

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Mon, 29 Jun 2015 04:46:34 -0700 http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/07/art-forgery/395282/
<![CDATA[Ways of Something - Episode 2]]> http://vimeo.com/119877012

Minute #1. Kevin Heckart Minute #2. Geraldine Juárez Minute #3. Gaby Cepeda Minute #4. Angela Washko Minute #5. Emilie Gervais Minute #6. LaTurbo Avedon Minute #7. Lyla Rye Minute #8. Mattie Hillock Minute #9. Antonio Roberts Minute #10. Georges Jacotey Minute #11. Daniel Rourke Minute #12. Sandra Rechico & Annie Onyi Cheung Minute #13. Yoshi Sodeoka Minute #14. Alma Alloro Minute #15. LoVid Minute #16. Andrea Crespo Minute #17. Ad Minoliti Minute #18. Arjun Ram Srivatsa Minute #19. Carrie Gates Minute #20. Isabella Streffen Minute #21. Esteban Ottaso Minute #22. Silke Zil Kuhar ZIL & ZOY Minute #23. Hyo Myoung Kim Minute #24. Jesse Darling Minute #25. Tristan Stevens Minute #26. Erica Lapadat-Janzen Minute #27. Claudia Hart Minute #28. Anthony AntonellisCast: Lorna MillsTags:

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Wed, 18 Feb 2015 12:01:39 -0800 http://vimeo.com/119877012
<![CDATA[All the Voyager Golden Record Images]]> http://sploid.gizmodo.com/this-awesome-image-may-be-found-by-aliens-one-day-along-1542854215

You're looking at alpinist Gaston Rébuffat standing proud on the Aiguille de Roc, a striking needle rock in the Alps, near Chamonix, France. It's an outstanding image—one that aliens from another solar system or galaxy may see one day.

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Thu, 13 Mar 2014 09:57:34 -0700 http://sploid.gizmodo.com/this-awesome-image-may-be-found-by-aliens-one-day-along-1542854215
<![CDATA[Google and the World Brain » thought maybe]]> http://thoughtmaybe.com/google-and-the-world-brain/

Google and the World Brain » thought maybe http://t.co/GseWFyA1Lt – Michel Bauwens (mbauwens) http://twitter.com/mbauwens/status/441202012756410368

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Wed, 05 Mar 2014 05:49:41 -0800 http://thoughtmaybe.com/google-and-the-world-brain/
<![CDATA[Google’s Earth]]> http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/01/opinion/01gibson.html?_r=1&

“I ACTUALLY think most people don’t want Google to answer their questions,” said the search giant’s chief executive, Eric Schmidt, in a recent and controversial interview. “They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next.” Do we really desire Google to tell us what we should be doing next? I believe that we do, though with some rather complicated qualifiers.

Science fiction never imagined Google, but it certainly imagined computers that would advise us what to do. HAL 9000, in “2001: A Space Odyssey,” will forever come to mind, his advice, we assume, eminently reliable — before his malfunction. But HAL was a discrete entity, a genie in a bottle, something we imagined owning or being assigned. Google is a distributed entity, a two-way membrane, a game-changing tool on the order of the equally handy flint hand ax, with which we chop our way through the very densest thickets of information. Google is all of those things, and a very large and powerful corporation to boot.

We have yet to take Google’s measure. We’ve seen nothing like it before, and we already perceive much of our world through it. We would all very much like to be sagely and reliably advised by our own private genie; we would like the genie to make the world more transparent, more easily navigable. Google does that for us: it makes everything in the world accessible to everyone, and everyone accessible to the world. But we see everyone looking in, and blame Google.

Google is not ours. Which feels confusing, because we are its unpaid content-providers, in one way or another. We generate product for Google, our every search a minuscule contribution. Google is made of us, a sort of coral reef of human minds and their products. And still we balk at Mr. Schmidt’s claim that we want Google to tell us what to do next. Is he saying that when we search for dinner recommendations, Google might recommend a movie instead? If our genie recommended the movie, I imagine we’d go, intrigued. If Google did that, I imagine, we’d bridle, then begin our next search.

We never imagined that artificial intelligence would be like this. We imagined discrete entities. Genies. We also seldom imagined (in spite of ample evidence) that emergent technologies would leave legislation in the dust, yet they do. In a world characterized by technologically driven change, we necessarily legislate after the fact, perpetually scrambling to catch up, while the core architectures of the future, increasingly, are erected by entities like Google.

Cyberspace, not so long ago, was a specific elsewhere, one we visited periodically, peering into it from the familiar physical world. Now cyberspace has everted. Turned itself inside out. Colonized the physical. Making Google a central and evolving structural unit not only of the architecture of cyberspace, but of the world. This is the sort of thing that empires and nation-states did, before. But empires and nation-states weren’t organs of global human perception. They had their many eyes, certainly, but they didn’t constitute a single multiplex eye for the entire human species.

Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon prison design is a perennial metaphor in discussions of digital surveillance and data mining, but it doesn’t really suit an entity like Google. Bentham’s all-seeing eye looks down from a central viewpoint, the gaze of a Victorian warder. In Google, we are at once the surveilled and the individual retinal cells of the surveillant, however many millions of us, constantly if unconsciously participatory. We are part of a post-geographical, post-national super-state, one that handily says no to China. Or yes, depending on profit considerations and strategy. But we do not participate in Google on that level. We’re citizens, but without rights.

Much of the discussion of Mr. Schmidt’s interview centered on another comment: his suggestion that young people who catastrophically expose their private lives via social networking sites might need to be granted a name change and a fresh identity as adults. This, interestingly, is a matter of Google letting societal chips fall where they may, to be tidied by lawmakers and legislation as best they can, while the erection of new world architecture continues apace.

If Google were sufficiently concerned about this, perhaps the company should issue children with free “training wheels” identities at birth, terminating at the age of majority. One could then either opt to connect one’s adult identity to one’s childhood identity, or not. Childhoodlessness, being obviously suspect on a résumé, would give birth to an industry providing faux adolescences, expensively retro-inserted, the creation of which would gainfully employ a great many writers of fiction. So there would be a silver lining of sorts.

To be sure, I don’t find this a very realistic idea, however much the prospect of millions of people living out their lives in individual witness protection programs, prisoners of their own youthful folly, appeals to my novelistic Kafka glands. Nor do I take much comfort in the thought that Google itself would have to be trusted never to link one’s sober adulthood to one’s wild youth, which surely the search engine, wielding as yet unimagined tools of transparency, eventually could and would do.

I imagine that those who are indiscreet on the Web will continue to have to make the best of it, while sharper cookies, pocketing nyms and proxy cascades (as sharper cookies already do), slouch toward an ever more Googleable future, one in which Google, to some even greater extent than it does now, helps us decide what we’ll do next.

William Gibson is the author of the forthcoming novel “Zero History.”

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Sat, 09 Nov 2013 04:02:33 -0800 http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/01/opinion/01gibson.html?_r=1&
<![CDATA[All Can Be Lost: The Risk of Putting Our Knowledge in the Hands of Machines]]> http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/11/the-great-forgetting/309516/

We rely on computers to fly our planes, find our cancers, design our buildings, audit our businesses. That's all well and good.

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Sat, 09 Nov 2013 04:02:18 -0800 http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/11/the-great-forgetting/309516/
<![CDATA[The Impulse of the Geocities Archive: One Terabyte Of Kilobyte Age]]> http://www.furtherfield.org/features/impulse-geocities-archive-one-terabyte-kilobyte-age

I visited the Photographers’ Gallery in central London for Furtherfield, and reviewed their latest exhibit One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age by artists Olia Lialina and Dragan Espenschied, on THE WALL. Over an eight week period (18 April – 17 June 2013) they feature a non-stop stream of video captures of what they term as the lost city and its archival ruins. A documentation of a past visual culture of the web and the creativity of its users with new pages changing every 5 minutes. The project provides a glimpse into web publishing when users were in charge of design and narration in contrast to the automated templates of Facebook, YouTube and Flickr. Sifting through a dormant internet message board, or stumbling, awestruck, on a kippleised [1] html homepage, its GIF constellations still twinkling many years after the owner has abandoned them, is an encounter with the living, breathing World Wide Web. At such moments we are led, so argues Marisa Olson, ‘to consider the relationship between taxonomy à la the stuffed-pet metaphor and taxonomy à la the digital archive.’ [2] How such descript images, contrived jumbles of memory and experience, could once have felt so essential to the person who collated them, yet now seem so indecipherable, stagnant, even – dare we admit it – insane to anyone but the most hardened retro-web enthusiast. On show at London’s Photographers gallery until June 17th is an extensive archival exhibit designed to manage, reveal and keep these experiences alive. One Terabyte Of Kilobyte Age (1tb) is the fifth work to be commissioned for the Photographer Gallery’s ‘The Wall’, curated by two artists long associated with the era of the web the exhibition reveres: Olia Lialina and Dragan Espenschied. Perhaps best known for their book Digital Folklore (2009) the artists and retro-web evangelists have, with the 1tb project, strengthened their status as archivists, an impulse Hal Foster famously argued ‘concerned less with absolute origins than with obscure traces’ [3]. In the same year that Dragan and Olia launched their guide to the folk web, Yahoo! announced they were to close one of its greatest sources of inspiration: Geocities. A vast expanse of personal webpages, many of which had long since slid into html decrepitude, represented for Yahoo! little but financial embarrassment. So ancient and outmoded was Geocities that many contemporary browsers were incapable of capturing its essence, fragmenting images and link rolls randomly across modern laptop screens in an attempt to render their 800×600 pixel aura. Scraping and downloading the terabyte or so of data that made up the Geocities universe was thought important enough by some that a taskforce was put together, made up of technical wizards and wizardesses driven by the profound notion that all existent culture is worth saving. From Olia and Dragan’s webpage: In between the announcement and the official date of death a group of people calling themselves Archive Team — managed to rescue almost a terabyte of Geocities pages. On the 26th of October 2010, the first anniversary of this Digital Holocaust, the Archive Team started to seed geocities.archiveteam.torrent.

Olia and Dragan’s gesture, to feed the wealth of culture contained in that torrent back to the masses in a palatable form, is a project whose fruition at the Photographer’s Gallery is but a minor part. After downloading, storing and sorting the 16,000 archived Geocities sites the task of exactly how to display them is a problem. Since most browsers would mangle the look and feel of the Geocities pages Olia and Dragan have turned to two main methods of re-representation. The first, let loose on an automated Tumblr blog that updates over 70 times a day, is an ever growing series of front-page screen captures. In this form 1tb bends to the will of a contemporary web user who concerns themselves with likes, reposts and uplinks. Reflecting on the Tumblr-archive of the torrent-archive of the Geocities-archive, Olia and Dragan’s site contemporary-home-computing highlights particular screen captures that have garnered the most reposts and likes from their Tumblr followers. The results say much for the humour that still drives online culture, but perhaps little about the original contexts from whence those screen captures came. For instance, the screen captures that garner most attention are usually the ones that have failed a part of the retrieval/display/capture process. These ‘obscure traces’ may be GIF heavy sites, half loaded to interesting aesthetic affect, or, perhaps the most telling, captures that show nothing but the empty shell of a Netscape Navigator browser, caught forever like a millennium bug in digital amber.

The second mode of capture and re-display takes place at the Photographer’s Gallery itself. Depicted on nine large intersecting HD video screens set into ‘The Wall’ of the entrance-cum-café, one’s first experience of the exhibit is ponderous. The display cycles through the vast array of Geocities homepages at five minute intervals, giving viewers a more than generous dose of 800×600 px nostalgia. Whether the websites that fade into view are a barrage of animated GIFs,insightful commentary on life in the late 1990s, or a series of barren ‘Under Construction’ assemblages, is up to chance. As a reviewer, sent to derive something from the gallery experience, the wall leered at me with gestures that sent my inner taxonomist into a frenzy. Confronted with such tiny slithers of the archive, in such massive doses, it quickly becomes obvious that the real potential of the project has not been quite realised. Rather than static screen captures The Wall shows cleverly rendered quicktime videos, allowing the GIF whiskers of a Hello Kitty mascot to quiver once more. If you are lucky, or have the patience to watch a long series of the sites fade into view, you’ll be greeted by flickering ‘Welcome’ banners, by cartoon workmen tirelessly drilling, by unicorns cantering and sitemeter bars flashing. But The Wall also feels wholly at odds with its content, caught up in a whirl of web nostalgia that minimises the lives, experiences and aesthetic choices of a defining generation to static flashes that you can’t click on, no matter how much you want to. Archives are living, breathing entities wont to be probed for new meanings and interpretations. Whether depicted as static or faux animated, One Terabyte Of Kilobyte Age is a project with an endless surface, with little way for its viewers to delve deeper.

Trawling through the 1tb Tumblr is a much more visceral experience than the one that greets you at the Photographer’s Gallery, but the sense of a journey waiting to be embarked on is lost somewhat in the move to the Tumblr kingdom. Every five minutes offers a new chance to spot similarities on The Wall, to ponder on the origins of a site or, more profoundly, wonder where the people that toiled to make them are now. Before the days of user driven content, of Facebook timelines, and even before RSS feed aggregators, the whole web felt something like this. Today’s web is unarguably more dynamic, with a clean aesthetic that barely shifts behind the waves of content that wash over its surface. But the user has been relegated to shuffler of material. The Geocities homepage was designed, and kept updated by an army of amateur enthusiasts, organising bandwidth light GIFs in ever more meaningful arrays, in the unlikely event that another living soul would stumble upon them. There is much to love about One Terabyte Of Kilobyte Age, and much to be learned from it given the time. But part of me wishes that the Photographer’s Gallery had given over their trendy café to a row of beige Intel 486 computer stacks, their unwieldy tube monitors better capturing the spirit of the web alá 1996. The clash between the 90s amateur enthusiast and the avid content shuffler of the 2010s is inherent in the modes of display Olia and Dragan chose for their project. Beginning from a desire to save and reflect on our shared heritage, 1tb now represents itself as pure content. An impulse to probe the archive replaced by an impulse to scroll endlessly through Tumblr streams, clicking like buttons on screen captures we hope will distract/impress/outrage our friends until the next cat video refreshes into view. Go, go to the Photographer’s Gallery tomorrow, grab yourself a coffee and let the Geocities archive wash over you. If you can do it without Instagramming a snap to your friends, without updating your Facebook page with tales of your nostalgic reverie, if you can let the flickering screen captures do their own talking , only then can you claim you truly re-entered the kilobyte age.

References [1] ‘Kipple’ is a word coined by science fiction author Philip K. Dick to describe the entropy of physical forms, Dick’s comment on the contradictions of mass-production, utility and planned obsolescence. [2] Marisa Olson, “Lost Not Found: The Circulation of Images in Digital Visual Culture,” Words Without Pictures (September 18, 2008): 281. [3] Hal Foster, “An Archival Impulse,” October – (October 1, 2004): 5, doi:10.1162/0162287042379847.

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Fri, 17 May 2013 03:16:13 -0700 http://www.furtherfield.org/features/impulse-geocities-archive-one-terabyte-kilobyte-age
<![CDATA[The Philosophy of Data - NYTimes.com]]> http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/05/opinion/brooks-the-philosophy-of-data.html?_r=1& ]]> Sat, 23 Feb 2013 03:24:39 -0800 http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/05/opinion/brooks-the-philosophy-of-data.html?_r=1& <![CDATA[Shakespeare’s Sonnets and MLK’s Speech Stored in DNA Speck – Phenomena: Not Exactly Rocket Science]]> http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2013/01/23/shakespeares-sonnets-and-mlks-speech-stored-in-dna-speck/

Using DNA would finally divorce the thing that stores information from the things that read it. Time and again, our storage formats become obsolete because we stop making the machines that read them-think about video tapes, cassettes, or floppy disks. That's a faff-it means that archivists have to co

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Mon, 11 Feb 2013 02:53:00 -0800 http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2013/01/23/shakespeares-sonnets-and-mlks-speech-stored-in-dna-speck/
<![CDATA[Object-Oriented Ontology Symposium]]> https://smartech.gatech.edu/handle/1853/33043

Ontology is the philosophical study of existence. Object-oriented ontology ("OOO" for short) puts things at the center of this study. Its proponents contend that nothing has special status, but that everything exists equally—plumbers, cotton, bonobos, DVD players, and sandstone, for example. In conte

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Tue, 22 Jan 2013 07:23:00 -0800 https://smartech.gatech.edu/handle/1853/33043