This text was read out loud on the 21st November, as part of the Volatile Dispersal: Festival of Art-Writing, held at The Whitechapel Gallery

Thanks must go to Maria Fusco and Francesco Pedraglio for asking me to take part…

In one of the most uncanny revelations in science fiction, the protagonist of H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine awakes from his anthropic slumber: the museum is filled with artefacts not from his past, but from his future.

Like… ]]> Mon, 23 Nov 2009 09:29:00 -0700 http://machinemachine.net/text/out-loud/speaking-about-ants-superman-and-centaurs 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

In 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…

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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 http://machinemachine.net/text/featured/beyond-the-topology-of-the-book

…the human perceptive apparatus [has] a potential to break with action and self-organisation: to see as such, without that point of view being folded around my organizing striving centre. It is precisely the image of bounded life that Deleuze sees as the illusion that has dominated philosophy and that is overcome in the radical connections of art.

- Claire Colebrook, Deleuze: A Guide for the Perplexed

Books are passive, denying their rigid topologies only… ]]> Wed, 27 May 2009 09:01:00 -0700 http://machinemachine.net/text/featured/beyond-the-topology-of-the-book http://machinemachine.net/stream/items/view/309/way-more-about-paths-at-uc-berkeley-than-youd-ever-want-to-read How architectural and design choices are mediated and ultimately over-ruled by user choice, reflexion, repetition and desire. ]]> Mon, 25 May 2009 12:21:00 -0700 http://machinemachine.net/stream/items/view/309/way-more-about-paths-at-uc-berkeley-than-youd-ever-want-to-read