Who are you, and what are you doing here? You, there in the mirror, there in the lens of your phone: What do you see? In the eyes of us poor moderns, it seems self-evident that a picture can capture who you are.

Below is a shortened version of Annie Culver’s essay that won Honorable Mention in the 2017 Greene Prize for Environmental Writing. Annie is a PhD student in English at Rice University.

If you live in a major metropolitan area, the odds are good you’re being watched and listened to at all times. And even if you don’t, that surveillance technology is still there—in stores, on cop cars, in schools and stop lights.

How an extreme libertarian tract predicting the collapse of liberal democracies – written by Jacob Rees-Mogg’s father – inspired the likes of Peter Thiel to buy up property across the Pacific by If you’re interested in the end of the world, you’re interested in New Zealand.

The dating sim has been experiencing something of a reexamining of late, finding itself in the broader public eye as iterations upon its core tenants are warped, distorted, and pushed past their typical use cases.

According to urban legend, a landfill somewhere in the small city of Alamogordo, New Mexico, bulges with millions of copies of the worst game ever made—a game that many observers blamed for the North American video-game sales crash of 1983. Atari’s bubble burst because of a little alien.

Every time I teach at an artschool in Europe I notice that the students are not actively following what is happening in pop music video cultures - there seems to be some kind of taboo. So I had my Merzakademie students make a playlist of recent (post digital) videos generated on edge of pop and internet cultures. I think it is a really good start.

From rainforest revival and green technology to social changes, the age of humans is not necessarily a one-way ticket to eco-disaster, argue three new books Will more of the world's cities share Singapore's future vision of itself? (Image: Suzanne Lee/SGIA/Panos Pictures) OPTIMISM is in the air.

KIPPLE by Eagle and Feather www.smileorangefilms.co.uk

The New Aesthetic is now subject to discussion and critique on a number of forums, blogs, twitter threads, and so forth (for a list, see bibliography on Berry 2012a, but also Bridle 2012, Kaganskiy 2012, Sterling 2012). Many of these discussions have a particular existential flavour, questioning the existence and longevity of the New Aesthetic, for example, or beginning to draw the boundaries of what is 'in' or 'out' of the domain of New Aesthetic things (See Twitter 2012).[1] Grusin (2012), for example, claims: '[t]he "new aesthetic" is just the latest name for remediation, all dressed up with nowhere to go'. At such an early stage there is understandably some scepticism and, being mediated via Twitter, some sarcasm and dismissal, rather than substantive engagements with the questions raised by a moment presaged by the eruption of the digital into the everyday lifeworld, but also some partial support (for example see, Berry 2012b, Crumb 2012, Exinfoam 2012, Fernandez 2012, Owens 2012). Nonetheless, it is good to see so much discussion and excitement around the concept, however defined.

When we meet Jesus of Nazareth at the beginning of the Gospel of Mark, almost surely the oldest of the four, he’s a full-grown man. He comes down from Galilee, meets John, an ascetic desert hermit who lives on locusts and wild honey, and is baptized by him in the River Jordan. If one thing seems nearly certain to the people who read and study the Gospels for a living, it’s that this really happened: John the Baptizer—as some like to call him, to give a better sense of the original Greek’s flat-footed active form—baptized Jesus. They believe it because it seems so unlikely, so at odds with the idea that Jesus always played the star in his own show: why would anyone have said it if it weren’t true? This curious criterion governs historical criticism of Gospel texts: the more improbable or “difficult” an episode or remark is, the likelier it is to be a true record, on the assumption that you would edit out all the weird stuff if you could, and keep it in only because the tradition is so s

some text, an image: every day

In 2005, Michael Shanks, the Omar and Althea Hoskins Professor of Classical Archaeology at Stanford University and director of the Archaeology Center’s Metamedia Lab, and three colleagues started The Presence Project to explore issues of presence and documentation across the arts and sciences. Artist Lynn Hershman Leeson, whose work has been shown at more than 200 major institutions and is part of the permanent collection at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, joined soon after and, together with Shanks and others in the Stanford Humanities Lab, created Life to the Second Power, an online encounter with her archive. As they see the project through to its completion in 2010, Shanks and Hershman Leeson plan to further explore memory, identity, and place. Seed invited them to advance the conversation.

Read the interview at Seed Magazine

This essay aims to increase our understanding of simulations and their impact on our notion of reality. Following on some observations regarding the dominant role of visual representations in our culture, I will argue that we are now living in a society, in which simulations are often more influential, satisfying and meaningful than the things they are presumed to represent. Media technologies play a fundamental role in our cycle of meaning construction. This is not necessarily a bad thing, nor is it entirely new. Yet, it has consequences for our concepts of virtual and real, which are less complementary, than they are usually understood to be.

Art is one of the ways that people communicate. It is difficult for me to imagine a serious person attacking any means of communication per se. Our real enemies are the ones who send us to die in pointless wars or to live lives which are reduced to drudgery, not the people who use other means of communication from those which we find most appropriate to the present situation. When these are attacked, a diversion has been established which only serves the interests of our real enemies.

Gizmo II here