http://machinemachine.net/stream/feed en-us http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Sweetcron text@machinemachine.net http://www.bruno-latour.fr/presse/presse_art/P-129-THES.html by Bruno Latour

’Who would know how to love without having read novels?” This saying seems to take on a new meaning with the multiplication of virtual worlds, even though the adjective “virtual” may be greatly misleading. It would be very odd to say, when thinking of the young hero of Marcel Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu, who spends whole days utterly absorbed in the fictional landscapes painted by his favourite novelists, that he resided in a “real” world, while a youngster of today who buys rather expensive equipment to play with buddies on the… ]]> Wed, 19 May 2010 07:18:00 -0700 http://www.bruno-latour.fr/presse/presse_art/P-129-THES.html http://www.artfagcity.com/2009/09/16/img-mgmt-hubrisnemesiswhatever/ Another binary myth fundamental to Western culture is the eternally popular hubris/nemesis complex. According to this idea, those who transgress against the natural order always get their just desserts. Hubris is a Greek word, meaning, “an impious disregard of the limits governing human action in an orderly universe” (Encyclopedia Britannica 2006). The great and gifted are most susceptible to sin, and in Greek tragedy usually the hero suffers from this tragic flaw. Expressed in countless myths, ranging from the Tower of Babel to Jurassic Park, hubris applies to various breeds of arrogant and boastful behavior. Often it is an evil… ]]> Fri, 13 Nov 2009 17:22:00 -0700 http://www.artfagcity.com/2009/09/16/img-mgmt-hubrisnemesiswhatever/ http://www.salon.com/books/int/2009/09/19/better_pencil/index.html By now the arguments are familiar: Facebook is ruining our social relationships; Google is making us dumber; texting is destroying the English language as we know it. We're facing a crisis, one that could very well corrode the way humans have communicated since we first evolved from apes. What we need, so say these proud Luddites, is to turn our backs on technology and embrace not the keyboard, but the pencil. Such sentiments, in the opinion of Dennis Baron, are nostalgic, uninformed hogwash. A professor of English and linguistics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Baron seeks to provide… ]]> Mon, 28 Sep 2009 09:01:00 -0700 http://www.salon.com/books/int/2009/09/19/better_pencil/index.html http://fictional-stimulus.ning.com/ Fictional Stimulus is a reading experience for people who like books and are curious about the future of literature in the digital world. It's an introductory taster for those new to reading online, and its form is inspired by the bookgroup where everyone reads the same material then gets together to discuss it at the end. Fictional Stimulus started on 22 September 2009 and runs for four weeks, over which time you’ll be sent twelve emails, one each time we make available a new batch of stimuli. Click on the green headings above to find the latest concise selection of… ]]> Mon, 28 Sep 2009 08:54:00 -0700 http://fictional-stimulus.ning.com/ 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 http://littlepig.org.uk/ Website and interactive portfolio of artist ]]> Fri, 30 Jan 2009 09:02:00 -0700 http://littlepig.org.uk/