MachineMachine / stream

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By T.C. Sottek and Thomas Houston Humans have always lived singularly in the present moment; the internet has only accelerated the pace that we leap from one lily pad of…

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In his new book The Silence of Animals, the philosopher John Gray explores why human beings continue to use myth to give purpose to their lives. Drawing from the material…

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ENO: I loved that experiment. I'd love to do something like that again. ANDERSON: I would, too. I've always loved the Quiet Club [a series of ambient-style installations by Eno…

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Within the pages of Digital Folklore Reader, Olia Lialina, one of the book's editors, refers to a claim by the social media researcher Danah Boyd, that some American teenagers identify…

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Technological revolutions are far less obvious than political revolutions to the generations that live through them. This is true even as new tools, for better and worse, shift human history…

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I've poked fun at these lazy op-eds before and, indeed, it must be tempting to retreat into the safe conceptual territory of "The Internet is fake!" when a juicy story…

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A high culture is the self-consciousness of a society. It contains the works of art, literature, scholarship and philosophy that establish a shared frame of reference among educated people. High…

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Fossils and artefacts pulled from the Grotte du Renne cave in central France present anthropologists with a Pleistocene puzzle. Strewn among the remains of prehistoric mammals are the bones of…

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THE THING: FIGURES IN THE FRAME « MULTIGLOM

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Contemporary art is an easy thing to hate. All the meaningless hype, the identikit openings in cities that blur into one long, banal, Beck’s beer fuelled anxiety dream from which…

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Interview with Michel Foucault originally published in Italian, then in French in 1994

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Time rather than money is the currency in the recent science fiction film In Time. At the age of 25, the citizens in the future world the film depicts are…

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To what extent do the material components (e.g. hardware, source code, network protocols) and properties (e.g. speed, malleability, erasability) of digital technology influence the methodologies one might employ to study…

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Alongside the Dadaists in the early twentieth century, the German artist Kurt Schwitters developed a style he called “Merz” (detached from the end of “Kommerz,” German for “commerce,” to create…

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In a time when likes, reblogs, and favorites determine what gets seen and what doesn’t, all cultural products, movies, music, writing, and visual art alike, exist in an economy of…

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To err is human; to err in digital culture is design. In the glitches, inefficiencies, and errors that ergonomics and usability engineering strive to surmount, Peter Krapp identifies creative reservoirs…

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The conflict between the Naturwissenschaften and the Geisteswissenschaften goes back at least two centuries, and became intensified as ambitious, sometimes impatient researchers proposed to introduce natural scientific concepts and methods…

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What is ROFLCon? It's a biennial convention (this year was its third) held to celebrate and discuss internet memes and the celebrity that is often created alongside them. This year's…

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Collective cultural memory is the foundation on which the significance of a creative practice stands. As summarized in Emerson Rosenthal’s post for #DIGART week, online collections and exhibition spaces have…

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A single cell, such as a bacterium, is the simplest thing that can be alive. In addition to the materials from which it is constructed, it needs three features: a…

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The Ecstasy of Influence, now the title of his recent collection of writings, often addresses the process of integrating and "cobbling together" ideas and culture to make something new. Yet,…

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Ever wonder how Google manages to search the entire web and return results in half a second? Well, RobertvH from Munich did, and Mountain View’s head of web-spam, Matt Cutts,…

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How does aesthetic experience fare in such an environment? Within art-tech circles, the buzz these days is about something called the “New Aesthetic,” a coinage of James Bridle, who launched…

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“When I first started on this project, I thought it would become a public art piece,” Marclay said. “I thought, What a great thing, to be in a train station…

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Sushi, of course, is the ultimate in simple food: mostly just rice and a piece of raw fish, it would seem that anyone with a knife and one functioning hand…