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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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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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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WHATEVER HAPPENED TO DIGITAL ART? Cast your mind back to the late 1990s, when we got our first e-mail accounts. Wasn’t there a pervasive sense that visual art was going…

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Why look at animated GIFs now? They are one of the first forms of image native to computer networks making them charmingly passé, a characteristic that gives them contradictory longevity.…

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Computers are getting invisible. They shrink and hide. They lurk under the skin and dissolve in the cloud. We observe the process like an eclipse of the sun, partly scared,…

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The missile rushing over your head was processed through an Instagram filter just hours previously. As you see it pass out of sight behind the apartment block opposite some young…

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Writing in the early 1990s, Susan Stewart observed that “with the advent of film, interpretation has been replaced by watching … Here we see the increasing historical tendency toward the…

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So ArtForum have launched a special September issue investigating the, lets say broader, relationship between new media, technology and visual art.* Of worthy mention is the essay Digital Divide by…

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WHATEVER HAPPENED TO DIGITAL ART? Cast your mind back to the late 1990s, when we got our first e-mail accounts. Wasn’t there a pervasive sense that visual art was going…

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The frontier of science is a wild and lawless place. Like all badlands, it attracts visionaries, charlatans and the dispossessed. Far from the jurisdiction of law enforcers, isolated communities cluster…

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This essay is in many ways a companion piece to Gary Hall’s ‘Pirate Radical Philosophy’ in RP 173 (May/June 2012). Consider it a prequel, or something akin to a video…

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Digital information is accumulating at an astounding rate, straining our ability to store and archive it. DNA is among the most dense and stable information media known. The development of…

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lecture by Craig Venter Life is code, as you heard in the introduction, was very clearly articulated by Schrodinger as code script. Perhaps even more importantly, and something I missed…

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For the most part, the biological metaphor has long been just that — a simplifying analogy rather than a blueprint for how to do computing. Engineering, not biology, guided the…

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In proposing the imitation game as a stand-in for another definition of thought or intelligence, Turing does more than deliver a clever logical flourish that helps him creatively answer a…

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Craig Venter spins increasingly ubiquitous metaphor: "The digital and biological worlds are becoming interchangeable" "All living cells that we know of on this planet are 'DNA software'-driven biological machines comprised…

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We take it for granted that the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) is a safe endeavor. Seriously, what could possibly go wrong with passively searching for interstellar radio signals? Unfortunately,…

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Artificial intelligence began with an ambitious research agenda: To endow machines with some of the traits we value most highly in ourselves—the faculty of reason, skill in solving problems, creativity,…

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We have met our match at the genteel pastime of jigsaw puzzles. It seems an algorithm can now whiz through 10,000 pieces in 24 hours. The speedy solver could also…

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A few days ago a blogger who identifies himself as just "Philip" took to his site to recount his experience of reading War and Peace – specifically, a 99¢ version…

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Letting microchips make a few mistakes here and there could make them much faster and more energy-efficient. Managing the probability of errors and limiting where they occur can ensure that…

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Mr. Obama decided to accelerate the attacks — begun in the Bush administration and code-named Olympic Games — even after an element of the program accidentally became public in the…

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Kernel on machines and memory, with some nice examples of apps that are exploring our changing relationship with both. We are all digital archaeologists now, writes Robert Carroll. But in…

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Last Wednesday, with relatively little fanfare, Google introduced a new technology called Google Knowledge Graph. Type in “François Hollande,” and you are offered a capsule history (with links) to his…