MachineMachine / stream

Link

SPIEGEL: Mr. Eco, you are considered one of the world's great scholars, and now you are opening an exhibition at the Louvre, one of the world's most important museums.

Link

Using DNA would finally divorce the thing that stores information from the things that read it. Time and again, our storage formats become obsolete because we stop making the machines…

Link

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…

Link

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…

Link

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.…

Link

Writing in the early 1990s, Susan Stewart observed that “with the advent of film, interpretation has been replaced by watching … Here we see the increasing historical tendency toward the…

Link

To understand why it's worth building an almost 200-year-old mechanical computer, it's necessary to first understand what a computer is. Although Babbage's analytical engine is entirely mechanical, it has the…

Link

This is my response to Claire Bishop‘s essay “Digital Divide“, published in Artforum in September 2012 (also posted in the comments section of the article): Reading this article was a…

Link

This month, Art Forum published a very timely, and beautifully written essay by Claire Bishop entitled, Digital Divide: on contemporary Art and New Media“. In it, Bishop analyses the contemporary…

Link

In 1977, NASA sent 115 images – the so-called ‘Golden Record’ – into space on board the Voyager space probe. They also included greetings in 55 different languages and a…

Link

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…

Link

Hoarding disorder is categorized as “the excessive acquisition of and inability to discard objects, resulting in debilitating clutter,” wrote the researchers behind the new study, led by Yale University School…

Link

For medical researchers and biochemists, simulation software will vastly speed the early stages of screening for new compounds. And for molecular biologists, models that are of sufficient accuracy will yield…

Link

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,…

Link

The following is an excerpt from Ian Hacking's introduction to the new edition of Thomas S. Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which commemorates the book's 50th anniversary. To be…

Link

It's a testament to Turing's fascination with nearly everything that 76 years since his first major paper, there's still so much to write about his work. Expect this week to…

Link

There are really two points. The first is a bit of technical background you can ignore if you like, and skip to the next paragraph. It’s the idea of “relative…

Link

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…

Link

The History of Art is filled with forgeries, but are there fakes in digital art fields made from creative cut-and-pastes, collaborative works and infinite works? We approached four people who,…

Link

Publication used to mean preservation but it no longer does. Let me explain. When a print book is published its metadata is literally attached to its content. The author and…

Link

With regard to the relativity of value, Karl Marx expressed this function of ideology in the clearest terms in Volume I of Capital: "... one man is king only because…

Link

"We're trying to work out whether places have memories and if so, how can we help people relate to these memories," says Tim Cole, a lecturer in History at the…

Link

Infographic on compulsive hoarding

Link

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,…

Link

Genetic information storage and processing rely on just two polymers, DNA and RNA, yet whether their role reflects evolutionary history or fundamental functional constraints is currently unknown. With the use…

Link

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…

Link

A really new aesthetics might work differently: instead of concerning itself with the way we humans see our world differently when we begin to see it through and with computer…