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This is a bucket of chum. Chum is decomposing fish matter that elicits a purely neurological brain stem response in its target consumer: larger fish, like sharks.

Ranjan here, and today I'm talking Taboola and Outbrain. Most of my work in media has been on subscriptions and branded content, so I've never played in the depths of ad-tech darkness. But, I spent seven years trading currency derivatives and am well versed in the art of arbitrage.

In 2011, a loose group of “grumpy futurists” wrote up an extensive list of “Alternatives to the Singularity” in a collaborative Google Document. “The Singularity”, in popular culture and para-religious belief, refers to the point where machine intelligence leaves humans behind.

Tens of thousands of Londoners died of cholera from the 1830s to the 1860s. The causes were simple: mass quantities of human waste and industrial contaminants were pouring into the Thames, the central waterway of a city at the center of a rapidly industrializing world.

In 1965, American sculptor Claes Oldenburg proposed an object of quite unforgettable brute simplicity for New York City. Oldenburg may be best known today for his cuddly "soft sculptures" and monumental pop-art reproductions of everyday objects, but this was neither cuddly nor pop.

The future as shown to us by science fictions is almost always shiny. Whether in aspirational daydreams or depictions of dystopia, the vision continues to be one of gleaming metal, stark white interiors, and of course many more robots.

“Language is easy to capture but difficult to read”, in the words of the poet and media researcher John Cayley.1 Cayley wrote this sentence merely as a footnote to an essay on his “terms of reference”, yet it sums up the whole dilemma of so-called “big data” processing.

We can now quantify how much humans have changed the surface of the planet.

Giant collection of fishing nets, plastic containers and other discarded items called a ‘ticking time bomb’ as large items crumble into micro plastics 13.02 EDT Last modified on Tuesday 4 October 2016 13.

KEEP IT DIRTY, vol. a., “Filth” (2016) I am filthy [Je suis sale]—writes Lautréamont—I am riddled with lice. Hogs, when they look at me, vomit. My skin is encrusted with the scabs and scales of leprosy, and covered with yellowish pus.

The dark web—the portion of the deep web only accessible through specific software—exists to serve the needs of hackers-for-hire, hitmen, internet drug kingpins, child pornographers, and their inevitable customers. That’s the public consensus. Then there’s the counter-narrative.

In early August 1997, Charles Moore found himself floating through the North Pacific in his Tasmanian-built catamaran.

It’s important to photograph the hermit crabs in their natural habitat.  I prefer to photograph them using a wide angle lens to achieve a unique perspective. Hermit crab in a glass bottle- Yomitan, Okinawa.

This talk was delivered as the plenary paper for The 11th Interdisciplinary Social Sciences Conference, Imperial College, London, 2nd August 2016. You can find the full content of the talk beneath the slides in the comments section, or click the gear icon below and select ‘Open speaker notes’ It is presented here under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 licence – please use as you wish, but always reference and refer back to this post or the slide show.

“Any sufficiently advanced civilisation is indistinguishable from its garbage.” – Bruce Sterling

On the second floor of a nondescript warehouse owned by New York City's Sanitation Department in East Harlem is a treasure trove—filled with other people's trash. Most of the building is used as a depot for garbage trucks, but there's a secret museum that takes over an entire floor.

According to a new study, humankind is now entering the “Age of Plastic”. The research investigates the evidence that we are living in the Anthropocene, a time in which humanity is the main geological force.

“Your Shiny Plastic Future Is a Load of Crap”: #Additivism interviewed for HyperallergicGretta Louw interviewed us for Hyperallergic:It was hugely important to us that the manifesto undermine the position from which it is situated. We tried to show the limits and contradictions in our own thinking. The manifesto performs a critique of itself through irony, contradiction, and self-ridicule. The language of the manifesto breaks down and degrades, just like any system accelerated to its limits. Andrea Young’s amazing sound design for the video was also paramount in performing that quality.But I’m going to try to answer your question from more of a perspective of personal experience. One of the things that I have thought about the most in the last couple of years is the new potentials of species-being that new technologies facilitate. As a woman from the Middle East, I interact with a heteropatriarchy, capitalist, colonialist world, and so much of that experience creates a certain kind of alienation that is unique to my very personal/political experience. I deeply connect with a sentence in the Xenofeminism Manifesto — “If nature is unjust; change nature” — and Donna Haraway’s command to “Make Kin Not Babies!” For me, these two are about many things from the past that I want to resist and rebuild. With #Additivism, we want to explore ways of turning alienation into expressions of power.↪ Read the full interview here

Additivism talk for Disnovation Panel at Transmediale, (4th Feb 2016)Daniel Rourke talked about deep time, horror, crap, ‘The Weird’ and The Radical at Transmediale festival, Berlin.

The talk was part of the Disnovation Research panel, featuring Jean-Marie Boyer, Ewen Chardronnet, Nicolas Maigret, Erin Sexton, and moderated by Ryan Bishop, with reflections on the work of #Additivism co-creator Morehshin Allahyari. ↪ Listen to the talk and follow the slides here.

TIDYING up is serious business. “Life truly begins only after you have put your house in order,” says Marie Kondo, whose bestseller “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying” has elevated a household chore into a process of emancipation and self-discovery.