To hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android. You are sitting in a comfortable chair by the fire, on a cold winter’s night. Perhaps you have a mug of tea in hand, perhaps something stronger.

To hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android. You are sitting in a comfortable chair by the fire, on a cold winter’s night. Perhaps you have a mug of tea in hand, perhaps something stronger.

Calculating the patterns and cycles of the past could lead us to a better understanding of history. Could it also help us prevent a looming crisis? By In its first issue of 2010, the scientific journal Nature looked forward to a dazzling decade of progress.

Memes and social networks have become weaponized, while many governments seem ill-equipped to understand the new reality of information warfare. How will we fight state-sponsored disinformation and propaganda in the future?

“It’s not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on what is past; rather, image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation. In other words, image is dialectics at a standstill.

For my latest Furtherfield review I wallowed in curator Shiri Shalmy’s ongoing project Data as Culture, examining works by Paolo Cirio and James Bridle that deal explicitly with the concatenation of data. What happens when society is governed by a regime of data about data, increasingly divorced from the symbolic? In a work commissioned by curator Shiri Shalmy for her ongoing project Data as Culture, artist Paolo Cirio confronts the prerequisites of art in the era of the user. Your Fingerprints on the Artwork are the Artwork Itself [YFOTAATAI] hijacks loopholes, glitches and security flaws in the infrastructure of the world wide web in order to render every passive website user as pure material. In an essay published on a backdrop of recombined RAW tracking data, Cirio states: Data is the raw material of a new industrial, cultural and artistic revolution. It is a powerful substance, yet when displayed as a raw stream of digital material, represented and organised for computational interpretation only, it is mostly inaccessible and incomprehensible. In fact, there isn’t any meaning or value in data per se. It is human activity that gives sense to it. It can be useful, aesthetic or informative, yet it will always be subject to our perception, interpretation and use. It is the duty of the contemporary artist to explore what it really looks like and how it can be altered beyond the common conception. Even the nondescript use patterns of the Data as Culture website can be figured as an artwork, Cirio seems to be saying, but the art of the work requires an engagement that contradicts the passivity of a mere ‘user’. YFOTAATAI is a perfect accompaniment to Shiri Shalmy’s curatorial project, generating questions around security, value and production before any link has been clicked or artwork entertained. Feeling particularly receptive I click on James Bridle’s artwork/website  A Quiet Disposition and ponder on the first hyperlink that surfaces: the link reads “Keanu Reeves“: “Keanu Reeves” is the name of a person known to the system.  Keanu Reeves has been encountered once by the system and is closely associated with Toronto, Enter The Dragon, The Matrix, Surfer and Spacey Dentist.  In 1999 viewers were offered a visual metaphor of ‘The Matrix’: a stream of flickering green signifiers ebbing, like some half-living fungus of binary digits, beneath our apparently solid, Technicolor world. James Bridle‘s expansive work A Quiet Disposition [AQD] could be considered as an antidote to this millennial cliché, founded on the principle that we are in fact ruled by a third, much more slippery, realm of information superior to both the Technicolor and the digital fungus. Our socio-political, geo-economic, rubber bullet, blood and guts world, as Bridle envisages it, relies on data about data. Read the rest of this review at Furtherfield.org

International Conference on the Image, ‘How GIFs “Language” and What They Might Mean’, University Center Chicago, October 18th-19th 2013

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 existence to the next.

Why Do Sign Language Interpreters Look So Animated?

The English language contains certain meaning-rich words that command attention and stir controversy. “Paradigm,” for instance: When Thomas Kuhn used it in 1966 to describe accepted scientific theories, and gave us the phrase “paradigm shift,” he launched a thousand articles, several hundred books and quite a few careers, some just distantly related to science.

That kind of word raises curiosity and pries open the imagination, encouraging us to think about what we might otherwise ignore. My favourite is “palimpsest.” When I first noticed it in print, four decades ago, it struck me as odd, beautiful and full of promise. It’s a term that engages many writers and continues to attract new meanings but to some readers it still seems slightly far-fetched, maybe outrageous.

Frances Egan is a mind-bombing philosopher who wonders on explanatory frameworks of science, the fits and starts of mind evolution, the links between neuroscience and meaning, the redness of tomatoes, the difference between horizon and zenith moons, fMRI interfaces with philosophy, mind/computer uploading and the consciousness of the USA. All in all, she is a deep groove hipster of the philo-mindster jive. Awesome!

3:AM: What made you a philosopher and has it been rewarding so far?

Frances Egan: I read some political philosophy on my own in high school, but I wasn’t exposed to philosophy systematically until college. I took a philosophy course in my first semester because I was looking for something different. After a brief introduction to logic we discussed the problem of evil: how could an omnipotent, benevolent god allow so much pain and suffering? I was raised Catholic but that was the end of religion for me. Nothing quite that dramatic has happened since, but thinking about fund

As New York City Mayor Bloomberg gave numerous televised addresses about the preparations the city was making for Hurricane Sandy, and then the storm’s aftermath, he was joined at the podium by a sign language interpreter, who immediately became a twitter darling. People watching the addresses tweeted that she was "amazing," "mesmerizing," "hypnotizing," and "AWESOME." Soon, her name was uncovered—Lydia Callis—and animated .gifs of her signing were posted. A couple of hours later, a tumblr was born. New York magazine called her "Hurricane Sandy's breakout star."

Callis was great, but not because she was so lively and animated. She was great because she was performing a seriously difficult mental task—simultaneously listening and translating on the spot—in a high-pressure, high-stakes situation. Sure, she was expressive, but that's because she was speaking a visual language. Signers are animated not because they are bubbly and energetic, but because sign language uses face and body movements as part of its grammar.

Errors and manipulations of rhetoric and logical thinking

Wherefrom comes this urge to expose such traumatic interiors? After all, hoarding can be nothing new – it’s easy to imagine a Cyclops’s cavern stuffed to the roof with sheep bones, cheese rinds and the remains of hapless Argonauts. The splurge of reality obesity shows that the explanation is simple: schadenfreude. We look upon those poor wobblers being shaken to their core by life coaches and think to ourselves, I may be a little on the tubby side but – Jesus! – I’m not that bad. Actually, my suspicion is that the compulsive hoarder craziness is an even more craven attempt to affect such a catharsis. As the crack team of cleaners goes into the bungalow, black bags and bug spray at the ready, we sit on the sofa watching and, for a few dreamy minutes, can forget all about the landfill-in-waiting that surrounds us.

Mediation and technologies of mediation, whether the sign (Vygotsky), the symbol (Piaget), or the mirror or signifier (Lacan), all play central roles in accounts of human development and activity. They are not simply metaphors enabling, say, a particular conception of memory, perception or language -- as is the case for Plato's wax tablet, Descartes' camera obscura or Chomsky's computational "language organ." Instead, media form the organizing principles for the psyche and its functions overall; they provide the pivotal moment for maturation and humanization -- the point where human development allegedly diverges decisively from the animal to the human. But in these contexts, media are not simply the basis, cause or source of psychological phenomena; they are inextricable from and in a sense even constitutive of them.

"What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible"

The list is the origin of culture. It's part of the history of art and literature. What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible. It also wants to create order -- not always, but often. And how, as a human being, does one face infinity? How does one attempt to grasp the incomprehensible? Through lists, through catalogs, through collections in museums and through encyclopedias and dictionaries. There is an allure to enumerating how many women Don Giovanni slept with: It was 2,063, at least according to Mozart's librettist, Lorenzo da Ponte. We also have completely practical lists -- the shopping list, the will, the menu -- that are also cultural achievements in their own right.

“Models of communication are…not merely representations of communication but representations for communication: templates that guide, unavailing or not, concrete processes of human interaction, mass and interpersonal.” - James Carey, Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society

The Shannon and Weaver Model - The Late Age of Print

Electrical Model illustrating a Mind having a Will but capable of only Two Ideas

Lewis F. Richardson

George Dyson: “Information Is Cheap, Meaning Is Expensive”

A stonishing animals show up everywhere these days. Cooperative apes, grief-stricken elephants, empathetic cats and dogs crowd our bookshop shelves. It’s all the rage to plumb the cognitive and emotional depths of the animal world, rejecting sceptics’ sneers of “anthropomorphism” to insist that we’re finally coming to see animals for who they really are: not so different from us.

Pushing against this tide of animal awe is a competing cultural trope, the relentless seeking of human superiority. It’s from this second camp that Michael C. Corballis, a professor emeritus of psychology from New Zealand, has written The Recursive Mind: The origins of human language, thought, and civilization. Mental time travel and theory of mind, Corballis believes, are two uniquely human ways of thinking that propelled our species to heights above all others, thanks to what is called recursion.