MachineMachine /stream - tagged with mimesis https://machinemachine.net/stream/feed en-us http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss LifePress therourke@gmail.com <![CDATA[Sonic Acts 2017: The Noise of Becoming: On Monsters, Men, and Every Thing in Between]]> https://vimeo.com/209632348

SONIC ACTS FESTIVAL - THE NOISE OF BEING Daniel Rourke - The Noise of Becoming: On Monsters, Men, and Every Thing in Between 26 February 2017 - De Brakke Grond, Amsterdam, The Netherlands --- In this talk Daniel Rourke refigures the sci-fi horror monster The Thing from John Carpenter's 1982 film of the same name. The Thing is a creature of endless mimetic transformations, capable of becoming the grizzly faced men who fail to defeat it. The most enduring quality of The Thing is its ability to perform self-effacement and subsequent renewal at every moment, a quality we must embrace and mimic ourselves if we are to outmanoeuvre the monsters that harangue us. Daniel Rourke is a writer and artist based in London. In his work Daniel exploits speculative and science fiction in search of a radical ‘outside’ to the human(ities), including extensive research on the intersection between digital materiality, the arts, and posthumanism. In March 2015 artist & activist Morehshin Allahyari and Daniel released The 3D Additivist Manifesto – a call to push technologies beyond their breaking point, into the realm of the provocative, and the weird. sonicacts.com/2017/artists/daniel-rourkeCast: Sonic Acts

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Sat, 29 Apr 2017 12:02:45 -0700 https://vimeo.com/209632348
<![CDATA[Turing Machines and (Gothic) Horror]]> http://ask.metafilter.com/mefi/272409

I am interested in any writings connecting (Universal) Turing Machines and horror. The idea of computers being able to imitate the behaviour of anything speaks to me of the monsters and doppelgängers from the Gothic tradition onwards. Know any writings on this? Alan Turing's 'Imitation Game' (not the film) plays a part in my hunch, as does the long discourse around biological processes as being 'machine-like'. Artificial Intelligence might come into this, but I am more interested in mimesis itself, and the fear this strikes in us. A machine able to imitate anything and everything surely echoes fears and nightmares that are labelled 'Gothic'.

Critical writings, fiction, articles and otherwise are very welcome indeed. Thanks.

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Wed, 03 Dec 2014 04:44:13 -0800 http://ask.metafilter.com/mefi/272409
<![CDATA[Neanderthals smart enough to copy humans]]> http://www.nature.com/news/neanderthals-smart-enough-to-copy-humans-1.11673

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 Neanderthals, along with bladelets, bone points and body ornaments belonging to what archaeologists call the Châtelperronian culture. Such complex artefacts are often attributed to modern humans, but a new report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests that Neanderthals created the objects in imitation of their Homo sapiens neighbors1.

How the Grotte du Renne deposit formed has important implications for how we view our extinct sister species. If Neanderthals left the assemblage, then they were capable of a degree of symbolic behaviour thought to be unique to humans.

The remains and artefacts were found together during excavations between 1949 and 1963, but they were not necessarily deposited at the same time. In 2010, Thomas Higham, an archaeologist at the University of

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Mon, 31 Dec 2012 06:52:00 -0800 http://www.nature.com/news/neanderthals-smart-enough-to-copy-humans-1.11673
<![CDATA[Abject Materialities: An Ontology of Everything on the Face of the Earth]]> http://machinemachine.net/text/ideas/abject-materialities-an-ontology-of-everything-on-the-face-of-the-earth

On the 5th of October I took part in the ASAP/4 ‘Genres of the Present’ Conference at the Royal College of Art. In collusion with Zara Dinnen, Rob Gallagher and Simon Clark, I delivered a paper on The Thing, as part of a panel on contemporary ‘Figures’. Our idea was to perform the exhaustion of the Zombie as a contemporary trope, and then suggest some alternative figures that might usefully replace it. Our nod to the ‘Figure’ was inspired, in part, by this etymological diversion from Bruno Latour’s book, On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods: To designate the aberration of the coastal Guinea Blacks, and to cover up their own misunderstanding, the Portuguese (very Catholic, explorers, conquerors, and to a certain extent slave traders as well) are thought to have used the adjective feitiço, from feito, the past participle of the Portuguese verb “to do, to make.” As a noun, it means form, figure, configuration, but as an adjective, artificial, fabricated, factitious and finally, enchanted. Right from the start, the word’s etymology refused, like the Blacks, to choose between what is shaped by work and what is artificial; this refusal, this hesitation, induced fascination and brought on spells. (pg. 6)

My paper is a short ‘work-in-progress’, and will eventually make-up a portion of my thesis. It contains elements of words I have splurged here before. The paper is on, or about, The Thing, using the fictional figure as a way to explore possible contradictions inherent in (post)human ontology. This synopsis might clarify/muddy things up further: Coiled up as DNA or proliferating through digital communication networks, nucleotides and electrical on/off signals figure each other in a coding metaphor with no origin. Tracing the evolution of The Thing over its 70 year history in science-fiction (including John W. Campbell’s 1938 novella and John Carpenter’s 1982 film), this paper explores this figure’s most terrifying, absolute other quality: the inability of its matter to err. The Thing re-constitutes the contemporary information paradigm, leaving us with/as an Earthly nature that was always already posthuman. You can read the paper here, or download a PDF, print it out, and pin it up at your next horror/sci-fi/philosophy convention.

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Fri, 19 Oct 2012 06:36:00 -0700 http://machinemachine.net/text/ideas/abject-materialities-an-ontology-of-everything-on-the-face-of-the-earth
<![CDATA[Binary Nomination]]> http://machinemachine.net/text/ideas/binary-nomination

‘An important feature of a learning machine is that its teacher will often be very largely ignorant of quite what is going on inside, although he may still be able to some extent to predict his pupil’s behaviour.’ Alan Turing, Computing Machinery and Intelligence (1950)

Replenishing each worn-out piece of its glimmering hull, one by one, the day arrives when the entire ship of Argo has been displaced – each of its parts now distinct from those of the ‘original’ vessel. For Roland Barthes, this myth exposes two modest activities:

Substitution (one part replaces another, as in a paradigm) Nomination (the name is in no way linked to the stability of the parts) 1

The discrete breaches the continuous in the act of nomination. Take for instance the spectrum of colours, the extension of which ‘is verbally reduced to a series of discontinuous terms’ 2 such as red, green, lilac or puce. Each colour has no cause but its name. By being isolated in language the colour ‘blue’ is allowed to exist, but its existence is an act of linguistic and, some would argue, perceptual severance. The city of Hull, the phrase “I will”, the surface of an ice cube and an image compression algorithm are entities each sustained by the same nominative disclosure: a paradox of things that seem to flow into one another with liquid potential, but things, nonetheless, limited by their constant, necessary re-iteration in language. There is no thing more contradictory in this regard than the human subject, a figure Barthes’ tried to paradoxically side-step in his playful autobiography. Like the ship of Argo, human experience has exchangeable parts, but at its core, such was Barthes’ intention, ‘the subject, unreconciled, demands that language represent the continuity of desire.’ 3

In an esoteric paper, published in 1930, Lewis Richardson teased out an analogy between flashes of human insight and the spark that leaps across a stop gap in an electrical circuit. The paper, entitled The Analogy Between Mental Images and Sparks, navigates around a provocative sketch stencilled into its pages of a simple indeterminate circuit, whose future state it is impossible to predict. Richardson’s playful label for the diagram hides a deep significance. For even at the simplest binary level, Richardson argued, computation need not necessarily be deterministic.

The discrete and the continuous are here again blurred by analogy. Electricity flowing and electricity not flowing: a binary imposition responsible for the entire history of information technology.

 

1 Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes (University of California Press, 1994), 46.

2 Roland Barthes, Elements of Semiology (Hill and Wang, 1977), 64.

3 Paul John Eakin, Touching the World: Reference in Autobiography (Princeton University Press, 1992), 16.

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Thu, 19 Jul 2012 09:32:00 -0700 http://machinemachine.net/text/ideas/binary-nomination
<![CDATA[The Great Pretender: Turing as a Philosopher of Imitation]]> http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/07/the-great-pretender-turing-as-a-philosopher-of-imitation/259824/

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 very old question about what makes someone (or something) capable of thought. In fact, he really skirts the question of intelligence entirely, replacing it with the outcomes of thought--in this case, the ability to perform "being human" as convincingly and interestingly as a real human. To be intelligent is to act like a human rather than to have a mind that operates like one. Or, even better, intelligence--whatever it is, the thing that goes on inside a human or a machine--is less interesting and productive a topic of conversation than the effects of such a process, the experience it creates in observers and interlocutors.

This is a kind of pretense most readily found on stage and on screen. An actor's craft is best described in terms of its effect, the way he or she portrays a part, elicits emotion

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Thu, 19 Jul 2012 08:20:00 -0700 http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/07/the-great-pretender-turing-as-a-philosopher-of-imitation/259824/
<![CDATA[The Mastery of Non-Mastery]]> http://lareviewofbooks.org/post/20167996473/the-mastery-of-non-mastery

There are two types of anthropologists: One models himself on the scientist, treating the world as his laboratory, people as his raw data. He mounts surveys, crunches numbers, and, crucially, remains detached and dispassionate throughout the process. He applies for big research grants with “expected outcomes” and “anticipated impact” carefully delineated long before he has gone out into the field. The other kind of anthropologist is more like a religious initiate, participating fully in the culture in which he is placed and intimating that he is then the possessor of some secret knowledge. Like an initiate, he cannot anticipate any “outcomes” before they happen but must simply live in the moment and immerse himself in the local customs and values.

It is this latter tradition of which Michael Taussig, an eminent professor at Columbia University, is one of the greatest exponents. The New York Times has called his work “gonzo anthropology.” He has drunk hallucinatory yagé on the sandy banks of the Putumayo River. He’s cured the sick with the aid of spirits. He’s escaped from guerrillas in a dugout canoe at dawn. Above all, he is interested in individual stories and experiences, unique tales that cannot be reduced to rational explanation or bland report. To read Taussig is to have an adventure in which one can move from Walter Benjamin’s experiments with hashish to American kids’ drawings to that dawn-lit canoe without skipping a beat. His narrative is lyrical, mesmeric.

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Sun, 08 Apr 2012 01:06:16 -0700 http://lareviewofbooks.org/post/20167996473/the-mastery-of-non-mastery
<![CDATA[Wired for Culture: How Language Enabled "Visual Theft," Sparked Innovation, and Helped Us Evolve]]> http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/02/28/mark-pagel-wired-for-culture/

Much has been said about what makes us human and what it means to be human. Language, which we’ve previously seen co-evolved with music to separate us from our primal ancestors, is not only one of the defining differentiators of our species, but also a key to our evolutionary success, responsible for the hallmarks of humanity, from art to technology to morality. So argues evolutionary biologist Mark Pagel in Wired for Culture: Origins of the Human Social Mind — a fascinating new addition to these 5 essential books on language, tracing 80,000 years of evolutionary history to explore how and why we developed a mind hard-wired for culture.

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Tue, 28 Feb 2012 06:35:34 -0800 http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/02/28/mark-pagel-wired-for-culture/
<![CDATA[The Spam of the Earth: Withdrawal from Representation (by Hito Steyerl)]]> http://www.e-flux.com/journal/the-spam-of-the-earth/

Image spam is one of the many dark matters of the digital world; spam tries to avoid detection by filters by presenting its message as an image file. An inordinate amount of these images floats around the globe, desperately vying for human attention.2 They advertise pharmaceuticals, replica items, body enhancements, penny stocks, and degrees. According to the pictures dispersed via image spam, humanity consists of scantily dressed degree-holders with jolly smiles enhanced by orthodontic braces.

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Sun, 12 Feb 2012 04:32:48 -0800 http://www.e-flux.com/journal/the-spam-of-the-earth/
<![CDATA[Computing Machinery and Intelligence (by Alan Turing)]]> http://www.loebner.net/Prizef/TuringArticle.html

I propose to consider the question, "Can machines think?" This should begin with definitions of the meaning of the terms "machine" and "think." The definitions might be framed so as to reflect so far as possible the normal use of the words, but this attitude is dangerous, If the meaning of the words "machine" and "think" are to be found by examining how they are commonly used it is difficult to escape the conclusion that the meaning and the answer to the question, "Can machines think?" is to be sought in a statistical survey such as a Gallup poll. But this is absurd. Instead of attempting such a definition I shall replace the question by another, which is closely related to it and is expressed in relatively unambiguous words.

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Mon, 31 Oct 2011 06:53:59 -0700 http://www.loebner.net/Prizef/TuringArticle.html
<![CDATA[The Doctrine of the Similar (GIF GIF GIF)]]> http://machinemachine.net/portfolio/the-doctrine-of-the-similar-gif-gif-gif

In two short essays – written in 1933 – Walter Benjamin argues that primitive language emerged in magical correspondence with the world. The faculty we all exhibit in childhood play, to impersonate and imitate people and things loses its determining power as language gradually takes over from our “non-sensuous” connection with reality. In a break from Saussurian linguistics, Benjamin decries the loss of this “mimetic faculty”, as it becomes further replaced by the “archive of non-sensuous correspondences” we know as writing. To put it in simpler terms… Where once we read the world, the stars or the entrails of a sacrificed animal, now we read the signs enabled and captured by written language. From Benjamin’s The Doctrine of the Similar: “So speed, the swiftness in reading or writing which can scarcely be separated from this process, would then become… the effort or gift of letting the mind participate in that measure of time in which similarities flash up fleetingly out of the stream of things only in order to become immediately engulfed again.” The GIF – standing for Graphical Interchange Format – has been around since 1987. Their early popularity was based, in part, on their ability to load in time with a web-page. In the days of poor bandwidth and dial-up connections this meant that at least part of a GIF image would appear before the user’s connection broke, or – more significantly – the user could see enough of the image for it to make sense. In the mid 90s avid web hackers managed to crack the code of GIFs and use this ‘partial loading’ mechanism to encode animations within a single GIF file. Thus the era of personal web pages saturated with looping animations of spinning hamsters was born. Brought on – ironically – by their obsolescence the GIF has become the medium of choice for web artists, propagating their particular net-aesthetic through this free, open and kitschy medium. GIFs inhabit the space between convenience and abundance, where an apparent breakdown in communication can stimulate new modes of expressing non-sensuous similarities in the internet world. Sites like dump.fm, 4chan and ytmnd revel in the GIF’s ability to quickly correspond to the world. GIFs can be broken into their constituent frames, compressed and corrupted on purpose and made to act as archives for viral events travelling the web. A playground of correspondences that at first reflected language and the wider world, in time has looked increasingly inward. As language and writing find themselves pulled through and energised by the semiotic sludge of the broken, corrupted and iconic animated GIF Benjamin’s sensitivity to similitude continues to echo its magical significance. GIFs take a variety of forms, some of which I will try to classify for you: GIF Type I: Classic

Small in size and made up of few frames, this is where animated GIFs began. Corresponding to single words or concepts such as ‘smile’, ‘alien’ or ‘flying pink unicorn’ GIF Type II: Frame Capture

Frame grab or video capture GIFs pay homage to well known scenes in pop culture. But as the ‘art’ of animated GIFs grew the frame capture began to stand for something isolated from context. This leap is, for me, the first point at which GIFs begin to co-ordinate their own realm of correspondence. An ocean of viral videos turned into a self-serving visual language, looping back on itself ad infinitum. GIF Type III: Art

Leaking then directly into the third category, we have the Art GIF. Much larger in resolution and aware of their heritage in cinema, these GIFs are acutely refined in their choice of framing. GIF Type IV: Glitch

A badly encoded or compressed GIF can result in odd, strangely beautiful phenomena, and with a little skill and coding ability these glitches can be enhanced to enormous proportions. Glitch GIFs break the boundaries of another non-sensuous realm: that of computer code. A significant magical order Benjamin was little capable of predicting. GIF Type V: Mash-Up

Lastly, and perhaps most prolific, is the mash-up GIF. These GIFs are comprised of a combination of all the previous forms. The mash-up is THE most inner-looking species of GIF. It is possible to track the cultural development of some of these. Often though, the source of any original correspondence becomes completely lost in the play of images. Here again, I think Benjamin’s essay can help us: “Language is the highest application of the mimetic faculty: a medium into which the earlier perceptive capabilities for recognising the similar had entered without residue, so that it is now language which represents the medium in which objects meet and enter into relationship with each other…” In other words, what these images MEAN I can’t tell you in words. But perhaps by showing you other GIFs I might go some way to helping you understand them.

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Wed, 25 May 2011 05:21:34 -0700 http://machinemachine.net/portfolio/the-doctrine-of-the-similar-gif-gif-gif
<![CDATA[Walter Benjamin, Doctrine of the Similar]]> http://www.scribd.com/doc/19792369/Walter-Benjamin-Doctrine-of-the-Similar

"Walter Benjamin, Doctrine of the Similar" #mimesis #similitude #language #philosophy #perception

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Mon, 16 May 2011 08:06:59 -0700 http://www.scribd.com/doc/19792369/Walter-Benjamin-Doctrine-of-the-Similar
<![CDATA[Takeshi Murata: Get Your Ass To Mars]]> http://tumblr.machinemachine.net/post/5240178214

If men really are from Mars, then Takeshi Murata’s new exhibition Get Your Ass To Mars at Ratio 3 in San Francisco might give us a sneak peak of some of the planets’ potential portraiture. Favoring work that cancross over different platforms, Murata moves away from the vivid animations that he’s known for, unveiling a new series of pigment prints using imagery rendered entirely on the computer. These prints, set in a virtual space, incorporate found objects including VHS tapes, ripe fruit, skulls and helmets, cracked iPhones, musical instruments, and beer bottles. The placement, angulation, and balance of the static objects emphasize the inherent tension and magnetism between them, at once unifying the images and giving a wink and a nod to the kinetic nature of his time-based videos. If you can’t make it to Ratio 3 to see this and the West Coast debut of “I, Popeye”, check out the slideshow above or see more stills from his work here.

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Fri, 06 May 2011 02:36:02 -0700 http://tumblr.machinemachine.net/post/5240178214
<![CDATA[Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media by Walter Benjamin]]> http://www.librarything.com/work/book/72715348

Harvard University Press (2008), Paperback, 448 pages

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Wed, 27 Apr 2011 01:45:58 -0700 http://www.librarything.com/work/book/72715348
<![CDATA[Analogue artists defying the digital age]]> http://guardian.co.uk/culture/2011/apr/24/mavericks-defying-digital-age

Dusty vinyl records, vintage film cameras, rickety typewriters and antiquated recording equipment … these are the creative tools being used by some emerging artists. Pure nostalgia? Or a laudable refusal to escape the speed and sanitised perfection of contemporary digital culture?

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Sun, 24 Apr 2011 06:39:12 -0700 http://guardian.co.uk/culture/2011/apr/24/mavericks-defying-digital-age
<![CDATA[Jacques Ranciere: What Medium Can Mean]]> http://parrhesiajournal.org/parrhesia11/parrhesia11_ranciere.pdf

I will present some remarks here on the use of the notion of medium in art theory and the light cast on this notion by the case of photography. The notion of medium is in fact much more complex than it appears at first. Theorizations of medium as the crucial element of artistic modernity bring two apparently opposite senses of the word into play. First, we understand the word ‘medium’ as ‘that which holds between’: between an idea and its realization, between a thing and its reproduction. The medium thus appears as an intermediary, as the means to an end or the agent of an operation. Now, modernist theorization makes ‘fidelity to the medium’ into the very principle of art, inverting the perspective. This medium to whose specificity one must be faithful is no longer simply the instrument of art. It becomes the specific materiality defining its essence. This is certainly the case in the Greenbergian definition of painting as that which is faithful to its own medium—

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Sat, 12 Mar 2011 01:55:38 -0800 http://parrhesiajournal.org/parrhesia11/parrhesia11_ranciere.pdf
<![CDATA[Similarities - a set on Flickr]]> http://www.flickr.com/photos/24140210@N05/sets/72157607329841191/with/4295713286/

The pairs of images in this "Similarities" set are similar visually in one way or another. They are presented without judgement as to the motives of their creators. The viewers of the pieces can form their own opinion(s) about what they see.

Some are "accidents": The creator of the similar piece had no knowledge of the original. Examples would be the 1982 Rafal Olbinski / New Pornographers posters and the Idea magazine cover / Okkervil River poster.

Some are "re-contextualized": Obscure imagery from long forgotten sources was used from vintage printed ephemera like 1940s and ’50s Popular Mechanics ads, matchbook covers, stamps, comic books, cook books, etc. giving them new life in a new form. An example would be the Czechoslovakian Matchbox Label and the Vibe Killers poster.

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Wed, 02 Mar 2011 06:28:57 -0800 http://www.flickr.com/photos/24140210@N05/sets/72157607329841191/with/4295713286/
<![CDATA[Ants mimic liquids to stay afloat]]> http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/nstv/2010/11/fluid-nature-ants-mimic-liquids-to-stay-afloat.html

Rain may seem a harmless nuisance to us humans, but for ants, it's a big deal. They can get trapped by just a single drop and risk drowning. Paradoxically, it's by mimicking liquids that ants manage to conquer them.

In the video above, Micah Streiff and his team from the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta captured writhing groups of ants behaving just like liquids. Working as a group they can turn themselves into a "raft" as they seek dry land or travel down a surface following the same physical rules as a viscous liquid. Thankfully, they haven't been caught mimicking your morning coffee just yet.

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Thu, 25 Nov 2010 03:36:00 -0800 http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/nstv/2010/11/fluid-nature-ants-mimic-liquids-to-stay-afloat.html
<![CDATA[In Praise of Copying: Get Your Free Copy]]> http://www.openculture.com/2010/11/in_praise_of_copying_grab_a_free_copy.html

Just a quick fyi: If you head over to the Harvard University Press web site, you can grab a free copy of Marcus Boon’s new book, In Praise of Copying, which makes the case that “copying is an essential part of being human, that the ability to copy is worthy of celebration, and that, without recognizing how integral copying is to being human, we cannot understand ourselves or the world we live in.” Boon is a writer, journalist and Associate Professor in the English Literature department at York University, Toronto. You can download a free copy of his book in PDF format straight from this link. (Note that the text is formally released under a Creative Commons license.) Or you can always purchase a printed copy online.

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Wed, 03 Nov 2010 08:26:00 -0700 http://www.openculture.com/2010/11/in_praise_of_copying_grab_a_free_copy.html
<![CDATA[Glitch Paintings]]> http://www.andydenzler.com/html/paintings-01.html

Andy Denzler does these great paintings that look as though they're highly compressed JPEGs with encoding issues.

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Thu, 21 Oct 2010 13:47:00 -0700 http://www.andydenzler.com/html/paintings-01.html