MachineMachine /stream - tagged with ontology https://machinemachine.net/stream/feed en-us http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss LifePress therourke@gmail.com <![CDATA[Vol. 30 No. 61-62 (2021): The Changing Ontology of the Image| The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics]]> https://tidsskrift.dk/nja/issue/view/9283

Vol. 30 No.

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Mon, 05 Jul 2021 02:36:39 -0700 https://tidsskrift.dk/nja/issue/view/9283
<![CDATA[The Changing Ontology of the Image | The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics]]> https://tidsskrift.dk/nja/issue/view/9283

Traditionally we think of images as relatively individualized or delimited phenomena that, in one way or the other, appear to the human mind and apparatus of perception. Currently, however, we are witnessing an intensification of what we might call thenetworkedness of the image along with a proliferation of machine imagery that operates independently of human perception and cognition. These “operative images” are, in Harun Farocki’s oft-cited formulation, “images without a social goal, not for edification, not for reflection”—they “do not represent an object, but rather are part of an operation.” In fact, one might claim that one of the characteristics of the contemporary image-space is its increasing integration of operational images and machine vision.

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Sun, 04 Jul 2021 22:36:39 -0700 https://tidsskrift.dk/nja/issue/view/9283
<![CDATA[The Closing of the Scientific Mind - David Gelernter, Commentary Magazine]]> https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/david-gelernter/the-closing-of-the-scientific-mind/

The huge cultural authority science has acquired over the past century imposes large duties on every scientist. Scientists have acquired the power to impress and intimidate every time they open their mouths, and it is their responsibility to keep this power in mind no matter what they say or do.

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Thu, 08 Apr 2021 05:55:18 -0700 https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/david-gelernter/the-closing-of-the-scientific-mind/
<![CDATA[The Noise of Being: available at sonicacts.com!]]> https://www.instagram.com/p/BYx8H4OgH9z/ ]]> Fri, 08 Sep 2017 05:37:51 -0700 https://www.instagram.com/p/BYx8H4OgH9z/ <![CDATA[Singularities panel, Transmediale 2017]]> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fd1LHsnlVC8

With Luiza Prado & Pedro Oliveira (A parede), Rasheedah Phillips, Dorothy R. Santos Moderated by Morehshin Allahyari and Daniel Rourke

A singularity is a point in space-time of such unfathomable density that the very nature of reality is brought into question. Associated with elusive black holes and the alien particles that bubble up from quantum foam at their event horizon, the term ‘singularity’ has also been co-opted by cultural theorists and techno-utopianists to describe moments of profound social, ontological, or material transformation—the coming-into-being of new worlds that redefine their own origins. Panelists contend with the idea of singularities and ruptures, tackling transformative promises of populist narratives, and ideological discrepancies that are deeply embedded in art and design practices. By reflecting on Afrofuturism and digital colonialism, they will also question narcissistic singularities of 'I,' 'here,' and 'now', counter the rhetoric of technological utopias, and confound principles of human universality.

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Wed, 01 Mar 2017 06:10:50 -0800 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fd1LHsnlVC8
<![CDATA[The Femunculus [NSFW] | Method]]> http://www.methodquarterly.com/2015/02/the-femunuculs/

Male bodies are seen as the default in biology. One artist is working towards helping us see the alternatives. In psychology, the homunculus is a visual representation of the sensory and motor cortices.

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Fri, 12 Jun 2015 02:01:59 -0700 http://www.methodquarterly.com/2015/02/the-femunuculs/
<![CDATA[Glitches in Things and the “Friendly Medium”]]> http://vimeo.com/84208956

This talk was original delivered at GLI.TC/H 2112, on Saturday 8th December 2012. The talk expands on ideas I have been carting around for a few of years now. Updated with Object Oriented insights I hope it acts as a mental toolkit for artists looking to dance with objects, in all their glitchy splendour. As usual, I completely ignored my notes whilst talking, for this reason it’s worth listening to the question and answer bit afterwards. See here for more: machinemachine.net/text/arts/an-object-oriented-glitch-ontology Infinite thanks must go to Rosa Menkman, Jon Satrom and Nick Briz – the GLI.TC/H Bots at the heart of the fest. Thank you for inviting me to participate.

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Wed, 15 Jan 2014 03:29:49 -0800 http://vimeo.com/84208956
<![CDATA[« The Closing of the Scientific Mind Commentary Magazine]]> http://www.commentarymagazine.com/article/the-closing-of-the-scientific-mind/

The huge cultural authority science has acquired over the past century imposes large duties on every scientist. Scientists have acquired the power to impress and intimidate every time they open their mouths, and it is their responsibility to keep this power in mind no matter what they say or do.

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Mon, 06 Jan 2014 04:54:15 -0800 http://www.commentarymagazine.com/article/the-closing-of-the-scientific-mind/
<![CDATA[An Ontology of Everything on the Face of the Earth]]> http://www.alluvium-journal.org/2013/12/04/an-ontology-of-everything-on-the-face-of-the-earth/

This essay was originally published as part of a special issue of Alluvium Journal on Digital Metaphors, edited by Zara Dinnen and featuring contributions from Rob Gallagher and Sophie Jones. John Carpenter’s 1982 film, The Thing, is a claustrophobic sci-fi thriller, exhibiting many hallmarks of the horror genre. The film depicts a sinister turn for matter, where the chaos of the replicating, cancerous cell is expanded to the human scale and beyond. In The Thing we watch as an alien force terrorises an isolated Antarctic outpost. The creature exhibits an awesome ability to imitate, devouring any creature it comes across before giving birth to an exact copy in a burst of blood and protoplasm. The Thing copies cell by cell and its process is so perfect – at every level of replication – that the resultant simulacrum speaks, acts and even thinks like the original. The Thing is so relentless, its copies so perfect, that the outpost’s Doctor, Blair, is sent mad at the implications: Blair: If a cell gets out it could imitate everything on the face of the Earth… and it’s not gonna stop!!! Based on John W. Campbell’s 1938 novella, Who Goes There?, Carpenter’s film revisits a gothic trope, as numerous in its incarnations as are the forms it is capable of taking. In Campbell’s original novella, the biologically impure is co-inhabited by a different type of infection: an infection of the Antarctic inhabitants’ inner lives. Plucked from an icy grave, The Thing sits, frozen solid, in a dark corner of the outpost, drip dripping towards re-animation. Before its cells begin their interstitial jump from alien to earthly biology, it is the dreams of the men that become infected: ‘So far the only thing you have said this thing gave off that was catching was dreams. I’ll go so far as to admit that.’ An impish, slightly malignant grin crossed the little man’s seamed face. ‘I had some, too. So. It’s dream-infectious. No doubt an exceedingly dangerous malady.’ (Campbell)

The Thing’s voracious drive to consume and imitate living beings calls to mind Freud’s uncanny: the dreadful creeping horror that dwells between homely and unhomely. According to Ernst Jentsch, whose work Freud references in his study, the uncanny is kindled, ‘when there is intellectual uncertainty whether an object is alive or not, and when an inanimate object becomes too much like an animate one’ (Grenville 233). A body in the act of becoming: John W. Campbell’s novella depicts The Thing as a monstrous body that “swallows the world and is itself swallowed by the world”

In the original novella, The Thing is condensed as much from the minds of the men, as from its own horrific, defrosting bulk. A slowly surfacing nightmare that acts to transform alien matter into earthly biology also has the effect of transferring the inner, mental lives of the men, into the resultant condensation. John W. Campbell had no doubts that The Thing could become viscous, mortal human flesh, but in order to truly imitate its prey, the creature must infect and steal inner life too, pulling ghosts, kicking and screaming, out of their biological machines. As a gothic figure, Campbell’s Thing disrupts the stable and integral vision of human being, of self-same bodies housing ‘unitary and securely bounded’ (Hurley 3) subjectivities, identical and extensive through time. John W. Campbell’s characters confront their anguish at being embodied: their nightmares are literally made flesh. As Kelly Hurley reminds us in her study on The Gothic Body, Mikhail Bakhtin noted: The grotesque body… is a body in the act of becoming. It is never finished, never completed; it is continually built, created, and builds and creates another body. Moreover, the body swallows the world and is itself swallowed by the world (Hurley 28). Each clone’s otherness is an uncanny exposure of the abject relationship we endure with ourselves as vicarious, fragmented, entropic forms. In the 44 years between the novella and John Carpenter’s 1982 film, there were many poor clones of The Thing depicted in cinema. Films such as Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) and, It Came from Outer Space (1953) are replete with alien dopplegangers, abject human forms, cast away very much as in gothic tradition. Howard Hawk’s film, The Thing from Another World (1951), the first to explicitly translate Who Goes There?, completely disfigures Campbell’s story. The resultant monster is nothing more than, what one character calls, ‘an intellectual carrot’, grown from alien cells in a laboratory. The film is worth considering though for its Cold War undertones. Recast in an Arctic military base, Hawk’s Thing is an isolated monster set against a small, well organised army of cooperative men. Faced with disaster the men group together, fighting for a greater good than each of them alone represents.

Cinematic clones of The Thing: 1950s American Science Fiction films like It Came From Outer Space and Invasion of the Body Snatchers are replete with alien doppelgangers and abject human forms [Images used under fair dealings provisions] The metaphor of discrete cells coordinating into autopoeitic organisms, does not extend to the inhabitants of the isolated Antarctic outpost in the original short story, nor in the 1982 version. Rather than unite against their foe, they begin to turn on each other, never knowing who might be The Thing. In a series of enactments of game-theory, the characters do piece together a collective comprehension: that if The Thing is to eventually imitate ‘everything on the face of the Earth’ it must not show itself now, lest the remaining humans group together and destroy it. The Thing’s alien biology calls to mind the original design of the internet, intended, according to Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri: …to withstand military attack. Since it has no center and almost any portion can operate as an autonomous whole, the network can continue to function even when part of it has been destroyed. The same design element that ensures survival, the decentralisation, is also what makes control of the network so difficult (Hardt and Negri 299). The novella Who Goes There? and the film, The Thing, sit either side of a pivotal era in the advancement of information technology. How a life form or a biological computer work is immaterial to the behaviours they present to an observer. John Carpenter’s The Thing explores the fulfilment of Alan Turing’s ‘Imitation Game.’ Moving away from Campbell’s original appeal to telepathy and a mind/body split, the materialist vision of Carpenter’s film confronts us with a more fundamental horror. That every part of us is reducible to every other. In her book Refiguring Life, Evelyn Fox Keller argues that: As a consequence of the technological and conceptual transformations we have witnessed in the last three decades, the body itself has been irrevocably transformed… The body of modern biology, like the DNA molecule – and also like the modern corporate or political body – has become just another part of an informational network, now machine, now message, always ready for exchange, each for the other (Keller 117–118). Meanwhile, eschewing Martin Heidegger’s definition of a thing (in which objects are brought out of the background of existence through human use), Bill Brown marks the emergence of things through the encounter: As they circulate through our lives… we look through objects because there are codes by which our interpretive attention makes them meaningful, because there is a discourse of objectivity that allows us to use them as facts. A thing, in contrast, can hardly function as a window. We begin to confront the thingness of objects when they stop working for us… (Brown 4).

A thing or an object? Bill Brown argues that we look through objects but are confronted by things [Image by Marc PhOtOnQuAnTiQuE under a CC BY-NC-ND license] In his infamous 1950 paper, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Alan Turing introduced the notion that a computer is nothing more than a machine that functions by pretending to be other machines. (Turing) Asking the question ‘can machines think?’ Turing replaced the ambiguity of ‘thought’ and ‘intelligence’ with imitation, proposing a test that avoided the need to know what was going on inside a machine, in favour of merely experiencing its affects. In a lecture entitled ‘Can Digital Computers Think?’, Turing expounds his point: It is not difficult to design machines whose behaviour appears quite random to anyone who does not know the details of their construction. Naturally enough the inclusion of this random element, whichever technique is used, does not solve our main problem, how to programme a machine to imitate a brain, or as we might say more briefly, if less accurately, to think. But it gives us some indication of what the process will be like. We must not always expect to know what the computer is going to do. We should be pleased when the machine surprises us, in rather the same way as one is pleased when a pupil does something which he had not been explicitly taught to do (Shieber 114–115). The mutability of Earthly life, its ability to err, to stumble upon novel strategies through random, blind chance, represents its most innate capacity. Biological life changes by mutation, passing those mutations on to the next generation, ad infinitum. The Thing, in opposition to this, can only become its other absolutely. There is no room for error, for mutation, for change or evolution: instead, The Thingly cadaver of Norris must protect its otherness in the only way it knows how: by transforming itself into a defensive form previously programmed and stored in its protoplasm. In terms of creativity it cannot escape its programming. Turing’s lecture hints at a further unsettling conclusion we can make: that even though novel behaviour may be consistent with error, from appearances alone it is impossible to distinguish something ontologically novel, with a behaviour which has been programmed to appear as such. The Thing is a Universal Turing Machine, a post-digital plasma, encoded with the biological ticker-tape of a thousand alien worlds. Put more simply, in the words of protagonist John MacReady: MacReady: Somebody in this camp ain’t what he appears to be. [my emphasis]

The “Gothicity” of matter? The digital metaphor of the Thing reveals that through imitation computers confer humanity upon us [Image by 

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Mon, 09 Dec 2013 10:34:38 -0800 http://www.alluvium-journal.org/2013/12/04/an-ontology-of-everything-on-the-face-of-the-earth/
<![CDATA[Otherkin]]> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otherkin

Otherkin are a community of people who see themselves as partially or entirely non-human. They contend that they are, in spirit if not in body,[2] not human. This is explained by some members of the otherkin community as possible through reincarnation, having a nonhuman soul, ancestry, or symbolic metaphor.[1] Scholarship has framed this claim as religious because it is frequently supported by a framework of metaphysical beliefs.[3] Not all otherkin necessarily share these beliefs; some may simply prefer to identify as non-human.

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Wed, 01 May 2013 14:02:59 -0700 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otherkin
<![CDATA[Object-Oriented Ontology Symposium]]> https://smartech.gatech.edu/handle/1853/33043

Ontology is the philosophical study of existence. Object-oriented ontology ("OOO" for short) puts things at the center of this study. Its proponents contend that nothing has special status, but that everything exists equally—plumbers, cotton, bonobos, DVD players, and sandstone, for example. In conte

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Tue, 22 Jan 2013 07:23:00 -0800 https://smartech.gatech.edu/handle/1853/33043
<![CDATA[artforum.com / in print]]> http://artforum.com/inprint/issue=201207&amp;id=31944

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 to get digital, too, harnessing the new technologies that were just beginning to transform our lives? But somehow the venture never

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Mon, 14 Jan 2013 17:29:00 -0800 http://artforum.com/inprint/issue=201207&amp;id=31944
<![CDATA[An Object Oriented Glitch Ontology?]]> http://machinemachine.net/portfolio/an-object-oriented-glitch-ontology

I took a trip to Chicago for GLI.TC/H 2112! – A conference/festival/carnival/movement in honour (and despite) of hardware/software/wetware errors, databends and feedback blackholes. I took a ton of photographs, you can view them on Flickr (better quality) or Facebook (dotted with comments, insights and exultations from the GLI.TC/H community). I intend to write more about the event, but for now I will post my talk here, which I gave on Saturday 8th December. It’s title is Glitches in Things and the “Friendly Medium”, a talk expanding on an idea I have been carting around for a couple of years now. Updated with Object Oriented insights I hope it acts as a mental toolkit for artists looking to dance with objects, in all their glitchy splendour. As usual, I completely ignored my notes whilst talking, for this reason it’s worth listening to the question and answer bit afterwards. Infinite thanks must go to Rosa Menkman, Jon Satrom and Nick Briz – the GLI.TC/H Bots at the heart of the fest. Thank you for inviting me to participate. More on OOO, glitches, kipple and Things to come reeeeal soon… (the talky bit starts a few minutes in)

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Mon, 10 Dec 2012 15:22:00 -0800 http://machinemachine.net/portfolio/an-object-oriented-glitch-ontology
<![CDATA[Why OOO?]]> http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2012/11/13/why-ooo/

In my view, Continental theory and philosophy has been overly dominated by a focus on text and the lived experience of human beings, ignoring the role played by nonhuman entities in social assemblages. This, at least, was the conclusion I had reached by the end of my graduate education at Loyola University of Chicago. My courses were dominated Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Levinas, as well as Derrida, Deleuze, Foucault, Gadamer, Lacan, and Zizek. There was also a strong ground in the history of philosophy focused on Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche. Some of my classmates would joke that I was permanently living in the “transcendental epoche” bubble, as I was, after an obsession with Heidegger, intoxicated by the thought of Husserl. Later that obsession shifted to Derrida, Lacan and Hegel, and I spent a tremendous amount of time exploring the French structuralist semioticians as well as the semiotics of Charles Sanders Pierce (the latter, much to the dismay of my Continental col

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Wed, 14 Nov 2012 04:38:00 -0800 http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2012/11/13/why-ooo/
<![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[Conference Panel: How to Survive in a Post-Zombie Digital Landscape]]> http://www.scribd.com/doc/215715678/Panel-delivered-‘Figuring-Genre-in-Contemporary-Culture-How-to-Survive-in-a-Post-Zombie-Digital-Landscape’

ASAP/4: Genres of the Present Conference, Royal College of Art, ‘Abject Materialities (an Ontology of Every Thing on the Face of the Earth)’ as part of panel, ‘Figuring Genre in Contemporary Culture: How to Survive in a Post-Zombie Digital Landscape’, with Zara Dinnen, Rob Gallagher and Simon Clark, October 4th-6th 2012

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Thu, 04 Oct 2012 08:26:41 -0700 http://www.scribd.com/doc/215715678/Panel-delivered-‘Figuring-Genre-in-Contemporary-Culture-How-to-Survive-in-a-Post-Zombie-Digital-Landscape’
<![CDATA[IS ONTOLOGY MAKING US STUPID?]]> http://t.co/qo21Rjl2

HARMAN AND OBJECT-ORIENTED ONTOLOGY

In THE THIRD TABLE, Harman gives a brief summary of the principle themes of his object-oriented ontology. It is a little book, published this year in a bilingual (English-German) edition, and theEnglish text occupies a little over 11 pages (p4-15). The content is quite engaging as Harman accomplishes the exploit of presenting his principal ideas in the form of a response to Eddington’s famous “two tables” argument. This permits him toformulate his arguments in terms of a continuous polemic against reductionism in both its humanistic and scientistic forms. All that is fine, so far as it goes. However, problems arise when we examine his presentation of each of Eddington’s two tables, and even more so with his presentation of his own contribution to the discussion: a “third table”, the only real one in Harman’s eyes.

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Thu, 20 Sep 2012 07:35:00 -0700 http://t.co/qo21Rjl2
<![CDATA[Synthetic Biology: Designing a “Metaphysical” Chicken]]> http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/6073

The ultimate design material is one that understands what it is to become. By way of an example, I’d like to think about how we might design a chicken. Think of the creativity of Nature – which, in very real terms can: • Transform an acorn into a giant oak tree • Change the colour of a chameleon • Ev

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Wed, 05 Sep 2012 01:20:00 -0700 http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/6073
<![CDATA[Synthetic Biology: Designing a “Metaphysical” Chicken]]> http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/6073

The ultimate design material is one that understands what it is to become. By way of an example, I’d like to think about how we might design a chicken. Think of the creativity of Nature – which, in very real terms can: • Transform an acorn into a giant oak tree • Change the colour of a chameleon • Ev

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Wed, 05 Sep 2012 01:20:00 -0700 http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/6073
<![CDATA[digital divide: contemporary art and new media - artforum.com / in print]]> http://artforum.com/inprint/issue=201207&id=31944

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 to get digital, too, harnessing the new technologies that were just beginning to transform our lives? But somehow the venture never

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Tue, 04 Sep 2012 06:17:00 -0700 http://artforum.com/inprint/issue=201207&id=31944