We’ve all heard the statistics. That in America, there is a mass shooting every day, that one hundred Americans die from gun violence daily, that access to a gun doubles and triples the risks of death by homicide and suicide respectively.

In 2016, Marshall University professor Jason Morrissette was playing Batman: Arkham Knight. While sneaking around the shadows, Morrissette stumbled upon a soda machine. Like many games, Akrham Knight doesn’t feature any real-life soda products; that’d cost money.

In What Is Posthumanism? Cary Wolfe insists “the nature of thought itself must change if it is to be posthumanist.

Authors: R. Guevara Erra, D. M. Mateos, R. Wennberg, J.L. Perez Velazquez Abstract: It has been said that complexity lies between order and disorder. In the case of brain activity, and physiology in general, complexity issues are being considered with increased emphasis.

Can anyone suggest artists working with plant life or fungus, growing, breeding, cultivating?

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

In this feature essay, Ninna Meier reflects on the materiality of the writing – and re-writing – process in academic research.

There’s a battle raging over whether academic research should be free, and it’s overflowing into the dark web.

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.

I read a lot of content from articles/essays I save online. Sometimes I want to annotate these articles and organise them for research purposes. At the moment the best way to do this is Evernote, but I find the iPad / Android app clunky for reading and highlighting. The interface is designed for writing, and is a constant frustration. Are there any better solutions? Other 'solutions' I have tried:

Pocket: a fantastic service, I just wish they would add highlighting and notes!

Instapaper: offers a paid highlighting service. The app is great for reading, but for organising and extracting notes later it isn't good. Plus, the fee is too high.

Kindle: for a while I saved articles to Kindle for later highlighting. Is worked pretty well until I wanted to extract my notes, at which point I came up against the closed wall of the Amazon system.

Diigo: their online highlighting service is pretty fantastic, but the iPad app is just awful, and hardly works as it is supposed to.

Convert to pdf: I could convert everything I want to read/highlight to PDF and use an app like the fantastic PDF Expert to highlight and save. But this feels like too much hard work.

This is a question that has been asked before. But I am hoping that something new and extraordinary has come along!

An historic milestone in artificial intelligence set by Alan Turing - the father of modern computer science - has been achieved at an event organised by the University of Reading.

Thence emerged the story of Robinson, in the way a dream might occur. When this dream was published, however, all Europe realized that it had been dreaming it.. They would make their islands in their own image.

In a paper published last year, I argued for a different way of understanding the emergence of hacker culture.

An historic milestone in artificial intelligence set by Alan Turing - the father of modern computer science - has been achieved at an event organised by the University of Reading.

shimmeringworldconference:

Vendosculant / Hannah Sawtell 2012 / Image courtesy: the artist and VIlma Gold We can now confirm the following schedule for Shimmering World: —————————————————————————————————————————————- 10.00 – Introduction from conference organisers Paul Clinton & Luke Healey First session (10.10-12.00) Keynote – Dr. Tamara Trodd (University of Edinburgh) Ian Rothwell (PhD candidate, University of Edinburgh) – ‘Bad as in Bad: Collapsing Production Values in Thomas Ruff’s Jpegs’ Harry Sanderson (artist, Arcadia Missa) – ‘In Detail: High-Definition Amplified and Amputated’ Daniel Rourke (PhD candidate, Goldsmiths College)– ‘“I like the glow that flashes red like our Krypton sun. But not this irritating noise. Make way.”’ 12.00 – Break Second session (12.20-14.10) Keynote – David Panos (Hollybush Gardens) Hannah Ellul (PhD candidate, Goldsmiths College) – ‘Picturing Political Agency: Anja Kirschner and David Panos’ Melissa Gronlund (co-editor, Afterall) – ‘Polyphony: The Dialogic and the Digital’ Dr. Cadence Kinsey (postdoctoral fellow, University College London) – ‘Semi-Automatic Images: from HD to materiality’ 14.10 –Lunch (not provided) Third session (15.00-17.10) Keynote – Ed Atkins (Cabinet/Goldsmiths College) Linda Stupart (PhD candidate, Goldsmiths College/associate lecturer, London College of Communication) – ‘Old Objects/New Materialisms’ Sheena Culley (PhD candidate, London Graduate School) – ‘The Photography of David LaChapelle: Reflections on Skin’ Shama Khanna (curator, flatness.eu) – ‘The Resistance of the Immaterial Image’ Kathy Noble (curator, Wysing Arts Centre) – ‘A Material World: The Late Late-Capitalist Body’’ 5.10 – Break 5.30 – Concluding Roundtable with keynote speakers Ed Atkins, David Panos and Dr. Tamara Trodd 6.00 – End of conference —————————————————————————————————————————————-  Hannah Sawtell’s contribution TBA  Event is free but booking is essential: tickets available at Eventbrite  

Human genome pioneer J. Craig Venter announced plans Tuesday to sequence the gene maps of 40,000 volunteers in a bid to crack the secrets of healthy human aging.

The history of Artificial Intelligence,” said my computer science professor on the first day of class, “is a history of failure.” This harsh judgment summed up 50 years of trying to get computers to think.

The road to a PhD is a common source of frustration. It is time to acknowledge and contest this experience as the outcome of a disciplinarian process.

As a faceless PhD student in a social science-y department, I repeatedly catch myself with the strangest metaphors to describe my research experience. The latest one is of academic work as a love relationship with a RealDoll: a lifestyle requiring sustained commitment and a rich (puppetry) skill set, to spin a tapestry of memories around an elegantly irrelevant act of masturbation.

The more I delve into this malaise, the more I become dissatisfied with the folk psychology of peer support inside a PhD community, with older students relating how their ideas got scrapped — sometimes beyond recognition — under the weight of what goes under the name of ‘constructive criticism’ (that, not unlike construction, requires a previous hollowing out of an organic soil to lay concrete foundations). These tales remind me a bit of stories of bullying in the army: we might all have been affected by it but, after the fact, end up looking back at it with some nostalgia, perhaps even a hint of gratitude, and rationalize it as a ‘formative’ experience. Lurking beneath the informal practices of peer support, however, lies buried a much deeper question of knowledge politics, and one that PhD students stupendously fail at engaging politically.

The PhD student is, essentially, a candidate for co-optation in academia. The mechanism is such that the PhD candidate is successfully co-opted upon favorable judgment by at least two other peers, an internal and an external examiner. In this sense, the process of becoming an academic is remarkably similar to that of joining a Rotary Club, or a circle of Freemasons (which, let’s face it, are not the most inclusive organizations in the world!). This somewhat paternalistic mechanism imbues a number of different aspects of the doctoral experience, down to the student-supervisor relationship, which in turn raises a number of political issues. Unfortunately, the failure to apprehend the structural constraints that are embedded in the very set-up for a PhD makes it so that any political points are simply driven underground, buried in the passing rants that PhD students share with one another in fleeting moments of bonding, with the secrecy and truth that accompanies anything shared in vino veritas.

In my tenure as a PhD student, I have possibly learnt one thing about what makes for a ‘good’ PhD. A good PhD is one that turns a captivating idea into a piece of writing that is so dry and mind-numbingly boring as to be utterly unpalatable to its author – who often feels estranged from the final product of his or her multi-year toil – and that is only read (if at all) by others who have an obligation to read it in a professional capacity. No one cares about PhD theses; in fact, even publishers routinely dismiss raw PhD dissertations. Instead, they request a ‘revision’ that amounts to the purging of one’s original idea from the ‘noise’ it has been drowned in, in order to get the academic title.

I am very pleased to have an essay/chapter in This Mess is a Place, a collection on hoarding and clutter, edited, compiled and misfiled by Zoë Mendelson. The book is currently available at Camden Arts Centre, with wider distribution to follow from the very wonderful AND Publishing.

This Mess is a Place: A Collapsible Anthology of Collections and Clutter is a limited edition publication, edited/curated by Zoë Mendelson and published by And Publishing.

This publication looks at the onset of hoarding through the voices of clinicians and expands the theme to examine how relationships to objects in space inform a number of fields in ways that can be seen to interrelate and impact upon each other. The idea behind the form of this anthology is that practice and artistic research can co-exist with more clinical and scientific research. It is hoped this will create overlaps and crises of ‘usefulness’ akin to the submersion of materials within a hoard or the pursuit of order within a collection. The publication itself is unbound – illogical and precarious as an object, containing loose leaves, pamphlets and nominal filing systems, gathered together in no particular order. The reader is ultimately responsible for the order (or dis-order) of the piece. Publication date is October 26th 2013.

It includes articles, artworks, interviews and fiction. Alongside This Mess is a Place's own collaborators from psychiatric and archival fields there are contributions of artistic projects from Jim Bay (UK); Michel Blazy (FR); Carrie M Becker (USA); Marjolijn Dijkman (NL); Nat Goodden (UK), Jefford Horrigan (UK); Dean Hughes (UK); Mierle Laderman Ukeles (USA); Robert Melee (USA); Zoë Mendelson (UK); Florence Peake (UK); Michael Samuels (UK); Kathryn Spence (USA); Tomoko Takahashi; Robin Waart (NL); Julian Walker (UK) and Laura White (UK).

The publication contains essays and documents by Dr. Colin Jones (Senior Lecturer/Researcher in Applied Health and Social Sciences, UK); Dr. Haidy Geismar (lecturer in digital anthropology and material culture, US/UK); Jeremy Gill (urban planner and theorist, AUS); Cecilie Gravesen (artist, curator and writer, UK/Den); Dr. Alberto Pertusa (consultant psychiatrist, UK); Daniel Rourke (artist and researcher, UK); Isobel Hunter (archivist and Head of Engagement at the National Archives, UK); Satwant Singh (nurse practitioner and cognitive behavourial therapist, UK); Nina Folkersma (curator and critic, NL); Alberto Duman (artist, writer, UK). A full list of essay titles can be seen here. The publication also includes documentary photography by Paula Salischiker (ARG) and an interview with an anonymous hoarder's daughter