LAGOS — Adegunji Kazeem vividly remembers the day his life fell apart. It was December 4, 2019. Kazeem was a final-year student at the University of Lagos and writing his undergraduate thesis, a requirement for graduation.

In mid-January, a group of computer scientists and biologists from the University of Vermont, Tufts, and Harvard announced that they had created an entirely new life form — xenobots, the world’s first living robots.

21.10.2016 We are living in the digital era, no doubt. Everything is going digital lately, so it’s no surprise to also see the growth of the digital art sphere. Today let’s focus on glitch art.

I will deliver this 4-week public series at The Tate Modern throughout July 2016. Sign up! Thanks to Viktoria Ivanova for working with me to achieve this.

Data is the lifeblood of today’s economic and social systems. Drones, satellites and CCTV cameras capture digital images covertly, while smartphones we carry feed data packets into the cloud, fought over by corporations and governments. How are we to make sense of all this information? Who is to police and distribute it? And what kind of new uses can art put it to? This four-week series led by writer/artist Daniel Rourke will explore the politics and potential of big data through the lens of contemporary art and the social sciences. Participants will assess the impact the digital revolution has had on notions of value attached to the invisible, the territorial and the tangible. We will look at artists and art activists who tackle the conditions of resolution, algorithmic governance, digital colonialism and world-making in their work, with a focus on key news events yet to unfold in 2016. Session 1 Hito Steyerl: Poor Image Politics In this first session we will examine the politics of image and data resolution, with special attention to the work of artist Hito Steyerl represented in the Tate Collection. How do poor images influence the significance and value of the events they depict? What can online cultures that fetishise poor quality teach us about the economics and autonomy of information? Is being a low resolution event in a field of high resolutions an empowering proposition? Session 2 Morehshin Allahyari: Decolonising the Digital Archive 3D scanning and printing technologies are becoming common tools for archaeologists, archivists and historians. We will examine the work of art activists who question these technologies, connecting the dots from terroristic networks, through the price of crude oil, to artefacts being digitally colonised by Western institutions. Artist Morehshin Allahyari will join us via skype to talk about Material Speculation: ISIS – a series of artifacts destroyed by ISIS in 2015, which Allahyari then ‘recreated’ using digital tools and techniques. Session 3 Mishka Henner: Big Data and World Making In this session we will explore the work of artists who channel surveillance and big data into the poetic re-making of worlds. We will compare and contrast nefarious ‘deep web’ marketplaces with ‘real world’ auction houses selling artworks to a global elite. Artist Mishka Henner will join us via skype to talk about artistic appropriation, subversion and the importance of provocation. Session 4 Forensic Architecture: Blurring the Borders between Forensics, Law and Art The Forensic Architecture project uses analytical methods for reconstructing scenes of war and violence inscribed within spatial artefacts and environments. In this session we will look at their work to read and mobilise ‘ambient’ information gathered from satellites, mobile phones and CCTV/news footage. How are technical thresholds implicated in acts of war, terrorism and atrocity, and how can they be mobilised for resist and deter systemic violence?

Automated Insights has opened up beta access to Wordsmith, its platform for automating repetitive, time-consuming writing tasks using your data.

I wrote a short piece for Grafik Magazine’s Screenshot feature: Moravec’s Paradox states that ‘low-level’ sensorimotor skills require far more computational resources than ‘high-level’ abstract reasoning. In general terms, this translates into the doctrine that computers are very good at solving some types of problems, humans at others. Picking out the face of a loved one in a packed crowd and walking over to embrace them is laughably easy for a human to do, but not a robot. Alternatively, calculating the square-root of 1,276,433,9 takes a cheap pocket calculator a few nanoseconds. As for a human? Well, try it out for yourself * Sustained by these principles, a new breed of machine/human hybrid systems have begun infecting our social and economic networks. Rather than imitate tasks that humans can do effortlessly, these programs are built to work with us, allowing the distinct strengths of human and ‘artificial’ intelligences to coalesce. One particularly intriguing example of this is the reCaptcha password system. Maintained by Google, reCaptcha is employed hundreds of millions of times every day, according to Google’s own promotional blurb, to ‘stop spam, read books’. You yourself — perhaps without knowing it — have taken part in a vast online act of computation, donating a short burst of your highly evolved pattern recognition skill to Google’s project of digitising every one of the world’s printed books. The reCaptcha system is doubly fascinating in regards Moravec’s Paradox because it marks the meeting-point between low-level and high-level computable problems. Every password is guessable given enough time and computer resources. Alternatively, the smudged word on page 286, line forty three of the Magna Carta is incredibly difficult for a computer to recognise. If it fails, a different smudge with a different ‘solution’ is pulled from the database, ensuring your email account remains secure. Whilst determining whether or not you are a human the reCaptcha software quietly hijacks your biological brain, translating the task it has been allotted to protect your data into a moment of distributed, invisible labour. The question is: who or what is using who or what, for what or whom? Systems like reCaptcha could be hailed as the birth of a ‘world brain’: a thinking web connecting everyone on Earth into a vast meta-mind capable of incredible feats of computation. The truth, however, is both far more mundane and far more profound in its implications. A generation or two ago we envisaged the future as a place where intricate machines would carry out most menial tasks, leaving humans free to contemplate their place in the universe, embrace loved ones in crowds, and sunbathe under the depleted ozone layer. Instead, we have inherited a world where humans carry out menial tasks at the bequest of machines, whilst maintaining the illusion that it is we, personally, who have benefited from each transaction. Every click and swipe of your finger is a collaboration between invisible entities — corporate, synthetic or not-even-invented yet. Next time you scan your own produce at the supermarket, track your eating and exercise habits, and upload them to a corporately maintained database, follow the advice of a piece of software on which stock to sell, or which car to buy, search Google for a weird string of misspelt terms, or retweet a Twitter bot, you are taking part in a vast experiment that has already evolved beyond any single person or machine’s ability to comprehend. The future of information is augmented, symbiotic, invisible and incessant. But does it belong to users? Corporations? Or semi-autonomous machines? Only you and your synthetic assistants can decide. * The answer, according to my smartphone, is 3572.7215116770576

In 2007 game designer and Second Life CEO Rod Humble wrote a video game called The Marriage[1]. The player’s goal in The Marriage is to prevent two squares from shrinking or fading out while circles drift around them

Here’s how Hollywood works today: Somebody writes a script. And especially if it’s an animated feature--a piece that will take hundreds of Pixar artists years to produce--there’s almost no chance it will be made.

For the first time in memory, adults in the United States under age forty are now expected to be poorer than their parents. This is the kind of grim reality that in other times and places spurred young people to look abroad for opportunity.

Hardcore Software presents Piracy Today, a platform for actions an interventions that challenge our dominant cultural order. The pilot exhibition presents work by four artists and practitioners who use piracy to interrogate patterns of cultural transmission.

http://hardcoresoftware.org/

Wednesday 28 August 2013 | 6-10pm Open discussion starts at 7pm Penthouse 4C, Barbican Centre Foyer

FEATURING WORK BY AND Publishing | Martin Dittus | Geraldine Juarez | Lawrence Lek

OPEN DISCUSSION 7-8.30pm Hosted by Rachel Falconer (Curator) Stuart Bannocks (Designer & Theorist) Ami Clarke (Artist & Curator) Martin Dittus (Hacker) Lawrence Lek (Artist) Daniel Rourke (Artist & Writer)

Why look at animated GIFs now? They are one of the first forms of image native to computer networks making them charmingly passé, a characteristic that gives them contradictory longevity. Animated GIFs crystallise a form of the combination of computing and the camera. As photography moves almost entirely into digital modes, the fascination with such quirky formats increases. The story of photography will be, in no small part, that of its file formats, the kinds of compression and storage it undergoes, as they in turn produce what is conjurable as an image. The Graphics Interchange Format was first developed through the computer network firm Compuserve. As an eight-bit file format it introduced the amazing spectacle of 256 colour images to be won over the thin lines of dial-up connections. Due to this, when a picture is converted to GIF, it’s likely that posterization occurs – where gradations of tone turn to patches of reduced numbers of colours. Such aliasing introduces a key part of their aesthetic, something described by the Lempel-Ziv-Welch (LZW) compression that lies at the format’s core. Characteristic of images in the present era its history is entangled with the imaginings and instruments of “intellectual property”. The LZW format was itself the site for a protracted and infamous attempt at patent enforcement in the USA that dragged on from 1994 until 2003 prompting the rapid development of the alternative PNG format.

For medical researchers and biochemists, simulation software will vastly speed the early stages of screening for new compounds. And for molecular biologists, models that are of sufficient accuracy will yield new understanding of basic cellular principles.

This kind of modeling is already in use to study individual cellular processes like metabolism. But Dr. Covert said: “Where I think our work is different is that we explicitly include all of the genes and every known gene function. There’s no one else out there who has been able to include more than a handful of functions or more than, say, one-third of the genes.”

The simulation of the complete life cycle of the pathogen, Mycoplasma genitalium, was presented on Friday in the journal Cell. The scientists called it a “first draft” but added that the effort was the first time an entire organism had been modeled in such detail — in this case, all of its 525 genes.

Craig Venter spins increasingly ubiquitous metaphor: "The digital and biological worlds are becoming interchangeable"

"All living cells that we know of on this planet are 'DNA software'-driven biological machines comprised of hundreds of thousands of protein robots, coded for by the DNA, that carry out precise functions," said Venter. "We are now using computer software to design new DNA software."

The digital and biological worlds are becoming interchangeable, he added, describing how scientists now simply send each other the information to make DIY biological material rather than sending the material itself.

Grandmasters of comparable skill now come to championship games with computer-generated analysis of their opponents’ opening lines and likely moves. Home preparation has always been important, but computers have made it much more so and have thereby changed the nature of the game. Now risky plays are almost inevitably punished because they’ve been anticipated, making Anand’s play in Game 8 of the recent championship a rare exception.

Computers don’t play chess perfectly — the game is far too complicated for that — but they play in a way that’s more exciting and more decisive. They also play better than humans. Which is why since chess is no longer about just two humans facing each other anyway — thanks to pre-game computer-assisted preparation — it makes sense to allow the use of computers during competitive games. (Of course, for the sake of fairness, the two players would have equal access to the same computer engine.)

Letting microchips make a few mistakes here and there could make them much faster and more energy-efficient.

Managing the probability of errors and limiting where they occur can ensure that the errors do not cause any problems. The result of a mathematical calculation, for example, need not always be calculated precisely—an accuracy of two or three decimal places is often enough. Dr Palem offers the analogy of a person about to cross a big room. Rather than wasting time and energy calculating the shortest path, it’s better just to start walking in roughly the right direction.

I'm looking for examples of websites that have successfully enhanced a research community (academic or artistic) with a dynamic online/social/mutual-portfolio presence. Blog and social media based hubs, perhaps, that showcase the possibilities of web portfolio/research integration for academic and creative purposes. I've been asked to help implement a website/blogging platform for a community of 20 MFA students.

Basically I'd like to gather up some examples of dynamic websites attached to academia (or similar i.e. the arts). These examples will be then passed on to my superiors with an eye to developing our own platform that takes the best approaches we discover and adds/mutates them to our needs. The cream of the crop in terms of design, content and implementation.

The perfect fit would (perhaps) give each student their own (blog) space from day one, and have the content they choose to share dynamically interface with the other students as the course unfolds. We might use it as a portfolio format (the students are studying art and writing) or we might integrate it with the theoretical components of the course, use it to share tutorial feedback, or even open the reading we do to the wider world.

Ideally we will do this cheaply, with open-source software.

Send me some impressive and inspiring examples!

Cheers in advance

Berry’s book is less one specific philosophical argument of what software is and what code does, but consists of chapters that illuminate different ways one can approach software and software culture philosophically. It gives a broad way of looking at the way in which code mediates and media is nowadays coded. As such, it indeed is good in tapping into various fields of philosophy: ontology (what is code as mode of abstraction from voltage differences to assembly languages), aesthetics and phenomenology (algorithmic art and how do we experience code), epistemology (how do we understand, make sense of code and how does code alter ways of knowing) and politics (e-politics). In politics, Berry asks a Latour-influenced question of how running politics works now through running code with an important insight into their entanglement: “I think of the technical-political as a subset of political rights that can be coded and materialised into specific technical functions”

On June 17, 2010, Sergey Ulasen was in his office in Belarus sifting through e-mail when a report caught his eye. A computer belonging to a customer in Iran was caught in a reboot loop — shutting down and restarting repeatedly despite efforts by operators to take control of it. It appeared the machine was infected with a virus. Ulasen heads an antivirus division of a small computer security firm in Minsk called VirusBlokAda. Once a specialized offshoot of computer science, computer security has grown into a multibillion-dollar industry over the last decade keeping pace with an explosion in sophisticated hack attacks and evolving viruses, Trojan horses and spyware programs.

The best security specialists, like Bruce Schneier, Dan Kaminsky and Charlie Miller are considered rock stars among their peers, and top companies like Symantec, McAfee and Kaspersky have become household names, protecting everything from grandmothers’ laptops to sensitive military networks.

What is a book, really? For that matter, what is an article, a record, or a movie? For each of these, I have a very clear picture in my mind that says more about when I came of age than about the content itself. When I think of books, my mind retrieves an image of my grandparents’ bookshelves, which I used to browse after school as a child. Records? I see the CD stacks of my teenage years, collected from local music shops and trading with friends. And somehow, thinking about movies still produces images of VHS tapes and memories of frustratedly fixing the tracking on my VCR. No doubt, future generations will have very different associations. (Or, more disturbingly, some readers of this column won’t even know what a VCR is. Just Google it.)

Words, music, and films are all content experiences that we’ve come to know just as much by their containers as by their substance.

This is the research wiki-webring for Glitch and other glitch/noise related content GLI.TC/H is an international gathering of noise & new media practitioners in Chicago & Amsterdam from September 29 thru October 03, 2010! GLI.TC/H is a physical and virtual assembly of artists, hackers, moshers, dirty mediators, noise makers, circuit benders, p/h/i/l/o/s/o/p/h/e/r/s, and those who find wonder in that which others call broken. GLI.TC/H seeks: Realtime + time-based performances (audio/video), utilizing broken/bent technologies/strategies. Workshops, sharing knowledge of hardware/software hacking, cracking, breaking, kludging, piracy, & tool building. Artworks and Projects, artware, videos, games, films, tapes, code, interventions, screen-captures, systems, websites & installations. Texts, lectures, essays, code, articles, & hypermedia.