Of all the buzzy 21st-century tech phrases, “machine learning” threatens to be the most important. Programming computers is slow, but we’re nearing the point where humans give the bots parameters and let them teach themselves.

In a few minutes, electronic music will start pulsing, stuffed animals will be flung through the air, women will emerge spinning Technicolor hula hoops, and a mechanical bull will rev into action, bucking off one delighted rider after another.

Around 1425, the Florentine artist Masaccio painted the first major works in one-point perspective. That revolutionized what artists could do ever after. In Paris in 1839, Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre demonstrated his new photographic invention.

I remember reading about Geraldine Juárez’s 2014 bitcoin-burning experiment at the time and getting immensely impressed by its boldness. Back then, crypto seemed like a fringe phenomenon – worthy of radical artistic interventions but not earnest policy debate – so I didn’t make much of it.

On May 4, “Ethereum Classic” popped onto the trending section of my Twitter page. I narrowed my eyes and I laughed.

This summer, when Fame Lady Squad launched, claiming to be the first ever female-led crypto art collective, it quickly raised $1.5 million from people who wanted to support underrepresented artists.  Weeks later, it turned out, the group was actually run by men.

When Christie’s auctioned for $69 million a “nonfungible token,” or NFT, linked to the digital collage Everydays: The First 5000 Days, many people asked WTF was an NFT? And why was a relative unknown artist by the name of Beeple now the third-highest selling living artist—for a digital work

In an interview with The New Yorker, Beeple said that as soon as he received his stash in ETH, he became concerned regarding Ethereum’s volatility, hence the immediate move to convert everything to US dollars. “Boom, 53 million dollars in my account.

On March 13, Li Jin sold a GIF for $25,000. A link to the moving image, which was assigned a unique bit of code as proof of authenticity and stored on the blockchain, was purchased at auction via the cryptocurrency Ethereum and sold in 24 hours.

Of all the buzzy 21st-century tech phrases, “machine learning” threatens to be the most important. Programming computers is slow, but we’re nearing the point where humans give the bots parameters and let them teach themselves.

“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.

Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies like Ethereum, Ripple, and Litecoin have soared in value over the past year, thanks to continued interest from a range of investors.

What’s the Value of Recreating the Palmyra Arch with Digital Technology?Seven months after ISIS destroyed Palmyra’s 1,800-year-old Arch of Triumph, the structure has risen once more — but this time 2,800 miles away from the ancient city, in London’s bustling Trafalgar Square.

The decisive violence imposed on life by the capitalist mode of production derives from its quest for radical simplification.

The new edition of Jacobin, focusing on technology and politics, is out now. Four-issue subscriptions start at only $19. The privatization of the Milky Way has begun.

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

Understanding phenomena and facticity, creating an art-object for subjects within constellations of agential-realism.

There are two absolutes we can never attain. One is freedom and the other is authenticity. These have simultaneously been promised as absolutes; logos, hegemonic since the commodification of identity made it less of a thing, more of an attitude. If this is the case, how is it possible that, in the apparently end-times of socialism – where we are reckoned to feel that there is no option but to comply with hyper-resilient networks – the futurity of being a free and authentic subject still applies as an ideal?

If these ‘absolutes’ are unattainable, contingently emerging abstracts, why is the best art that which fluxes desperately in a carry-on struggle to reach both?

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.

...according to Akasegawa's definition. A publisher's blurb states that this includes the "doorknob in a wall without a door, that driveway leading into an unbroken fence, that strange concrete... thing sprouting out of your sidewalk with no discernible purpose." Learn more about what makes a Thomasson in the video below, which includes quixotic footage of real-life examples like a stairway ending in a window.

The artist, who's birth name is Katsuhiko Akasegawa, picked the word in tribute to Gary Thomasson, an American baseball player who whiffed on so many balls during his 1980s stint with the Yomiuri Giants that the Japanese media took to calling him the "Electric Fan" or "Giant Human Fan." Akasegawa was wowed by the innate conundrum of Gary Thomasson, who (according to the video) "had a fully formed body and yet served no purpose to the world." Interestingly enough, the term has been repurposed by author William Gibson in the sci-fi tome Virtual Light to denote a "useless and inexplicable monument."

In trying to think what Marx would have made of the world today, we have to begin by stressing that he was not an empiricist. He didn’t think that you could gain access to the truth by gleaning bits of data from experience, ‘data points’ as scientists call them, and then assembling a picture of reality from the fragments you’ve accumulated. Since this is what most of us think we’re doing most of the time it marks a fundamental break between Marx and what we call common sense, a notion that was greatly disliked by Marx, who saw it as the way a particular political and class order turns its construction of reality into an apparently neutral set of ideas which are then taken as givens of the natural order. Empiricism, because it takes its evidence from the existing order of things, is inherently prone to accepting as realities things that are merely evidence of underlying biases and ideological pressures. Empiricism, for Marx, will always confirm the status quo. He would have particularly disliked the modern tendency to argue from ‘facts’, as if those facts were neutral chunks of reality, free of the watermarks of history and interpretation and ideological bias and of the circumstances of their own production.