Daniel Rourke /stream

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In Luc Besson’s sci-fi classic The Fifth Element (1997), the "veryperfect" future human is reverse engineered from a severed hand.

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n 1953, at the dawn of modern computing, Nils Aall Barricelli played God. Clutching a deck of playing cards in one hand and a stack of punched cards in the other,…

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Since the beginning of cinema, filmmakers have relied on cutting from one image to another in order to tell a visual story. The human brain naturally fills in the gaps between…

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Since the dawn of cinema, the cut has been one of the most powerful tools in a director’s kit. If we see a man walk through a door and turn his…

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Astronauts on a routine repair mission for the Hubble Space Telescope find themselves coping with more than they bargained for in the pulse-pounding opening sequence of Alfonso Cuaron’s Oscar-winning film, Gravity.…

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OVER THE NEXT DECADE video game engines will be used in film-making, with the two disciplines combining to eliminate the movie post-production process. That rather ambitious claim comes from Lucasfilm, the…

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Artist Daniel Temkin has been creating and discussing glitch art for over seven years. In that time, he's exhibited in solo and group shows, and had his work featured in Rhizome…

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Craig Venter is scientist/entrepreneur and founded the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI), a not-for-profit genomic research organization that announced in May 2010 they had successfully constructed the first self-replicating, synthetic bacterial…

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In the late 1980s, scientists at Osaka University in Japan noticed unusual repeated DNA sequences next to a gene they were studying in a common bacterium. They mentioned them in the…

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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…

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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…

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During writing a paper for the 100 Year Starship Symposium, I wished to convince the starship designers that they should  acknowledge the dynamics of high-technology economy, which may be crucial for…

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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…

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In “Prometheus as Performer: Toward a Posthumanist Culture?” Ihab Hassan uses the metaphor of the mythological Prometheus to frame his discussion on posthumanism and positions him as a trickster with a…

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“Propaganda is called upon to solve problems created by technology, to play on maladjustments and to integrate the individual into a technological world” (Ellul xvii). How might future research into digital…

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Published in The New York Review of Science Fiction Issue 218, Vol. 19, No. 2 (October 2006) Some books and authors come into your life at precisely the right moment.

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n 1953, at the dawn of modern computing, Nils Aall Barricelli played God. Clutching a deck of playing cards in one hand and a stack of punched cards in the other,…

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KentuckyFC (1144503) writes "One of the most profound advances in science in recent years is the way researchers from a variety of fields are beginning to formulate the problem of consciousness…

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Since the dawn of cinema, the cut has been one of the most powerful tools in a director’s kit. If we see a man walk through a door and turn his…

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Astronauts on a routine repair mission for the Hubble Space Telescope find themselves coping with more than they bargained for in the pulse-pounding opening sequence of Alfonso Cuaron’s Oscar-winning film, Gravity.…

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OVER THE NEXT DECADE video game engines will be used in film-making, with the two disciplines combining to eliminate the movie post-production process. That rather ambitious claim comes from Lucasfilm, the…

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“When Kurzweil first started talking about the “singularity”, a conceit he borrowed from the science-fiction writer Vernor Vinge, he was dismissed as a fantasist.

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In the late 1980s, scientists at Osaka University in Japan noticed unusual repeated DNA sequences next to a gene they were studying in a common bacterium. They mentioned them in the…

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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…

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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…

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If there is one issue in contemporary life that supposedly defines the progressive nature of liberal societies, it is gay rights. Over the past half-century, most of the world’s Western democracies…

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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…

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“Propaganda is called upon to solve problems created by technology, to play on maladjustments and to integrate the individual into a technological world” (Ellul xvii). How might future research into digital…

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Places that have never existed except in the human imagination may find an incongruous afterlife in the everyday world. Umberto Eco tells of how an attempt to commemorate the brownstone New…