Daniel Rourke /stream

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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…

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With an eight-track tape recorder and 100,000 times less memory than an iPod, Voyager 1 is celebrating its 35th birthday at the edge of the solar system. Traipsing through a giant,…

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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…

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The cosmos is composed of many different species of stardust and despite our advanced, secular knowledge we imagine these primordial substances give rise to a universe, fashioned in our own image.…

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Contemporary art is an easy thing to hate. All the meaningless hype, the identikit openings in cities that blur into one long, banal, Beck’s beer fuelled anxiety dream from which there…

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The frontier of science is a wild and lawless place. Like all badlands, it attracts visionaries, charlatans and the dispossessed. Far from the jurisdiction of law enforcers, isolated communities cluster together…

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Digital curation involves selection and appraisal by creators and archivists; evolving provision of intellectual access; redundant storage; data transformations; and, for some materials, a commitment to long-term preservation. Digital curation is…

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Interview with Michel Foucault originally published in Italian, then in French in 1994

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The image infects, burrows, pupates, and emerges like a butterfly from its host. In The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Philip K. Dick wrote about a non-understandable space entity that did…

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Time rather than money is the currency in the recent science fiction film In Time. At the age of 25, the citizens in the future world the film depicts are given…

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In 1977, NASA sent 115 images – the so-called ‘Golden Record’ – into space on board the Voyager space probe. They also included greetings in 55 different languages and a number…

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In the invisible, parallel world of Earth, they kill half the bacteria in the ocean every day, and invade a microbe host 10 trillion times a second around the world. There…

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lecture by Craig Venter Life is code, as you heard in the introduction, was very clearly articulated by Schrodinger as code script. Perhaps even more importantly, and something I missed on…

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This two-story brick building is nothing special, even a bit decrepit, but as you walk up its crooked metal staircase toward the second floor, you will find the first hint that…

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This rocky hill in Ebihens, France, is, well, just that -- a rocky hill in Ebihens, France. But to pretty much any human observer, the assemblage of meaningless angles takes on…

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Hoarding disorder is categorized as “the excessive acquisition of and inability to discard objects, resulting in debilitating clutter,” wrote the researchers behind the new study, led by Yale University School of…

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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…

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In proposing the imitation game as a stand-in for another definition of thought or intelligence, Turing does more than deliver a clever logical flourish that helps him creatively answer a very…

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To what extent do the material components (e.g. hardware, source code, network protocols) and properties (e.g. speed, malleability, erasability) of digital technology influence the methodologies one might employ to study it?…

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In the work Once upon a Time (2004) McQueen presents a slide show of 116 of these images installed to make them seem to float in space: about two-thirds of the…

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Alongside the Dadaists in the early twentieth century, the German artist Kurt Schwitters developed a style he called “Merz” (detached from the end of “Kommerz,” German for “commerce,” to create a…

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We take it for granted that the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) is a safe endeavor. Seriously, what could possibly go wrong with passively searching for interstellar radio signals? Unfortunately, the…

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Meanwhile, Richard Dawkins was picking another fight. Normally, this would not be an occasion worthy of comment. The best way to distinguish between Professor Dawkins’ waking and sleeping states is probably…

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"How does technological progress challenge our ideas about free will & human life?" Can cells become little computers? And how does technological progress challenge our ideas about free will, intelligence, and…

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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…

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With an eight-track tape recorder and 100,000 times less memory than an iPod, Voyager 1 is celebrating its 35th birthday at the edge of the solar system. Traipsing through a giant,…

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This month, Art Forum published a very timely, and beautifully written essay by Claire Bishop entitled, Digital Divide: on contemporary Art and New Media“. In it, Bishop analyses the contemporary art-world’s…

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The cosmos is composed of many different species of stardust and despite our advanced, secular knowledge we imagine these primordial substances give rise to a universe, fashioned in our own image.…

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The frontier of science is a wild and lawless place. Like all badlands, it attracts visionaries, charlatans and the dispossessed. Far from the jurisdiction of law enforcers, isolated communities cluster together…

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This essay is in many ways a companion piece to Gary Hall’s ‘Pirate Radical Philosophy’ in RP 173 (May/June 2012). Consider it a prequel, or something akin to a video game’s…

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Interview with Michel Foucault originally published in Italian, then in French in 1994

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The image infects, burrows, pupates, and emerges like a butterfly from its host. In The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Philip K. Dick wrote about a non-understandable space entity that did…

Bookmark

Time rather than money is the currency in the recent science fiction film In Time. At the age of 25, the citizens in the future world the film depicts are given…

Bookmark

In 1977, NASA sent 115 images – the so-called ‘Golden Record’ – into space on board the Voyager space probe. They also included greetings in 55 different languages and a number…

Bookmark

In a New Yorker essay a few weeks back, Laura Miller considered the various ways in which science fiction writers have imagined aliens, from the 18th century through today. Perhaps inevitably,…

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lecture by Craig Venter Life is code, as you heard in the introduction, was very clearly articulated by Schrodinger as code script. Perhaps even more importantly, and something I missed on…

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This rocky hill in Ebihens, France, is, well, just that -- a rocky hill in Ebihens, France. But to pretty much any human observer, the assemblage of meaningless angles takes on…

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For the most part, the biological metaphor has long been just that — a simplifying analogy rather than a blueprint for how to do computing. Engineering, not biology, guided the pursuit…

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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…

Bookmark

In proposing the imitation game as a stand-in for another definition of thought or intelligence, Turing does more than deliver a clever logical flourish that helps him creatively answer a very…

Bookmark

To what extent do the material components (e.g. hardware, source code, network protocols) and properties (e.g. speed, malleability, erasability) of digital technology influence the methodologies one might employ to study it?…

Bookmark

In the work Once upon a Time (2004) McQueen presents a slide show of 116 of these images installed to make them seem to float in space: about two-thirds of the…

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There have been plenty of conferences about the future of publishing, but few, if any, have been aimed at writers. The Literary Consultancy remedied this recently with a two-day conference –…

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We take it for granted that the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) is a safe endeavor. Seriously, what could possibly go wrong with passively searching for interstellar radio signals? Unfortunately, the…

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"How does technological progress challenge our ideas about free will & human life?" Can cells become little computers? And how does technological progress challenge our ideas about free will, intelligence, and…

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Artificial intelligence began with an ambitious research agenda: To endow machines with some of the traits we value most highly in ourselves—the faculty of reason, skill in solving problems, creativity, the…