Daniel Rourke /stream

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I logged into "Second Life" in the year 2018 A.D. It still exists, sort of. Residents and businesses began fleeing for more popular social networks long ago. Vast acres of land are abandoned or sparsely populated by the…

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It brought riches to Britain and many other European nations; played a major role in enslaving more than 10 million Africans; and created the first global markets in cotton, tobacco and sugar. But now colonialism has been accused…

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In a recently posted video, Patrick LeMieux(Assistant Professor of Cinema and Digital Media at UC Davis) describes his own material exploration and investigation of Cory Arcangel’s seminal artwork, Super Mario Clouds (2002). LeMieux’s research is spectacular in many…

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Archaeology was institutionalized by a reification of the past into governmental branding, such as through images of Palmyra on the national currency, or school textbooks. Although Palmyrans wrote and probably spoke in Aramaic, they are frequently called ‘Arabs’…

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Outraged headlines erupted when students launched a campaign to challenge the great western philosophers. We went to the source of dissent – London’s School of Oriental and African Studies – to investigate

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In the 19th century, changes in knowledge were facilitated not only by large quantities of new information pouring in from around the world but by shifts in the production, processing and analysis of that information.

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Humans invented it—and not that long ago. How and why did the modern world and its unprecedented prosperity begin? Many bookshelves are full of learned tomes by historians, economists, political philosophers and other erudite scholars with endless explanations.

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Remember the good old days™? When Bill Clinton was President, when average monthly rent was around $645, and when Yahoo’s acquisition of GeoCities shot the dream of personal websites into the stratosphere? What a simpler, kinder time.

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The movement was young, energetic, educated, and art school-heavy. Above all it was “positive”: both cyber-positive and sex-positive. Sometime in the late 1990s, I met someone else called Joanna Walsh. The fact that this is also my name drew me…

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According to urban legend, a landfill somewhere in the small city of Alamogordo, New Mexico, bulges with millions of copies of the worst game ever made—a game that many observers blamed for the North American video-game sales crash…

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We humans are changing. We have become so intertwined with what we have created that we are no longer separate from it. We have outgrown the distinction between the natural and the artificial. We are what we make.

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A few weeks ago on this site I reviewed John Robb’s book Brave New War, discussing the potential of reconfiguring heritage preservation from a top-down, hierarchical model into a participatory, two-way, resilient and distributed platform.

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In Berlin's Neues Museum, there sits a 3,000-year-old bust of Queen Nefertiti. The priceless artifact is under glass, kept safe by alarms, and watched by security guards. Last year, it was stolen.

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Why has the narrative of computer history come to be defined more by images of Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg than by the pioneering work of Ada Lovelace, who is often recognized as the world’s first computer programmer?…

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The total archive is already here, Balázs Bodó finds it hidden in the shadows and run by pirates. As I write this in August 2015, we are in the middle of one of the worst refugee crises in…

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Like many of you, I suspect, I have a love hate relationship with the internet. I love the access it gives me to all sorts of information, and how it connects me with people I would have never…

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Paintings by the masters da Vinci, Rembrandt, Goya, and Caravaggio are often accepted as absolute works. Today, we use mobile devices to capture these images, compressing them onto tiny screens, and remixing them into snapchats, selfies or light…

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I logged into "Second Life" in the year 2018 A.D. It still exists, sort of. Residents and businesses began fleeing for more popular social networks long ago. Vast acres of land are abandoned or sparsely populated by the…

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It brought riches to Britain and many other European nations; played a major role in enslaving more than 10 million Africans; and created the first global markets in cotton, tobacco and sugar. But now colonialism has been accused…

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Newly-released oil industry documents push back the start date of the world’s most successful disinformation campaign to the 1960s, if not earlier.

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Archaeology was institutionalized by a reification of the past into governmental branding, such as through images of Palmyra on the national currency, or school textbooks. Although Palmyrans wrote and probably spoke in Aramaic, they are frequently called ‘Arabs’…

Bookmark

In the 19th century, changes in knowledge were facilitated not only by large quantities of new information pouring in from around the world but by shifts in the production, processing and analysis of that information.

Bookmark

H.P. Lovecraft is universally acknowledged as one of the most important horror writers of the 20th century, and references to his Cthulhu Mythos abound in contemporary culture. But Lovecraft was also quite racist, a fact made clear in…

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Humans invented it—and not that long ago. How and why did the modern world and its unprecedented prosperity begin? Many bookshelves are full of learned tomes by historians, economists, political philosophers and other erudite scholars with endless explanations.

Bookmark

Remember the good old days™? When Bill Clinton was President, when average monthly rent was around $645, and when Yahoo’s acquisition of GeoCities shot the dream of personal websites into the stratosphere? What a simpler, kinder time.

Bookmark

The movement was young, energetic, educated, and art school-heavy. Above all it was “positive”: both cyber-positive and sex-positive. Sometime in the late 1990s, I met someone else called Joanna Walsh. The fact that this is also my name drew me…

Bookmark

Defecating ducks, talking busts, and mechanised Christs — Jessica Riskin on the wonderful history of automata, machines built to mimic the processes of intelligent life.

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We humans are changing. We have become so intertwined with what we have created that we are no longer separate from it. We have outgrown the distinction between the natural and the artificial. We are what we make.

Bookmark

A few weeks ago on this site I reviewed John Robb’s book Brave New War, discussing the potential of reconfiguring heritage preservation from a top-down, hierarchical model into a participatory, two-way, resilient and distributed platform.

Bookmark

TORONTO, Canada - The mood is haunting at Morehshin Allahyari’s first solo exhibition in Canada, as a dozen reconstructed artefacts destroyed by Islamic State (IS) group fighters look up from ledges and beneath glass casings.

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Why has the narrative of computer history come to be defined more by images of Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg than by the pioneering work of Ada Lovelace, who is often recognized as the world’s first computer programmer?…

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The total archive is already here, Balázs Bodó finds it hidden in the shadows and run by pirates. As I write this in August 2015, we are in the middle of one of the worst refugee crises in…

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If an annual award for the ‘hottest digital image format online’ existed, this year’s winner would be the Graphics Interchange Format or gif: an eight-bit, 256-colour bitmap picture file that can composite a series of stills into an…

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Paintings by the masters da Vinci, Rembrandt, Goya, and Caravaggio are often accepted as absolute works. Today, we use mobile devices to capture these images, compressing them onto tiny screens, and remixing them into snapchats, selfies or light…