Daniel Rourke /stream

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To say that Marshall McLuhan was incidentally a Christian, or that his Catholicism was just part of his private life, is a little like saying that Karl Marx was only incidentally a Marxist.

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A barista gets burned at work, buys first-aid cream at Target, and later that day sees a Facebook ad for the same product. In another Target, someone shouts down the aisle to a companion to pick up some…

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In 2006 a man walked into an internet cafe in Kassel, Germany, and shot dead Halit Yozgat, a 21-year-old member of the Turkish-German family who owned it. It was the ninth in a series of racist killings by…

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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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At the end of June, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook had hit a new level: two billion monthly active users. That number, the company’s preferred ‘metric’ when measuring its own size, means two billion different people used Facebook…

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{I was invited to teach a seminar at City College’s MFA program in Digital & Interdisciplinary Art Practice. This is the syllabus for the course I came up with.

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A NEW commodity spawns a lucrative, fast-growing industry, prompting antitrust regulators to step in to restrain those who control its flow. A century ago, the resource in question was oil. Now similar concerns are being raised by the…

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Digital technologies make it easier for people to copy the work of other artists—yet the same tools make it more likely for them to get caught. The messages began rolling in on an otherwise quiet Saturday.

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Watching the 2016 US presidential election was already a surreal experience, as dozens of qualified candidates lost out to a failed businessman and reality television star.

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“I am alarmed,” wrote Henry David Thoreau in “Walking,” his 1862 essay, “when it happens that I have walked a mile into the woods bodily, without getting there in spirit.” The point of his saunter had been to…

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Like most every­thing today, the campaign was launched with a hashtag. But instead of promoting a new album or a movie release, #AllEyesOnISIS announced the 2014 invasion of northern Iraq—a bloody takeover that still haunts global politics two…

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An adorable black kitten is sitting on a bookshelf, eyes fixed on an insect. It sits, paws perfectly aligned. Then, out of nowhere, it pounces — leaping off the shelf and into the air, wild and frantic.

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ACCORDING to some prominent voices in the tech world, artificial intelligence presents a looming existential threat to humanity: Warnings by luminaries like Elon Musk and Nick Bostrom about “the singularity” — when machines become smarter than humans —…

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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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At Facebook’s F8 conference in Silicon Valley, David Marcus, the company’s head of messaging, proudly demonstrated its new suite of chatbots. Users can now get in a conversation with the likes of CNN, H&M, and HP, and ask…

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Mark Zuckerberg hasn’t had the best week. First, Facebook’s Free Basics platform was effectively banned in India.

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BuzzFeed has achieved an outrageous amount of success in recent years, reaching an estimated 203 million people a month, including 112 million in the US alone, according to Quantcast. There are a lot of reasons for that but…

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In this newly commissioned essay, Daniel Rubinstein answers one of photography’s most complicated questions.

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The digital life is material and submerged, as much as it is immaterial and in the cloud. It is the navy and gold submarine cables set into the ocean bed. Digital life is the germanium and indium, the…

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If you haven’t watched YouTube in a while—if you’ve joined the Amish, or you’re Edward Snowden—a lot has changed. Early on, the platform was a salmagundi of out-of-focus lifecasts.

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To say that Marshall McLuhan was incidentally a Christian, or that his Catholicism was just part of his private life, is a little like saying that Karl Marx was only incidentally a Marxist.

Bookmark

A barista gets burned at work, buys first-aid cream at Target, and later that day sees a Facebook ad for the same product. In another Target, someone shouts down the aisle to a companion to pick up some…

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Second Life was supposed to be the future of the internet, but then Facebook came along. Yet many people still spend hours each day inhabiting this virtual realm. Their stories—and the world they’ve built—illuminate the promise and limitations…

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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…

Bookmark

{I was invited to teach a seminar at City College’s MFA program in Digital & Interdisciplinary Art Practice. This is the syllabus for the course I came up with.

Bookmark

Digital technologies make it easier for people to copy the work of other artists—yet the same tools make it more likely for them to get caught. The messages began rolling in on an otherwise quiet Saturday.

Bookmark

Watching the 2016 US presidential election was already a surreal experience, as dozens of qualified candidates lost out to a failed businessman and reality television star.

Bookmark

“I am alarmed,” wrote Henry David Thoreau in “Walking,” his 1862 essay, “when it happens that I have walked a mile into the woods bodily, without getting there in spirit.” The point of his saunter had been to…

Bookmark

Like most every­thing today, the campaign was launched with a hashtag. But instead of promoting a new album or a movie release, #AllEyesOnISIS announced the 2014 invasion of northern Iraq—a bloody takeover that still haunts global politics two…

Bookmark

Versions is the essential guide to virtual reality and beyond. It investigates the rapidly deteriorating boundary between the real world and the one behind the screen. Versions launched in 2016 at the eponymous conference dedicated to creativity and…

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ACCORDING to some prominent voices in the tech world, artificial intelligence presents a looming existential threat to humanity: Warnings by luminaries like Elon Musk and Nick Bostrom about “the singularity” — when machines become smarter than humans —…

Bookmark

Mark Zuckerberg hasn’t had the best week. First, Facebook’s Free Basics platform was effectively banned in India.

Bookmark

BuzzFeed has achieved an outrageous amount of success in recent years, reaching an estimated 203 million people a month, including 112 million in the US alone, according to Quantcast. There are a lot of reasons for that but…

Bookmark

In this newly commissioned essay, Daniel Rubinstein answers one of photography’s most complicated questions.

Bookmark

The Listener creates a physical space which makes tangible, and sometimes cacophonous, the discrete and near-constant data broadcast from devices such as smartphones. It exposes how this data can be used to identify and track individuals, and reveal…

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The digital life is material and submerged, as much as it is immaterial and in the cloud. It is the navy and gold submarine cables set into the ocean bed. Digital life is the germanium and indium, the…

Bookmark

If you haven’t watched YouTube in a while—if you’ve joined the Amish, or you’re Edward Snowden—a lot has changed. Early on, the platform was a salmagundi of out-of-focus lifecasts.