Daniel Rourke /stream

Bookmark

The earthquake confirms that a pre‑Enlightenment urge to blame human greed for natural disasters is making a comeback. The Japanese proverb ‘fix the problem, not the blame’ captures an attitude towards…

Bookmark

Gleick makes his case in a sweeping survey that covers the five millenniums of humanity’s engagement with information, from the invention of writing in Sumer to the elevation of information to…

Bookmark

This year marks the 40th anniversary of Creeper, the world’s first computer virus. From Creeper to Stuxnet, the last four decades saw the number of malware instances boom from 1,300 in…

Bookmark

it must have been when i was a boy at school that the phonograph was invented. at any rate it was at that time a chief object of public wonder; this…

Bookmark

Reports of the demise of the humanities are exaggerated, suggest these panelists, but there may be reason to fear its loss of relevance. Three scholars whose work touches a variety of…

Bookmark

This view of the future of humankind is grounded in an appreciation of the biologically innate powers bestowed upon us by hundreds of millions of years of evolution. This deep respect…

Bookmark

The views of machinery which we are thus feebly indicating will suggest the solution of one of the greatest and most mysterious questions of the day. We refer to the question:…

Bookmark

The field of the digital humanities embraces various scholarly activities in the humanities that involve writing about digital media and technology as well as being engaged in digital media production. Perhaps…

Bookmark

What is it that constitutes (a) post-digital art, and how can it be thought in terms of aesthetic theory – or even post-aesthetic theory? In one sense, post-digital(1) refers to works…

Bookmark

Kelly argues that all technologies, from the stone ax to the computer chip, should be seen as a collectivity—the technium, which is “the greater, global, massively interconnected system of technology vibrating…

Bookmark

In case you haven’t heard, the newest champion of "Jeopardy!," the popular TV game show, is a computer. Watson, an enormous computer developed by researchers at IBM, was pitted against the…

Bookmark

Imagine it: a flower blossoming inside the brain, nanometer stalks splitting away from a micrometer stem. Expanding into every available capillary, touching every cubic millimeter of the brain, collecting terabytes of…

Bookmark

In preparing paintings for the exhibition, the head of oil painting conservation noticed usual things about some of them, prompting her to X-ray, among others, 'A view of Pickersgill Harbour, Dusky…

Bookmark

The concept of openness is often employed as part of a radical critique of the closed-off worlds of what might be called ‘traditional media’. It is variously used to urge for…

Bookmark

Shanzai is the name used for a huge black market industry that (currently) specialises in making fake mobile phones in small factories. Basements. We’re not talking about a few phones either.…

Bookmark

In a clever juxtaposition of biology and technology, Stanford physicist, Ingmar Riedel-Kruse and his team are creating paramecia-based versions of classic video games that you can play by controlling the movements…

Bookmark

What's the difference between a Hollywood special-effects blockbuster like "Terminator 2" and a hard-core porn film? Very little, claims novelist, essayist and footnote fetishist David Foster Wallace. 1990s moviegoers who have…

Bookmark

It could be one of the most ambitious computer projects ever conceived. An international group of scientists is aiming to create a simulator that can replicate everything happening on Earth -…

Bookmark

What if the best thing art has to offer is freedom from choice? There’s a reason it’s high praise, not criticism, to say that a film or a piece of music…

Bookmark

It’s fitting that at the end of this essay about the proliferation of e-readers, Scott McLemee invokes critic Franco Moretti, who has devoted the past decade to deromanticizing literary criticism and…

Bookmark

The earthquake confirms that a pre‑Enlightenment urge to blame human greed for natural disasters is making a comeback. The Japanese proverb ‘fix the problem, not the blame’ captures an attitude towards…

Bookmark

JUST AS IN OUR DAY a fervid minority denounces the digitization of literary experience, fifteenth-century literati responded to their own depredations. In 1492, Johannes Trithemius, Abbot of Sponheim, wrote De Laude…

Bookmark

Gleick makes his case in a sweeping survey that covers the five millenniums of humanity’s engagement with information, from the invention of writing in Sumer to the elevation of information to…

Bookmark

it must have been when i was a boy at school that the phonograph was invented. at any rate it was at that time a chief object of public wonder; this…

Bookmark

The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is the very archetype of a “closed society.” It ranks dead last—196th out of 196 countries—in Freedom House’s Freedom of the Press index. Unlike the…

Bookmark

This view of the future of humankind is grounded in an appreciation of the biologically innate powers bestowed upon us by hundreds of millions of years of evolution. This deep respect…

Bookmark

The views of machinery which we are thus feebly indicating will suggest the solution of one of the greatest and most mysterious questions of the day. We refer to the question:…

Bookmark

The field of the digital humanities embraces various scholarly activities in the humanities that involve writing about digital media and technology as well as being engaged in digital media production. Perhaps…

Bookmark

...this particular baleen whale has apparently been tracked by NOAA since 1992, using a "classified array of hydrophones employed by the Navy to monitor enemy submarines." It sings at 52 Hertz,…

Bookmark

Kelly argues that all technologies, from the stone ax to the computer chip, should be seen as a collectivity—the technium, which is “the greater, global, massively interconnected system of technology vibrating…

Bookmark

Imagine it: a flower blossoming inside the brain, nanometer stalks splitting away from a micrometer stem. Expanding into every available capillary, touching every cubic millimeter of the brain, collecting terabytes of…

Bookmark

"Watson is a computer that uncovers meaning in our language, and pinpoints the right answer, instantly. It uses deep analytics to answer questions computers never could before, even the ones on…

Bookmark

In preparing paintings for the exhibition, the head of oil painting conservation noticed usual things about some of them, prompting her to X-ray, among others, 'A view of Pickersgill Harbour, Dusky…

Bookmark

The concept of openness is often employed as part of a radical critique of the closed-off worlds of what might be called ‘traditional media’. It is variously used to urge for…

Bookmark

Shanzai is the name used for a huge black market industry that (currently) specialises in making fake mobile phones in small factories. Basements. We’re not talking about a few phones either.…

Bookmark

In a clever juxtaposition of biology and technology, Stanford physicist, Ingmar Riedel-Kruse and his team are creating paramecia-based versions of classic video games that you can play by controlling the movements…

Bookmark

How do we deal with a purposeless universe and the finality of death? From Victorian séances to the embalming of Lenin's corpse to schemes for uploading our minds into cyberspace, there…

Bookmark

It could be one of the most ambitious computer projects ever conceived. An international group of scientists is aiming to create a simulator that can replicate everything happening on Earth -…

Bookmark

It’s fitting that at the end of this essay about the proliferation of e-readers, Scott McLemee invokes critic Franco Moretti, who has devoted the past decade to deromanticizing literary criticism and…

Bookmark

Professor of New Media Art at the University of California, both artist and graphic designer, Lev Manovich does not need further presentation. His first book “The language of New Media” (it…