MachineMachine (formerly 'The Huge Entity')

Link: Abandoned Places In The World

Tue, 14 Jul 2009 16:05:00 -0700

When starting on this post for some reason I was thinking that there are not many abandoned places in the world, at least the cities. I knew there are many villages, farms and just lonely houses all around the world but when thousands of people leave, leaving the whole city dead that’s a real tragedy. There are mainly two reasons why people suddenly or little by little leave the place where they used to live for years or even generations: that’s the danger and economic factors. The biggest number of abandoned villages and farms can be found in Unites States…

Link: Adorno on Mimesis in Aesthetic Theory

Mon, 13 Jul 2009 07:19:00 -0700

Art is imitation only to the extent to which it is objective expression, far removed from psychology. There may have been a time long ago when this expressive quality of the objective world generally was perceived by the human sensory apparatus. It no longer is. Expression nowadays lives on only in art. Through expression art can keep at a distance the moment of being-for-other which is always threatening to engulf it. Art is thus able to speak in itself. This is the realization through mimesis. Art's expression is the antithesis of 'expressing something.' Mimesis is the ideal of art, not…

Writing for 3quarksdaily: Desire Paths: Reading, Memory and Inscription

Sun, 12 Jul 2009 22:35:00 -0700

by Daniel Rourke

This article is an edifice, a mockery of the freedom needed to create it. It is rigid, it is linear. Its sentences end only to lead onwards to the next, pulling the reader's eye through a series of limited, and limiting pathways. And yet, reading does not have to be this way. In the process of writing this article little time was spent laying out the path of words you now follow to their conclusion. The process of writing is non-linear, perhaps more like a network of ideas spanning out from nodes…

Video: Richard Feynman on doubt, uncertainty and religion

Sun, 12 Jul 2009 15:54:00 -0700

Link: What do Amnesia, Immortality, and Mind Control have to do with Game Design, Immersion, and Suspension of Disbelief?

Sat, 11 Jul 2009 06:53:00 -0700

What breaks your sense of presence in a story? The culture of video game playing has developed a tolerance for the common practices and limitations in designing and producing games. We’ve stopped asking “why?” and have come to expect the typical input arrangements, the impermanence of death, and restrictions of our own free will. Although much of the work in the EIS lab is focused on investigating new practices in creating and playing games, I’ve found, in my personal “research” of popular games, that despite the predictability, certain innovations in narrative are notably novel. If we break down a game…

Link: My Ten Favorite Fetishes

Fri, 10 Jul 2009 08:46:00 -0700

Having studied sexual fetishes for twenty years (which is itself a kind of fetish), I'm long past the investigation of shoes, pain, vomit and rubbing up against people on the subway. My first real job out of college was working as the circulation manager for the Spectator, a Bay Area adult-entertainment publication, which was fueled by classified advertising — often for very distinctive "services" and interests. While there, I became acquainted with a number of memorable characters: Peg Leg, a one-legged call girl with a very full dance ticket (and some remarkable prosthetic attachments); The Coach (gym shorts, silver whistle,…

Link: Daniel Everett Debunks the Essence of Human Language

Thu, 09 Jul 2009 01:28:00 -0700

Professor Daniel Everett, author of Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes, discusses the importance of preserving dying languages. He describes his experience living with the Piraha people in Brazil, and explores what Piraha, both the people and the language, can teach us about human nature.

Link: Beyond Postmodernism? Paul Virilio's Hypermodern Cultural Theory

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 09:34:00 -0700

Paul Virilio is one of the most significant French cultural theorists writing today.1 Increasingly hailed as the inventor of concepts such as 'dromology' (the 'science' of speed), Virilio is renowned for his declaration that the logic of acceleration lies at the heart of the organization and transformation of the modern world. However, Virilio's thought remains much misunderstood by many postmodern cultural theorists. In this article, and supporting the ground-breaking work of Arthur and Marilouise Kroker, I shall evaluate the contribution of Virilio's writings by suggesting that they exist beyond the terms of postmodernism and that they should be conceived of…

Link: From Book to Anti-Book

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 09:25:00 -0700

by Harry Polkinhorn - To arrive at a theoretical understanding of artists' books, it is perhaps best to begin, as Richard Kostelanetz points out in his essay entitled "Book Art," on a formal note: "artists' books" are those book-like objects made by visual/literary artists which treat the book form as an artistic genre comprised of dynamic sets of tactile/graphic as well as literary potentials. A (false) contrast is suggested with "writers' books," thus underscoring the futility of trying to classify art objects solely from the point of view of the "initial profession (or education)" [1] of their makers. Since a…

Link: Last Year at Marienbad: An Intertextual Meditation

Mon, 06 Jul 2009 09:39:00 -0700

On the making of novels into films, there are two general schools of thought. Some feel that the film should be faithful to the original and are dismayed when it deviates significantly. Like sophomore literature students, they want the movie to be a faithful crib of the book. Most films, both art and popular, based on prior texts humbly meet this demand - Ragtime, The Shining, Diary of a Country Priest and any of the John Grisham films are just a few examples. Some films even promise a special allegiance by making the author's name a part of the title…

Link: Tech Is Too Cheap to Meter: It's Time to Manage for Abundance, Not Scarcity

Mon, 06 Jul 2009 09:37:00 -0700

This is the power of waste. When scarce resources become abundant, smart people treat them differently, exploiting them rather than conserving them. It feels wrong, but done right it can change the world. The problem is that abundant resources, like computing power, are too often treated as scarce. Consider another example: Wired's IT department used to send out occasional emails telling employees it was time to "delete unneeded files from the shared folders"—their way of saying they had run out of storage room on the servers. Because we're good corporate citizens, we all dutifully scanned through our files, deleting those…

Link: Dancing About Architecture

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 09:30:00 -0700

I just published a novel about music. Early in the process of writing it, I was warned by a similarly music-obsessive friend that “writing about music is like dancing about architecture.”[1] Since that first somewhat menacing reminder, I’ve heard the line frequently. At first blush, the claim is a smugly dismissive one: verbal descriptions of music are doomed to be pointlessly, perhaps even ridiculously, inferior to actual music. As a reader, I resisted this idea; it just felt false, though I couldn’t quite say why. But as a writer, this assertion paralyzed me: I didn’t want to waste two or…

Link: Ant mega-colony takes over world

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 09:10:00 -0700

A single mega-colony of ants has colonised much of the world, scientists have discovered. Argentine ants living in vast numbers across Europe, the US and Japan belong to the same inter-related colony, and will refuse to fight one another. The colony may be the largest of its type ever known for any insect species, and could rival humans in the scale of its world domination. What's more, people are unwittingly helping the mega-colony stick together. Argentine ants (Linepithema humile) were once native to South America. But people have unintentionally introduced the ants to all continents except Antarctica. These introduced Argentine…

AskMefi: Behind the Mask - Michael Jackson's rarest recording?

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 11:40:00 -0700

Michael Jackson penned and recorded lots of songs, many of which remain unreleased. Perhaps the most infamous, and rarest recording, is his version of Behind the Mask. Legend has it that upon hearing Yellow Magic Orchestra's original track, somewhen around 1979, Quincy Jones fell in love with the track, and he and Michael worked together on their own version. Jackson wrote new lyrics for it - adding to those of Ryuichi Sakamoto and Chris Mosdell - and eventually recorded it during his Off The Wall sessions. For unknown reasons the track…

Link: Take two video games and call me in the morning

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 09:22:00 -0700

Growing scientific evidence demonstrates that the human brain dynamically changes in response to experience and to changes in the environment, a phenomenon that is known as “plasticity.” It is also believed that timing is crucial – our brains appear to be more susceptible to change early in our developmental lives. Thus, a world with vastly different technology driven demands, opportunities and challenges, is surely going to lead to brain changes: the brain of our children will be different from those of the generations who rode their bikes, jumped rope, and played sports in the backyard, rather than throwing a football…

/text blog: The Movement of The Middle

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 09:05:00 -0700

Words, bread, and wine are between us, beings or relations. We appear to exchange them between us though we are connected at the same table or with the same language. They are breast-fed by the same mother. Parasitic exchange, crossed between the logical and the material, can now be explained… Do we ever eat anything else together than the flesh of the word?[...]

Mediations, relations - one can make believe one is lost in this fractal cascade……

Video: Origins of the Moonwalk

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 04:04:00 -0700

Link: three frames

Mon, 29 Jun 2009 17:01:00 -0700

Three frames is all you need

Link: Fifty Books for Our Times

Mon, 29 Jun 2009 16:43:00 -0700

We know it's insane. We know people will ask why on earth we think that an 1875 British satirical novel is the book you need to read right now—or, for that matter, why it even made the cut. The fact is, no one needs another best-of list telling you how great The Great Gatsby is. What we do need, in a world with precious little time to read (and think), is to know which books—new or old, fiction or nonfiction—open a window on the times we live in, whether they deal directly with the issues of today or simply help…

Video: Rejected - Best Oscar Award Winner Movie

Mon, 29 Jun 2009 16:30:00 -0700