Search, compile, publish.

text, internet, digital, post-digital, art, artist books, library of the printed web

Looking through the works, you see artists sifting through enormous accumulations of images and texts. They do it in various ways—hunting, grabbing, compiling, publishing. They enact a kind of performance with the data, between the web and the printed page, negotiating vast piles of existing material. Almost all of the artists here use the search engine, in one form or another, for navigation and discovery.

http://soulellis.com/2013/05/search-compile-publish/

Avant-gardes […] are not really about art, whatever some silly art school textbooks might say. Avant-gardes are about media,…

“Avant-gardes […] are not really about art, whatever some silly art school textbooks might say. Avant-gardes are about media, about social relations, about property-forms, but they are only ever incidentally or tactically concerned with art. The most interesting ones around at the moment might be about pharmacology or horticulture or even ‘business models’.”

–McKenzie Wark in “McKenzie Wark | Information-Commodification”, Marvin Jordan (2014)

Big data’s escalating interest in and successful use of preemptive predictions as a means of avoiding risk becomes a catalyst…

“

Big data’s escalating interest in and successful use of preemptive predictions as a means of avoiding risk becomes a catalyst for various new forms of social preemption. More and more, governments, corporations, and individuals will use big data to preempt or forestall activities perceived to generate social risk. Often, this will be done with little or no transparency or accountability. Some loan companies, for example, are beginning to use algorithms to determine interest rates for clients with little to no credit history, and to decide who is at high risk for default. Thousands of indicators are analyzed, ranging from the presence of financially secure friends on Facebook to time spent on websites and apps installed on various data devices. Governments, in the meantime, are using this technique in a variety of fields in order to determine the distribution of scarce resources such as social workers for at-risk youth or entitlement to Medicaid, food stamps, and welfare compensation.

Of course, the preemption strategy comes at a significant social cost. As an illustration, consider the practice of using predictive algorithms to generate no-fly lists. Before the development of many such lists in various countries, high-risk individuals were generally at liberty to travel—unless the government had a sufficient reason to believe that such individuals were in the process of committing an offense. In addition to curtailing liberty, a no-fly list that employs predictive algorithms preempts the need for any evidence or constitutional safeguards. Prediction simply replaces the need for proof.

Taken to its logical extreme, the preemption philosophy is not merely proactive—it is aggressive.

”

–

Prediction, Preemption, Presumption; How Big Data Threatens Big Picture Privacy. By Ian Kerr and Jessica Earle. 

Seminal reading of Preemptive Prediction algorithms and big data. 

(viaalgopop)

hysterical literature

hysterical literature, clayton cubitt, art, literature, photography, portraits, hysteria, orgasm

Women are seated with a book at a table, filmed in austere black and white against a black background. They have chosen what to read and how to dress. When the camera begins recording, they introduce themselves, and begin reading. Under the table, outside of the subject’s control, an unseen assistant distracts them with a vibrator. The subjects stop reading when they’re too distracted or fatigued to continue, at which point they restate their name, and what they’ve just read. The pieces vary in length based on the response time of the subjects.

http://hystericalliterature.com/faq

A heretical thought I have had about Star Trek: the Federation has no need for Star Fleet. They’re fantastically wealthy and…

“

A heretical thought I have had about Star Trek: the Federation has no need for Star Fleet. They’re fantastically wealthy and cannot meaningfully gain from trade in physical items. They’re not just singularity-esque wealthy relative to the present-day US, they’re equally more secure. Nobody kills mass numbers of Federation citizens. That occasionally happens on poor planets elsewhere. Sucks but hey poverty sucks.

So why have a Star Fleet? Because Jean Luc Picard is a Federation citizen, and he wouldn’t be happy as other than a starship captain. It’s a galaxy-spanning Potempkin village to make him happy. Why would they do that? You’re thinking like a poor person. Think like an unfathomably rich person. They do it because they can afford to. He might have had a cheaper hobby, like say watching classic TV shows, but the Federation is so wealthy that Starfleet and a TV set both round to zero.

This makes Star Fleet officers into in-universe Trekkies: a peculiar subculture of the Federation who are tolerated because despite their quirky hobbies and dress they’re mostly harmless. Of course if you’re immersed in the subculture, Picard looks like something of a big shot. We get that impression only because the camera is in the subculture, not in the wider Federation, which cares about the Final Frontier in the same way that the United States cares about the monarch butterfly: “We probably have somebody working on that, right? Bright postdoc somewhere? Good, good.”

”

–https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7237395 (viam1k3y)

An Eschatological Taxonomy

futurism, end of the world, extinction, apocophillia, collapse, disaster, taxonomy

What do we mean when we talk about the “end of the world?” It’s a term that get thrown around a bit too often among a variety of futurist-types, whether talking about global warming, nanofabrication, or non-friendly artificial intelligence. “Existential risks” is the lingo-du jour, referring to the broad panoply of processes, technologies and events that put our existence at risk. But, still, what does that mean? The destruction of the Earth? The end of humankind? A “Mad Max” world of leather-clad warriors, feral kids, and armed fashion models? All are frightening and horrific, but some are moreso than others. How do we tell them apart?

http://www.openthefuture.com/2006/12/an_eschatological_taxonomy.html

The Challenge of Photography

photography, time, ostranenie, defamiliarization, art, perception

Photography does not lend itself to defamiliarization easily, thus making it the unlikeliest of all art forms. As it happens, the challenge plays out on both sides of the process, for photographers and viewers. What happened to be in front of a camera lens can be found depicted in the resulting photograph. However, given the process itself and its myriad of choices, the photograph is little more than a manipulated two-dimensional representation of what previously existed in four dimensions (three spatial, one – often forgotten – time).

http://cphmag.com/challenge/

How far should we trust scientific models?

models, science, economics, climate, modelling, simulation

One way to appreciate the virtues of climate models is to compare them with a field where mirages are pretty much the standard product: economics. The computer models that economists operate have to use equations that represent human behaviour, among other things, and by common consent, they do it amazingly badly. Climate modellers, all using the same agreed equations from physics, are reluctant to consider economic models as models at all. Economists, it seems, can just decide to use whatever equations they prefer.

http://aeon.co/magazine/world-views/should-we-trust-scientific-models-to-tell-us-what-to-do/

The challenge of crafting policy for DIY brain stimulation

tDCS, brain stimulation, neurology, ethics, DIY.pubmed

Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS), a simple means of brain stimulation, possesses a trifecta of appealing features: it is relatively safe, relatively inexpensive and relatively effective. It is also relatively easy to obtain a device and the do-it-yourself (DIY) community has become galvanised by reports that tDCS can be used as an all-purpose cognitive enhancer. We provide practical recommendations designed to guide balanced discourse, propagate norms of safe use and stimulate dialogue between the DIY community and regulatory authorities. We call on all stakeholders-regulators, scientists and the DIY community-to share in crafting policy proposals that ensure public safety while supporting DIY innovation.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23733050

DIY scientists should not trade creativity for funding

DIY, DIYBio, research, science, industry, academia, non-market-forces

In contrast to academia or industry where knowledge and the market are the main driving forces, DIY biologists’ motivations are broad – entrepreneurs are looking for low-cost and open technologies, artists for new sources of inspiration and materials, scientists for a laid-back creative environment and enthusiasts simply for accessible instrumentation and expertise to satisfy their curiosity. The latter are given an opportunity that few traditional institutions provide, making biological research accessible to the lay public. Even though the mission of DIYbio communities is hard to define without a case-by-case analysis, their potential to benefit society should not be in doubt.

https://theconversation.com/diy-scientists-should-not-trade-creativity-for-funding–21143

What costs more than space exploration? Astrology.

costsmorethanspace:

What costs more than space exploration? Astrology.

According to research done by Telefono Antiplagio, described by the TelegraphAndas “an Italian voluntary service that helps the victims of con artists,” and the European Consumer Organisation, Italian citizens spent a total of €6 billion on magic and occult services—primarily astrology—in 2010.

As reported by Space News, the budget for the Italian Space Agency in 2010 was about €700 million. That sum included the €385 million Italy contributed to the European Space Agency that year for all kinds of activities, including the training of Italian astronauts Luca Parmitano, Samantha Cristoforetti, and Paolo Nespoli. A large part of the remaining funding went to development of the Vega launch vehicle.

Many thanks to reader  Mark Booth, who suggested the astrology aspect and provided a good source.

(Photo: “Personification of Astrology” by Giovanni Francesco Barbieri, and official portrait of Luca Parmitano.)

A Linguist Explains the Grammar of Doge. Wow.

much lingusit, very grmmer, wow, doge, memes, grammar, second generation internet language

The second factor that goes into doge is the general principle of internet language these days that the more overwhelmed with emotions you are, the less sensical your sentence structure gets, which I’ve described elsewhere as “stylized verbal incoherence mirroring emotional incoherence” and which leads us to expressions like “feels,” “I can’t even/I’ve lost the ability to can,” and “because reasons.” Contrast this with first-generation internet language, demonstrated by LOLcat or 1337speak, and in general characterized by abbreviations containing numbers and single letters, often in caps (C U L8R), smilies containing noses, and words containing deliberate misspellings. We’ve now moved on: broadly speaking, second-generation internet language plays with grammar instead of spelling. If you’re a doomsayer, the innovative syntax is one more thing to throw up your hands about, but compared to a decade or two ago, the spelling has gotten shockingly conventional.

http://the-toast.net/2014/02/06/linguist-explains-grammar-doge-wow/

ICE/ISEE–3 to return to an Earth no longer capable of speaking to it

space, spacecraft, ICE, ISSE-3, 1970s, technology, obsolesence, protocols, radio, Deep Space Network

Communication involves speaking, listening and understanding what we hear. One of the main technical challenges the ISEE-3/ICE project has faced is determining whether we can speak, listen, and understand the spacecraft and whether the spacecraft can do the same for us. Several months of digging through old technical documents has led a group of NASA engineers to believe they will indeed be able to understand the stream of data coming from the spacecraft. NASA’s Deep Space Network (DSN) can listen to the spacecraft, a test in 2008 proved that it was possible to pick up the transmitter carrier signal, but can we speak to the spacecraft? Can we tell the spacecraft to turn back on its thrusters and science instruments after decades of silence and perform the intricate ballet needed to send it back to where it can again monitor the Sun? The answer to that question appears to be no.

http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-lakdawalla/2014/02070836-isee–3.html

Without Walls: An Interview with Lebbeus Woods

Lebbeus Woods, architecture, radical reconstruction, architecture fiction

Lebbeus Woods is one of the first architects I knew by name – not Frank Lloyd Wright or Mies van der Rohe, but Lebbeus Woods – and it was Woods’s own technically baroque sketches and models, of buildings that could very well be machines (and vice versa), that gave me an early glimpse of what architecture could really be about. Woods’s work is the exclamation point at the end of a sentence proclaiming that the architectural imagination, freed from constraints of finance and buildability, should be uncompromising, always. One should imagine entirely new structures, spaces without walls, radically reconstructing the outermost possibilities of the built environment. If need be, we should re-think the very planet we stand on.

http://bldgblog.blogspot.com.au/2007/10/without-walls-interview-with-lebbeus.html

Looking the Future in the Eyes

changeist, glass, google glass, mediation, AR, advertising, augmentation, scott smith

More completely, they’re all mostly addressing their headgear with a sunny “OK Glass.” We are in the middle of a strange five-minute demo of Google’s already iconic head-mounted computing device, Glass, and the sensation is not one of empowerment, but of awkward disorientation mixed with racing curiousity. Five minutes, give or take. How to see the future in five minutes? For some, it’s trying to find pizza or barbecue. For others, it’s attempting to video someone else. For most, it’s a slightly zombifying experience, turning slowly, staring just above the horizon, or squinting at a clock floating in front of one eye. Some are talking to their Glass, giving it short commands. Others, like me, are finding the noise level of 50-odd people all muttering to the metal on their heads falling short of the promise, the magic.

https://medium.com/weird-future/de38d5a136ac

Seeing as a Service

changeist, AR, augmentation, perception, place, google, enclosure

We know that applications such as Google Maps, Google Earth and StreetView already acquiesce to regulations that require obscuration of government installations, private companies’ facilities in some cases, some brands, and private citizens faces and number plates—even as it works hard to decipher items like house numbers. In other words, technology is used to differentiate what we can see and not see, depending on the legal or ethical (or otherwise) standards of a particular place. For the most part, Google Maps, Google Earth and StreetView are forms of augmented reality. They digitally render reality with forms of markup, of contextual data, which adds to our perception of places. Except in the cases of blur, pixelation and, it could be argued, accidental presentation of various kinds of render ghosts—people and things only partly captured or partly presented, artifacts of digital accident or persistent memory. Some kind of determination is made that there are things present in reality that we can’t or shouldn’t see.

https://medium.com/futures-exchange/403771297f5f

On the Difference between Binary Prediction and True Exposure with Implications for Forecasting Tournaments and Decision Making

Taleb, Tetlock, prediction, exposure, decision theory, probability, Predictions, Risk, Decision, Jud

There are serious differences between predictions, bets, and exposures that have a yes/no type of payoff, the “binaries”, and those that have varying payoffs, which we call the “vanilla”. Real world exposures tend to belong to the vanilla category, and are poorly captured by binaries. Vanilla exposures are sensitive to Black Swan effects, model errors, and prediction problems, while the binaries are largely immune to them. The binaries are mathematically tractable, while the vanilla are much less so. Hedging vanilla exposures with binary bets can be disastrous – and because of the human tendency to engage in attribute substitution when confronted by difficult questions, decision-makers and researchers often confuse the vanilla for the binary.

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2284964

I have a friend who’s an artist and has sometimes taken a view which I don’t agree with very well. He’ll hold up a flower and…

“I have a friend who’s an artist and has sometimes taken a view which I don’t agree with very well. He’ll hold up a flower and say“look how beautiful it is,” and I’ll agree. Then he says“I as an artist can see how beautiful this is but you as a scientist take this all apart and it becomes a dull thing,” and I think that he’s kind of nutty. First of all, the beauty that he sees is available to other people and to me too, I believe. Although I may not be quite as refined aesthetically as he is… I can appreciate the beauty of a flower. At the same time, I see much more about the flower than he sees. I could imagine the cells in there, the complicated actions inside, which also have a beauty. I mean it’s not just beauty at this dimension, at one centimeter; there’s also beauty at smaller dimensions, the inner structure, also the processes. The fact that the colors in the flower evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting; it means that insects can see the color. It adds a question: does this aesthetic sense also exist in the lower forms? Why is it aesthetic? All kinds of interesting questions which the science knowledge only adds to the excitement, the mystery and the awe of a flower. It only adds. I don’t understand how it subtracts.”

–Richard P. Feynman

The most valuable skill of a successful entrepreneur … isn’t “vision” or “passion” or a steadfast insistence on destroying every…

“The most valuable skill of a successful entrepreneur … isn’t “vision” or “passion” or a steadfast insistence on destroying every barrier between yourself and some prize you’re obsessed with. Rather, it’s the ability to adopt an unconventional approach to learning: an improvisational flexibility not merely about which route to take towards some predetermined objective, but also a willingness to change the destination itself. This is a flexibility that might be squelched by rigid focus on any one goal.”

–The surprising psychology of how sticking to plans actually hinders success and happiness (viaexplore-blog)