Late last year the Spanish government passed a law that set extreme fines for protesters convening outside of government buildings. In response to the controversial Citizen Safety Law, which will take effect on July 1, Spanish activists have staged the world’s first ever virtual political demonstration. After months of massive flesh-and-blood protests against the so-called ‘gag law’, thousands of holograms last night marched in front of the Spanish parliament in Madrid. Organised by the group Holograms for Freedom, ghost-like figures holding placards took aim at the imminent draconian measures, arguing that holographic people are now afforded greater freedoms than their real-life counterparts.
“The ISSpresso payload is a multi-functional device that can be used to brew coffee, but also to make teas, broth and other hot beverages – overall improving the quality of drinks available to ISS crew members.”
“Another new addition are special cups that are shaped in a way that allows them to hold fluids in microgravity through the clever use of surface tension properties to allow crews to take a sip from an actual cup instead of the drinking pouches and their straws.”
For months I had joked to my family that I was probably on a watch list for my excessive use of Tor and cash withdrawals […] the things I had to do to evade marketing detection looked suspiciously like illicit activities. All I was trying to do was to fight for the right for a transaction to be just a transaction, not an excuse for a thousand little trackers to follow me around. But avoiding the big-data dragnet meant that I not only looked like a rude family member or an inconsiderate friend, but I also looked like a bad citizen.,
Serios was an unemployed bellhop when his claims that he had the ability to put images on film with his mind came to the attention of Eisenbud. Serios’s technique was to hold a small cylinder, or tube, up to the lens of an instant camera, which was then pointed at his forehead and the shutter released. It was also claimed he could project his thoughts from several meters away, or without using the cylinder. He would often be drunk, or at least have been drinking, when he produced his photographs.
Nakamoto (The Proof). Scan de passeport, fichier numérique .jpg, 2506 x 3430 px, 2014
“Nakamoto est le créateur du Bitcoin, système de paiement révolutionnaire permettant d’effectuer des transactions en ligne de manière anonyme et infalsifiable. Cette monnaie virtuelle est largement employée sur les darknets, réseaux garantissant l’anonymat à la réputation sulfureuse, notamment du fait des activités cybercriminelles qu’ils facilitent (commerce de stupéfiants, faux-papiers, etc.). Dès son premier message public et jusqu’à sa disparition le 12 décembre 2010, Nakamoto a tout mis en œuvre afin de préserver son identité. Non localisable de par ses adresses IP toujours différentes, ses messages sont publiés à des heures aléatoires et écrits dans un Anglais ne permettant pas de déterminer sa nationalité. Ayant créé les premiers bitcoins, on lui prête une fortune estimée à plusieurs centaines de millions d’Euros. L’importance de sa création et le mystère parfaitement maîtrisé autour de sa personne ont aujourd’hui fait de lui un véritable mythe contemporain, alimentant un nombre toujours croissant de rumeurs et de fantasmes.”
At times, companies’ claims can raise eyebrows. One brochure shows a soldier, draped in fatigues, holding a portable device up to the faces of a somber group of Arabs. “Innocent civilian or insurgent?,” the pamphlet asks.
Whether reactionary spasm or irrevocable paradigm shift, if history is a guide, once the game is afoot, scores of designers will be eager to get with the program. Obviously, doing ugly work isn’t difficult. The trick is to surround it with enough attitude so it will be properly perceived not as the product of everyday incompetence, but rather as evidence of one’s attunement with the zeitgeist.
“The fundamental problem of communication is that of reproducting at one point either exactly or approximately a message selected at another point. Frequently the messages have
meaning; that is they refer to or are correlated according to some system with certain physical or conceptual entities. These semantic aspects of communication are irrelevant to the engineering problem. “
– Claude Shannon,
A Mathematical Theory of Communication
“There are symbolic dreams—dreams that symbolize some reality. Then there are symbolic realities—realities that symbolize a dream. Symbols are what you might call the honorary town councillors of the worm universe. In the worm universe, there is nothing unusual about a dairy cow seeking a pair of pliers. A cow is bound to get her pliers sometime. It has nothing to do with me.”
“Like a fantastic lens the curve focuses the abstract over the real and the speculative over the material.
Composition is an overlaying of the seen versus the unseen with potentiality set against the real. What is left in the mind is something different to the canopy, a sculpture of another sort, an unfolding series of
informal cuts in an imagined space.
Like the bird in flight over the chasm, whatever we think, the idea is as much in the mind as in the curve in space.
Structure then becomes poetic licence — or a metaphysic in the science of architecture.”
“The metaphors are numerous—bots are homunculi, bots are witches’ familiars, bots are daemons. And yes, the bots were inside us all along, and ultimately we make ourselves into Twitter bots in order to live. But really. Twitter bots are the imaginary friends that I love and cherish as much as the real-person relationships I’ve formed on Twitter (both with people and with other creatures with alleged human operators, whose true identities are best left unknown). They notice things we might not notice.”
“The individual images have very limited powers to define the world. But, if individual images can’t define the world, perhaps a sufficient number of images could, at least, surround the world and thereby contain some part of it. My own solution to the problem of the veracity of photographs is to make the series, and not the single image, the unit of work. Grouping photographs allows points to be raised, asserted through repetition, criticized, restructured into sub-categories; in short, a coherent visual syntax can be developed to show a number of facets of the same general subject. The ability of such a group of photographs to describe a subject is comparable to that of non-narrative film.”
“All important pictures embody something that we do not yet understand. In the process we collect a few random yet vivid facts that we didn’t know before.”
“As we spoke, it became clear that the social context for the collecting, distribution, selling, and preservation of algorithms is an initiative that is sorely needed. Chan noted, “I don’t think you can separate art from the context of history. Art is produced in a society, and it occurs in a society; you can’t separate it out.” Furthermore he claims that because “Software and code is very much part of how we create culture,” new standards for the long-term sustainability of algorithms must become responsibilities of institutions like Cooper Hewitt.”
“The risk is that we would conclude by simply mapping the mapmakers, showing where they themselves fit in the networks, fields, forces, institutions. Maps of the social, technical, communicative production and determination of maps, as it were. This would be the meta-map taking account of itself, to show its own determination by the tendencies of our intellectual moment – tendencies like the emphasis on capitalism’s mysteriousness and intractability, or our incapacity in the face of it, of our anxiety about our incapacity, and so forth”
“I’ve never called a spirit belonging the large group we call “fairies” a “fairy” to its face, and then tried using one of the more common euphemisms to fix any problems. Typically I began by asking, “what is your name?” and went from there. So I can’t really say whether changing how you refer to the spirit would change its disposition towards you, one way or another.”
“LIGHTS ALL ASKEW IN THE HEAVENS; Men of Science More or Less Agog Over Results of Eclipse Observations. EINSTEIN THEORY TRIUMPHS Stars Not Where They Seemed or Were Calculated to be, but Nobody Need Worry.”
–Special Cable to THE NEW YORK TIMES. November 10, 1919
“Marc Explo contends urban exploration is more about time than place. In essence, there are few places you can’t ever be, but plenty of places that you aren’t supposed to be in at certain times. For example, we were a few months early for the opening of the new Amsterdam Metro line. We also showed up at 3am, which was probably the wrong time. Simple mistake.”
