Interview with Joseph Nechvatal by Évelyne Rogue (Music2Eye)
Paris, February 2004.
Évelyne Rogue: Since 1986, you’ve been working with ubiquitous electronic visual information, computers and computer-robotics. Your computer-robotic assisted painting and computer animations are shown in galleries and museum throughout the world. How do you explain this choice?
WORDS MADE FLESH
Code, Culture, Imagination
Florian Cramer
Media Design Research
Piet Zwart Institute
institute for postgraduate studies and research
Willem de Kooning Academy Hogeschool Rotterdam
A b s t r a c t: Executable code existed centuries before the invention of the computer in magic, Kabbalah, musical composition and experimental poetry. These practices are often neglected as a historical pretext of contemporary software culture and electronic arts. Above all, they link computations to a vast speculative imagination that encompasses art, language, technology, philosophy and religion. These speculations in turn inscribe themselves into the technology. Since even the most simple formalism requires symbols with which it can be expressed, and symbols have cultural connotations, any code is loaded with meaning. This booklet writes a small cultural history of imaginative computation, reconstructing both the obsessive persistence and contradictory mutations of the phantasm that symbols turn physical, and words are made flesh.
Download as a PDF here
Rabbit takes a leap forward in race to network devices
By Thomas Crampton International Herald Tribune
SUNDAY, JULY 17, 2005
OXFORD, England For Rafi Haladjian, the next leap ahead in technology starts with a toy called Nabaztag.
A plastic box shaped like a rabbit, with pastel ears and facial features akin to Hello Kitty, it has a few flashing lights, a rudimentary speaker, one button and a name derived from the Armenian word for rabbit.
An interview with Olia Lialina on artificial.dk:
Stars Fading on the Web
- An Interview with Olia Lialina
Olia Lialina is a pioneer of net.art, especially known for the often remixed piece 'My Boyfriend Came Back From the War'. She is currently professor of New Media at Merz Academie, Stuttgart.
In Slate Nathan Hodge and Sharon Weinberger tour the most beautiful nuclear test craters in Nevada:
NEVADA TEST SITE, Nev.—Rumor had it she was a whore from Pahrump. But it didn't matter to those who knew her: Everyone agreed Priscilla was the most beautiful.
On June 24, 1957, the U.S. military touched off a 37-kiloton nuclear device over Frenchman Flat, a dry lake bed about 75 miles northwest of Las Vegas. The atmospheric test, code-named Priscilla, was one in a series called Operation Plumbbob. The provenance of the code name remains obscure; the earliest tests were ordered on the old military alphabet (Able, Baker, Charlie), but several tests in the 1950s were named after women. Test site lore persists that some were named for local prostitutes.
Download the BBC documentary The Power of Nightmares "questioning whether the threat of terrorism to the West is a politically driven fantasy and if al-Qaeda really is an organized network".
There is also a transcript of the final episode on the site for the bandwidth impared.
Thanks to Liza Sabater for posting the site on Thingist.
Wouldn't you know this comes out of Florida, paranoia capital of the US:
Wi-Fi cloaks a new breed of intruder
Though wireless mooching is preventable, it often goes undetected.
By ALEX LEARY, Times Staff Writer
Published July 4, 2005ST. PETERSBURG - Richard Dinon saw the laptop's muted glow through the rear window of the SUV parked outside his home. He walked closer and noticed a man inside.
The new version of Apple's iTunes makes it easy to publish and subscribe to podcasts that download directly into the player.
ArtCast by Barbara Strebel and Patrik Tschudin in Basel is number 69 in the top 100!
Art Dirt Redux mp3 (rough)
Spiral Jetty has such an iconic place in American art -- for some nearly a fetish -- it's easy to forget Robert Smithson was very much at home within the confines of interior spaces making more traditional objects and images. The retrospective of his work opening today at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York is beautifully and thoughtfully installed so that even his most esoteric meanderings into visualizing entropy are provided a context through his films, drawings, paintings, collages and even his slide lectures.
Night-stalking Stella the cat and my laptop in the garden in Williamsburg: