January 2011
The Future Does Not Have to Be Like the Past
“…As to past Experience, it can be allowed to give direct and certain information of those precise objects only, and that precise period of time, which fell under its cognizance: but why this experience should be extended to future times, and to other objects, which for aught we know, may be only in appearance similar; this is the main question on which I would insist…
...
December 2010
Jeff Buckley - New Year’s Prayer
...
Things I Could Have Taken a Picture of, but Didn't
1. Standing on the train platform in Hartford, gold dome of the state capitol floodlit and framed by the fluorescent roof and a chain-link fence.
2. Midnight, with heavy curtains almost drawn, a valance covered in Spring flowers and a whiteout through the glass.
3. A flatbed truck parked on a suburban lawn, strapped with sections of a massive tree and a ruined wing of the house, behind.
Things I Could Have Taken a Picture of, but Didn't
1. Standing on the train platform in Hartford, gold dome of the state capitol floodlit and framed by the fluorescent roof and a chain-link fence.
2. Midnight, with heavy curtains almost drawn, a valance covered in Spring flowers and a whiteout through the glass.
3. A flatbed truck parked on a suburban lawn, strapped with sections of a massive tree and a ruined wing of the house, behind.
Ghosted
1.
Long, loose, spindly, green stalks with their few leaves, bug-eaten tatters on which a black monarch sits, folding and unfolding its wings.
2.
A friend’s funeral has broken up –
or was that the last dream?
Now I’m struggling between monuments,
looking for Chuck.
It’s getting dark and I’m pissed off
because he won’t answer his cell.
3.
On the wall in a coffee bar, a model’s...
Theosophy & Modernism, pt. VII
rachaelrosen:
“Pre-cybernetic machines could be haunted; there was always the specter of the ghost in the machine. This dualism structured the dialogue between materialism and idealism that was settled by a dialectical progeny, called spirit or history, according to taste. But basically machines were not self-moving, self-designing, autonomous. They could not achieve man’s dream, only mock it....
Blind Willie McTell - Don’t You See How This...
Blind Willie McTell - Don’t You See How This...
“The movie resonates in the current moment because... →
— David Carr on The Company Men (via karinalongworth)
…More from Carr:
“…[T]he movie delivers, over and over, a message that far from being a center of American know-how and ingenuity, much of modern business is now preoccupied with goosing the share price and tricking up the year-end bonus — about getting over by getting by.”
WatchShowtime: flight404 is still hacking his Kinect | Beyond The Beyond
It’s interesting…the actual, proper functioning Kinect feels banal. When its mechanism is invisible, it’s a novelty and not a particularly interesting one.
The hacked Kinect, however, has produced some of the best art I’ve seen in a long time. The blanket of random, infrared dots is just spooky enough to...
"Do you remember the Turing Test?" →
[Tom Scocca]: …The premise of the Turing Test was that at some point, a machine would be able to converse with a human in a manner that would pass for human.
Eliza: Why do you mention computers?
TS: That, there, for instance—you said “computers,” which was absolutely correct in context, even though I had not used the word itself.
Eliza: Why do you mention computers?
TS:...
Watchfette:
B.I.G. E.G.O., 2010, directed by David Parker for Wise Blood. Birds, Daphne Guinness, Kanye isn’t too far away.
Wise Blood is amazing and this video is beautiful.
leggette:
oceanofmind:
ineffable
1. Ineffability. — The handiest of the marks by which I classify a state of mind as mystical is negative. The subject of it immediately says that it defies expression, that no adequate report of its contents can be given in words. It follows from this that its quality must be directly experienced; it cannot be imparted or transferred to others. In this...
“postpersonal blogs”
— Discuss? (via melissa)
“Postpersonal,” in the language of this article, means “professional.” It means speaking for a cause, a concept or a company in a voice that is not your own but somehow belongs to it…whatever it may be.
“The blog revolution is over — meaning not that the form is irrelevant, but that it’s matured into a mainstream...
"The Biography of the Network"
…The central metaphor behind the theory and practice of the biography of the object is that of the conveyor belt, which, Tret’iakov writes, “has an extraordinary capacity to incorporate human material.” Tret’iakov details how the “conveyor belt” rolls through the production process.
People approach the object at a cross-section of the conveyer [sic] belt. Every segment introduces a...
Coma Cinema - Her Sinking Sun (via The Road Goes...
