media art histories

url: DARC – digital aesthetics research center

ninawenhart — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 06:01:46 +0000

http://darc.imv.au.dk/?p=62

url: paul brown, articles on art + technology

ninawenhart — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 05:52:48 +0000

http://www.digicult.it/digimag/article.asp?id=1388

paleo-future + time capsules

ninawenhart — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 18:13:00 +0000

http://www.paleofuture.com

a great blog on “futures that never were” by Matt Novak, that covers futuristic visions from the 1880s to the 1990s.

it also has a small section of books on that topic: http://www.paleofuture.com/library/

a second blog by the same author, where he collects information about time capsules, their content and google maps where they are burried; that really made me laugh:
http://timecapsuled.org/

another interesting post on CTheory’s section “Resetting Theory”:

ninawenhart — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 16:04:00 +0000

________________________________________________________
CTHEORY: THEORY, TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE VOL 32, NOS 1-2
*** Visit CTHEORY Online: http://www.ctheory.net ***

RT 005 06/02/2009 Editors: Arthur and Marilouise Kroker
______________________________

__________________________

On Game Art, Circuit Bending and Speedrunning as Counter-Practice:
‘Hard’ and ‘Soft’ Nonexistence
================================================

Author: Seb Franklin

Intro: “In _The Exploit_ Alexander R. Galloway and Eugene Thacker speculate
that “[f]uture avant-garde practices will be those of nonexistence.”
[1] This extraordinary claim is a response to the current ubiquity of
digital technology and its impact on cultural politics; if existence
becomes a question of being classified informatically, the avoidance
of this classification, or nonexistence, becomes of paramount
importance. The discussion of nonexistence in _The Exploit_ opens
with a question, one that forms the basis of this essay: “how does
one develop techniques and technologies to make oneself unaccountable
for?” [2] Directly following this question comes a specific, material
example through which a crucial distinction between “unaccountable
for” and “invisible” or “absent” is made — the use of a laser
pointer, aimed into a surveillance camera in order to ‘blind’ it. In
this situation, the camera is not destroyed nor is the individual
shining the laser actually hiding, or invisible; instead, they are
simply not present on the particular screen or data set recorded by
the camera in question. [3] The same is true of the tricking of a
server, causing it to record a routine event when one goes online.
These kinds of tactics, “tactics of abandonment”, are “positive
technologies” for Galloway and Thacker. They are entirely distinct
from absence, lack, invisibility and nonbeing because they are “full”
or rather, because they “permeate.” [4] The practical consequences of
Galloway and Thacker’s formulation of nonexistence are clear: It’s
not a question of hiding, or living off the grid, but of living on
the grid, in potentially full informatic view, but in a way that
makes one’s technical specification or classification impossible.” etc.etc.etc.

legendary operating systems

ninawenhart — Fri, 22 May 2009 03:58:00 +0000

article about ten meanwhile historical operating systems on TecChannel:

http://www.tecchannel.de/pc_mobile/windows/2018554/legendaere_betriebssysteme_msdos_nextstep_amigaos_macos/index2.html

The text is in German, but even for non-German speakers it is worth taking a look at the beautiful screenshots!

VisiCorp Visi On

Mac OS System 1.0

Xerox Alto

IX @ Hacker Space Fest 2009

ninawenhart — Thu, 21 May 2009 09:33:00 +0000

IX by h3x3n has been accepted to the Hacker Space Fest 2009, Paris.
The festival starts on June 26th and lasts until June 30th and consists of workshops, presentations, conferences and an exhibition of works.
Our installation can be seen throughout the festival. The presentation of the project will be on Monday, 29th June, 15:00.

agenda: http://www.hackerspace.net/

Russian proto-electronic music from 1930-s and beyond

ninawenhart — Wed, 20 May 2009 12:06:00 +0000

“Sound out of Paper” with Andrei Smirnov
May 21 at NK Berlin, Elsenstr. 52 2HH, 2Etage Entrance: Free starting at 21:00

Russian proto-electronic music from 1930-s and beyond, A presentation and film viewing session of synthesized sound from light called Graphical (Drawn) Sound technique produced in the 1930s recently discovered at the Russian State Film Archive. The technology of synthesizing sound from light called Graphical (Drawn) Sound technique which was invented in Soviet Russia in 1929 as a consequence of the newly invented sound-on-film technology. At exactly the same time similar efforts were being undertaken in Germany by Rudolf Pfenninger in Munich and, somewhat later, by Oscar Fischinger in Berlin. This invention came at least twenty years too early while the World War II was already at the threshold. As a result by late 1930-s the work in this domain effectively came to a halt. Although there were several short articles published in USA by V. Solev (1935), most publications about research and developments in the USSR were in Russian. At the same time the most important documents were never published at all and were circulating in manuscript form. Fortunately many unique archives survived and are collected now at the Theremin Center in Moscow. Over two hours of synthesized music produced in 1930s twenty years before the foundation of electronic music were discovered recently at the Russian State Film Archive.

Ars Electronica 2009: Human Nature

ninawenhart — Tue, 19 May 2009 13:20:00 +0000

Ars Electronica announced the topic for its next festival:
http://www.aec.at/humannature/index_en.html

The festival will take place in Linz, Austria, from Thursday Sept. 3rd to Tuesday Sept. 8th, 2009.

This year is the 30th anniversary of Ars Electronica. The festival started in 1979, from 1980 to 1986 it was held biannually, from 1987 on yearly.

Wolfram|Alpha

ninawenhart — Mon, 18 May 2009 21:17:00 +0000

on may 18th, 2009, Wolfram|Alpha has been launched. in contrast to search engines such as google, it is called an “answer engine”, a growing knowledge base of structured data. users are welcomed to contribute by submitting specific facts, a whole set of structured data as well as algorithms (http://www.wolframalpha.com/participate/participate.html)

“Our goal is to build on the achievements of science and other systematizations of knowledge to provide a single source that can be relied on by everyone for definitive answers to factual queries.” (http://www.wolframalpha.com/about.html)
these sources can be accessed at the bottom of every query result.

at the moment, wolfram alpha “contains 10+ trillion of pieces of data, 50,000+ types of algorithms and models, and linguistic capabilities for 1000+ domains. Built with Mathematica—which is itself the result of more than 20 years of development at Wolfram Research—Wolfram|Alpha’s core code base now exceeds 5 million lines of symbolic Mathematica code. Running on supercomputer-class compute clusters, Wolfram|Alpha makes extensive use of the latest generation of web and parallel computing technologies, including webMathematica and gridMathematica.”

blog: http://blog.wolframalpha.com/
website: http://www.wolframalpha.com/

archive 2020

ninawenhart — Mon, 18 May 2009 21:10:00 +0000

a conference about archiving and sustainability of born digital content. unfortunately it already took place (today, may 18th, 2009) in amsterdam.

http://www.virtueelplatform.nl/en/#2489

talks by:
Lev Manovich (on cultural analytics)
Olga Goriunova (runme.org)
Eric Kluitenberg (the living archive)
Alessandro Ludovico (neural.it)
Aymeric Mansoux (goto10)
Christiane Paul (the whitney artport)
Esther Weltevrede (archiving web dynamics)
Monika Fleischmann & Wolfgang Strauss (netzspannung.org)