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some things i have made, sorted by keywords;
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In our lives it has partially taken over the role of art, partially that of speculative philosophy. Indeed, in the days of Plinius Ziegenhalss, for instance, it was often called by a different name, one common in the literature of the Feuilletonistic Age. That name, which for many a prophetic spirit in those days embodied a visionary ideal, was: Magic Theater.
For all that the Glass Bead Game had grown infinitely in technique and range since its beginnings, for all the intellectual demands it made upon its players, and for all that it had become a sublime art and science, in the days of Joculator Basiliensis it still was lacking in an essential element. Up to that time every game had been a serial arrangement, an ordering, grouping, and confronting of concentrated concepts from many fields of thought and aesthetics, a rapid recollection of eternal values and forms, a brief, viruoso flight through the realms of the mind. Only after some time did there enter into the Game, from the intellectual stock of the educational system and especially from the habits and customs of the Journeyers to the East, the idea of contemplation.
This new element arose out of an observed evil. Mnemonists, people with freakish memories and no other virtues, were capable of playing dazzling games, dismaying and confusing the other participants by their rapid muster of countless ideas. In the course of time such displays of virtuosity fell more and more under a strict ban, and contemplation became a highly important component of the Game. Ultimately, for the audiences at each Game it became the main thing. This was the necessary turning toward the religious spirit. What had formerly mattered was following the sequences of ideas and the whole intellectual mosaic of the game with rapid attentiveness, practised memory, and full understanding. But now there arose the demand for a deeper and more spiritual approach. After each symbol congured up by the director of a Game, each player was required to perform silent, formal meditation on the content, origin , and meaning of this symbol, to call to mind intensively and organically its full purport. The members of the Order and of the Game associations brought the technique and practise of contemplation with them from their elite schools, where the art of contemplation and meditation was nurtured with the greatest care. In this way the hieroglyphs of the game were kept from degenarating into mere empty signs.
(The Glass Bead Game, Herman Hesse)
Quote reblogged from The Verge with 16 notes
It’s true that computers are a particularly important and influential kind of thing in the world, and indeed I myself have spent most of my career pondering how to use, make, and understand them. But they are just one thing among so many more: airports, sandstone, koalas, climate, toaster pastries, kudzu, the International 505 racing dinghy, the Boeing 777 Dreamliner, the brand name ‘TaB.’ Why should a new aesthetic interested only in the relationship between humans and computers, when so many other relationships exist just as much? Why stop with the computer, like Marinetti foolishly did with the race car?
The New Aesthetic Needs to Get Weirder - Ian Bogost - Technology - The Atlantic (via thisistheverge)
I’ve seen many meandering critiques of the New Aesthetic, which is good, so I’ll add my own meandering critique.
Bridle, clearly, is encouraging us to commune with machines not because he truly believes that they are friendly and trying to talk to us, but because holding a purely Us vs. It mentality in light of current machine/system + human/community power relations serves only to reinforce passivity and fearful neglect of transformative creativity. Empathy, on the other hand, allows for understanding- not only of one’s potential enemy but of possibilities for reconciliation and transformation. Empathy allows its user to discern sound where there was previously only noise, and as such underlying structures and processes become visible. If the New Aesthetic occasionally positions the human as originary subject it is not because of a preference for human aesthetics or because of a neglect of object relations, at its base of course the vision at work in the New Aesthetic must see the human being as object amongst objects. It is crucial that we know ourselves as the product of our tools. The Alien Aesthetic therefore, is ever present if one sees the human being as composite object, as I believe the New Aesthetic encourages- if not obvious in the New Aesthetic tumblr, then it is certainly clear within Bridle’s talks.
Addressing the idea of the Alien Aesthetic again: no conception of how our tools see the world can ever be devoid of the human subject, we can catalogue, however, how the human object’s vision may have been altered by its interaction with tools, and, we can catalogue the specific interactions that the inhuman object is having- we can record exactly what is seen by computers/machines.
The same old issue arises again: if we, feeling ourselves a subject, cannot conceive of exactly how the machine-object sees, would the machine ever be able to understand exactly what the human-object sees, or would it be stuck in the position of machine-subject analysing externally a construct of the human mind it has created within itself? Instead, when one moves past the idea of subjectivity and focuses on interactivity, we can consider the human mind’s ability for machine-like containment of constructs, and the question becomes- how close can we get? how much information do we need? we can run the calculations. how much longer do we have before their processes are truly beyond our comprehension and out of our hands? If the machines can analyse us for their own code-writ purposes, then we must do the same to every machine used and owned and protected by artificial cultural structures, and we must make every effort to analyse and alter our coding, which is cultural, biological and environmental, while we are still the only ones who can. However, this process must be up to the individual and the community, must be constantly in flux and ever-changing or it is usurped.
I do not believe that Bridle will or even should attempt to “thrust forth some fully-assembled theory for making and perceiving beautiful objects in a digital age”. To push forward any ideal framework, or doctrine, is inherently restrictive and inevitably self defeating- as is clear now more than ever, with so much history at our fingertips. Storytelling functions only to point the viewer in certain directions, to encourage consideration and to provide perspectives with which to increase the viewer’s awareness of their environment. Objects that present transformations in the human being of notions of time, space, and image are both fascinating and contain revolutionary potential. However, to decide what an object of beauty is or should be, from a position of authority, is to restrict the viewers you share this with from using their own transformative vision- after all, the sublime is user-generated. Why is the New Aesthetic so successful if not for its quiet and patient aggregation of seemingly ubiquitous things? Bridle is not positioning himself as some abstract container of immediately consumable answers, and rightly so. Movements do not require leaders, movements do not require doctrines, what movements need is collaborative meaning making. It is not technonarcissism, it is not apolitical, it is not purely aesthetic; it is patient, unassuming, transformative praxis. Soft praxis, yes, but transformative nonetheless.
So, spam bots stand as proof that human agency is not required in the process of cultural creation- you do not have to look further than human reactions to horse_ebooks for proof of that. In this sense the spam bot’s schizophrenic interaction with language stands as an externalisation, a visualisation, of the secret life of our symbiotes, our objects and tools. Yet, doesn’t this focus on algorithmic processing, which appears so often lifelike, educate the viewer about hir own inner workings, and the workings of culture at large? The spam bot’s removal (or rather, postponement) of human agency is a beautiful automated metaphor for the extended functions of infrastructure when it is displayed to our culture, possessing as it does, an antiquated notion of singular selfhood. Neither the technological singularity, nor even any conceivable less drastic realisation of hard AI, is required to see touchpoints at which “machines and human consciousness interpenetrate”, the two have always been intertwined. There is not, nor has there ever been, a line between the physical and the digital, yet the New Aesthetic is right to present examples of the interaction because in its audience the artificially drawn line is becoming increasingly blurred, thankfully, and to deny the line’s artificiality any longer could be disastrous.
So large a part of the infrastructure that governs our daily lives relies on the digital. We are living in a time in which human vision, and human decision making, which we have long since surrendered to hierarchies and cultural systems, is now outsourced to the machinic indifference of screens. The alienation and isolation of the modern condition, which sets us in cycles of fear, fear of otherness and difference amongst ourselves and inside our own minds, destroys possibilities for community. We can watch in real time as free association or revolutionary thought is crushed by habitual, culturally defined, assumptions, and, we can watch in real time as revolutionary action is misconstrued, subverted, usurped, and physically crushed, for the purposes of advertising and artificially prolonging the life of certain cultural and economic systems. I beg of you a solemn nod at least, here, to acknowledge the dead. If a true line between what is called “artificial” and what is called “natural” can be drawn then it should be drawn at the point where culture contravenes the wisdom of considerately exercised free human agency, not out of an irrational idolisation of the human subject or of transcendentalist ideas, but to ensure that our actions do not continue to be destructive- perhaps we can change our use of the word “artificial” to take into account the fact that man-made things are an extension of nature, and operate both with and without us. Is a new word needed here? “Superficial” perhaps, as in, not belonging to the core?
If we wait to see where Bridle’s work goes next; he has said he wants to address the issue of privacy, and he has stated that he does not know how his work will end up he just sets things in motion, of course, like any artist. I personally, alongside many others, am fascinated by the changes in human consciousness and language use that are facilitated by interaction with machine systems. The use and development of tools that can track these things is most commonly held, and most effectively wielded, by the hands of advertisers. Of course it is better to look to physical and social geography to understand how the unbridled extensions of our tools affect the world around us, and better to look to computer science itself for how machine language is changing, but for the human mind to understand itself it requires only reflection. Not the crude, “superficial”, reflections of a mirror- which provides a simple copy- but the reflection of the sky in the movements of water, and the act of contemplative reflection, something often neglected, that can be found therein. So follows an extension of the phrase Matthew Battles used to describe the New Aesthetic’s objects of interest; “But they move”. Yes, the objects are able to show us glimpses of what hard AI might look like- but these glimpses are crude, thoroughly abstracted. In the streams that are the New Aesthetic tumblr, or any tumblr, and the streams of text that come from spam bots that are seen as ‘moving’ towards something. What is the movement pointing towards? With regards to the bots, the simpler option, their movement points nowhere- yes they, and those behind them, are better adapting their language-selection processes to appeal to or trick potential viewers, and yes, that is a part of the movement towards an intelligence that can pass or fool the turing test. But in the reflection, there is movement also; in the viewer of these streams, there is a process of creative identification, and where does that lead? Under the right conditions, it leads to the inevitable, all-human(currently) process of questioning the self, to fragmenting false constructs, away from the jagged edges and sharp falls of mountains, away from fickle, lonesome, meandering paths, away from the chemical pollution and indiscriminate destruction of rivers, towards a great ocean. This, I believe, is what tumblr and twitter facilitate as systems- rapid, positive changes in language use.
Bridle’s work is to bring evidence of these changes into media streams outside of their spheres. To find evidence of transformative human reactions to such changes is important, because it allows for the sharing of affect, of thought patterns. By doing this in the manner of hyperlinked aggregator, rather than consolidating a limited guidebook, he leads new audiences towards the streams and work of others. I hope that his work in future will include more sharing of frameworks for understanding and identifying transformative social changes, so that we do not lose them in such rapid streams.
I wrote this twice because I wrote it on tumblr and as such accidentally deleted it the first time when it was nearly finished and and and i refuse to look at it any longer
Quote reblogged from .heksenhaus. with 7 notes
There are people who exist in this world not like entities but like the speckles or spots on something.
nikolai gogol, from ‘dead souls.’ (via heksenhaus)
phrase spot! google searchin’ “there are people who”
There Are People Who Thought The Titanic Was Fiction. FTW. via, gothamist. No Comments, Comment or Ping. Reply to “There Are People
There are people who, instead of listening to what is being said to them, are already listening to what they are going to say themselves. Albert Guinon …
Eco-Solidarity: there are people who are hungry. … THERE ARE PEOPLE WHO HAVE NOTHING TO WEAR! THERE ARE PEOPLE WHO ARE ILL …
There are people who don’t use feed readers? 5/02/2007 03:00:00 PM. Posted by Brad Hawkes, Software Engineer Email screenshot. It’s fun to share …
Around the world there are people who really do feed off the energy—and the blood—of others to get through their everyday lives. They have communities in …
1/9. Four Types of Cyclists. Roger Geller, Bicycle Coordinator. Portland Office of Transportation. Despite all the considerable advances Portland and the region …
David Cannadine: ‘There are people who believe there’s no hope or …
Poetry. There Are People Who Think That Painters Shouldn’t Talk : A GUSTONBOOK. by Patrick James Dunagan. Written in the Spring of 2009 and composed of …
Askville Question: There are people who make things happen, there are people who watch things happen, and there are people w : Society.
19 Mar 2012 – There are people who build things and people who tear things down. Just remember which side you’re on.” Brain Pickings has a free weekly …
There are people who still don’t believe that Obama is a Muslim… by sheikyermami on February 26, 2011. But every action he takes furthers Islamization: …
’There Are People Who Don’t Like Me,’ He Says, but It Didn’t Stop Him from Winning the Dream Role of Paul Newman’s Son.
There are people who spend hundreds of pounds on a hotel, but then ask if psychotherapy isn’t ‘a bit self-indulgent’.
”There are people who will stop at nothing to destroy News International” - Trevor Kavanagh on police investigation into the Sun - The World at One, BBC Radio …
Note to our Readers: The Yurica Report obtained a copy of the original Eric Heubeck essay, “The Integration of Theory and Practice: A Program for the New …
Now, there are people who think we’re living in the post-American world, to coin a phrase. There are people …
“There are people who still look down on Morocco” | In english | EL …
”There are people who will go to Mykonos in late August?” - Find the answer to this question and millions more on Yahoo!7 Answers.
blogs.journalism.co.uk/…/sun-associate-editor-there-are-people-who-… 13 Feb 2012 – Trevor Kavanagh said he would be ‘delighted’ to talk to Rupert Murdoch about the arrests when he visits this week.
Upvoting & Downvoting on Quora: Do you think there are people who follow you around on Quora and downvote all of your answers? Why do you think they are …David Cannadine: ‘There are people who believe there’s no hope or …28 Nov 2011 – Comment is free interviews: David Cannadine, historian and author of The Right Kind of History on history’s place in the school curriculum.
It makes me sad that there are people who have no idea how … Facebook is a social utility that connects people with friends and others who work, study and live around them. People use Facebook to keep up with friends, …
There are people who were gay, and lived a gay lifestyle, and aren’t anymore.: Rick Santorum explains on Fox News Sunday (January 1, 2012) that being gay is …
3 people liked this quote by Jim Lovell: ‘There are people who make things happen, there are people whowatch things happen, and there are people who wo…
10 Mar 2012 – … “God Bless America” was an odd and unexpected salve – a reassuring reminder that there are people who value basic human decency and …
They believe that there should not be buildings remaining empty when there are people who are in crucial need of a home but lack the resources to legally …
There are people who care - 420 Magazine™
Why There Are People Who Have Never Seen A Floppy Disk. Posted by hocking in Public Clouds Rock! on Mar 9, 2012 6:29:25 PM. In my role with NetApp as …
6 Mar 2012 – There are people, some of them voters, who think Facebook is run by the CIA. God help us.
There are people who live long enough to create a link — a one-generation link — to figures from what feels like a distant past. And their …
Someone once said, “There are people who are just happy drinking water. On the other hand, there are some who sink in sorrow while dressed in luxury.
ENDLESSLY FASCINATING PHRASE
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i only take
small parts of me
with me
when-ever i gooo
i haven’t had
enough time
to understand everything i knowww, oh!
you might think there’s something wrong with me,
or you might call it progress
you might have known that alreaady!
or you might think i diiigress
ooooo differing perspectives and boundaries, woah! >:D
oooo shifting understandings and existences tralalalala OHHH! >:]
differing perspecitives and boundaries
every speed is crawling when we’re on our knees oh >:|
*shampoo complete*
it is a habit from childhood that need not stop only i don’t sing aloud any more except when i am alone, and it is it is it is a joke. that is a black country superpower- you can confront anything by positioning yourself in a chuckling humility corner. i remember i was thinking about roman roads and tributaries as a way of explaining the increasing ease in bypassing overarching structures in media influenced thought, to pass the time while i waited for sleep. i only realise now it connects with the imagery “CAIN & ABEL; A ROAD AND A RIVER” which i had not thought of in a while, but which first clicked when i was taking frantic plane-window photographs nearing the end of baby’s first transatlantic flight, so.. as a consequence it carries the significance-weight of a message from the beyond, despite the obvious fact that metaphors and similes and other such elucidations are a dime a fucking dozen in the human mind, they just do not always come out to greet us
(i have to brush my hair while it has conditioner in it or the tangles hurt)
INSIDE EVERY ONE OF US IS A SINGER
INSIDE EVERY ONE OF US IS A POET
INSIDE EVERY ONE OF US IS AN ARTIST
INSIDE EVERY ONE OF US THERE ARE MANY NOVELISTS
INSIDE EVERY ONE OF US THERE ARE INNUMERABLE FECKLESS SCRIBES
inside everyone of us is hell
inside everyone of us is everyone of us is
i would talk about convening worlds and the fact that the self, containing everything, does not require a self it needs only communication to further approach fulfillment via peace without laziness and with purpose - but this is a brief and vague user guide to unknown unknowns, not a haynes manual. or rather, i am just relaying to you the morning news as i received it from the movements of water during a cleansing ritual at five o’clock in the afternoon. did someone say something about self imposed isolation and the artistic spirit? HUSH don’t give her any ideas. speaking of childhood it inherently contains unparalleled instances of unselfconscious free association.
(sic)
my lover listens to medieval music when he works because of video games
my lover listens to medieval music when he works because of video games
i could hear the words disintegrating as i brushed my teeth
and
now the air is cool and refreshing
i don’t know what i have forgotten
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festival
protest
festival
protest
festival
protest
the dog chews,
the dog chews
there are four lights
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“Does computer-mediated vision change how we see without computers?”
when i am falling asleep at night, can traverse levels of abstraction in chaos-generated imagery in my mind’s eye by adjusting levels of focus, subtle grades of conscious awareness/influence. i’ve noticed the first instinct is to see pixels or static in the closed eye, and that it is through relaxation and removal that the shapes become “organic” and fluid, it is at that point or at the transition between static/screen-imitative visual noise and the “organic” that images are produced. if the images kick off from the wholly “organic” they tend towards landscapes, figures. if the images kick off at the transition point they tend towards an “animation”/simulacrum quality- “artificially” recieved image patterns. however, in saying this i am aware that it is a fluctuating environment and the differences between the imagery is a product of my watching, observation bias on noise that takes place behind the scenes. i’m wondering if the static/pixel aspect was present in minds’ eyes before the era of screens. interlacing or cubic patterns are not new - are present in various textiles across many cultures.
however i take it that you treat vision as meaning visual language, what of and how we communicate that which we observe, in which case you are undoubtedly correct. inc. aural, written, automatic/systemic, transformations of information within the mind that can be considered communication insomuch as they are interaction, or other “non-visual” languages. and that cooperatively reclaiming, rethinking how we use language - scrutinising the power of language - can be a catalyst for positive growth. vision as structured by language, performing selective processes on *what* we “see” out of what is around us.
the best thing to scrutinise is how computer use may act to change the individual’s sense of time and place. i am greatly interested by the personal effects of outsourcing memory and communication- since the conscious place-present mind is an observer of what is in essence a separate (though connected) self involved in the use of tools we do not control. just as the human being interacts with its speech, but structurally different in that the human being is able to revisit reproductions of its speech/action at a different point in time unprotected by the staunch revisionist that is human memory- not only in personal correspondence, but in every word, action, and movement.
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Naomi Taylor
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increasingly noticing the number of people saying that bots/algorithms/systems *need* to be referred to as AI’s- skipping the question of what constitutes life to address the fact that life is not required to produce and alter “culture”- encompassing advanced mathematics+physics/philosophical/political/geographic/historical/sociological/anthropoligical/poetic -extended materialism- worldview.
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Naomi Taylor
about an hour ago
Naomi Taylor
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capitalism is the rampant, evil over-seer AI. text it.
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xxx
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Naomi Taylor
55 minutes ago
Naomi Taylor
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also i hereby proclaim that it is time to use a term like “antisocial media” instead of “traditional” or “mainstream” or “moderated”- to directly address restrictive forces that have a vested interest to carry out the will of said Aggressive Self-Serving Hive Mind; the sole aim of which evidently is to engender existential apocalypse via imbuing our species’ continually-deferred-future-vision of that already-present dystopia with the images of paradise via a corrupted notion of the human self (re: libertarians, though this is part of a wider process of ever changing perspectives which even in their conflict serve to perpetuate the distributed destructive-through-rampant-creation thought-form as an ever evolving/adapting interconnected construct-body across time-space).
o reagan.jpg

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Naomi Taylor
46 minutes ago
Naomi Taylor
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“antisocial” carries the unwanted contextual recent history of “Antisocial behaviour” control language. However, with proper usage within self-affirming language, to recalibrate perspectives the user is communicating, it would serve to reclaim the term in the name of a humanist anticapitalist perspective to mean “against the greater good” or “against free thought” or “against the human will for considered yet non-hierarchical communal expression”
o nixon.jpg

the captcha for reagan.jpg was “always there”
the captcha for nixon.jpg was “over there”
We See The Future Through The Binoculars Of The People
Text reblogged from Mar de Cortez with 10 notes
I do not understand this trend of photos of naked women wearing stormtrooper helmets

now trying to compare google trends for the searches “femen” and “female stormtrooper” but apparently that has had 0 hits, as has “naked stormtrooper” and “women wearing stormtrooper helmets” ..purportedly meaning that it falls too far below their scale, presented as “we don’t have enough data” but who knows, man, WHO. KNOWS.
so i can’t be bothered to look into this any further to see if there actually was any correlation at any point because it was meant to be a joke
“stormtrooper” alone, however, comes up with a high amount of searches and the following sidebar headlines
Stormtrooper in court for legal fight
Melbourne Herald Sun - Apr 8 2008
Both sides claim Stormtrooper court case victory
BusinessWeek - Jul 31 2008
Stormtrooper battle returns to British courts
Philadelphia Inquirer - Nov 3 2009
Stormtrooper fight goes to Britain’s Supreme Court
CBS News - Mar 7 2011
Lucas loses UK battle over stormtrooper helmets
San Jose Mercury News - Jul 27 2011 ![]()
This is the delicious Stormtrooper cake you’re looking for
CNET News -Jan 18 2012
ok searching stormtrooper on “Google insight for searches” now
these are the headlines it gives me
South East Trek for Stormtrooper
This is the delicious Stormtrooper cake you’re looking for
Rush Limbaugh Compares Sharon Bialek’s Son To A Nazi Stormtrooper (AUDIO)
Graffiti artist makes Star Wars Stormtrooper helmet out of Adidas sneakers
Lucas loses UK battle over stormtrooper helmets
‘Stormtrooper’ Helmet Copyright Case Argued in UK
Stormtrooper fight goes to Britain’s Supreme Court
it has plenty of data, and even conveniently has a forecast for the rest of 2012
searches for STORMTROOPER will spike at FIFTY during month OCTOBER of THE YEAR OF OUR LORD TWENTY TWELVE
searches for STORMTROOPER will reach a low at THIRTY FOUR during month JUNE of THE YEAR OF OUR LORD TWENTY TWELVE

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celebrate, embrace, discover noise
until it becomes what it always was; sound
as we are training our machines to do
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Here’s one that has been waiting a long while just to breathe, even!
No. 1.26, We Now Exit the Realm of Practise and Enter the Domain of Tradition
‘You’re standing in the parking lot of a convenience store, which sits off the highway to the West. The higway itself makes a sharp bend to the south, making it a perfect place for motorists to stop.’
DO YOU COPY? Y/N
Photo with 4 notes
OCTOBER, 2008
ok i’m done, dickheads, since i just actively showed the world a drawing i did when i was 17 and i don’t want to make a habit of it.
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