Brand Seduction/spambod

November 16, 2003

There’s a lot of hype surrounding the current crop of Social Networking applications (LinkedIn, Friendster, Huminity etc.) But I’m wondering about a couple of issues. The first, is that there are too many of these systems, with no common architecture. How many times do I want to have to code my social network? Possibly once, probably not at all — let the software work it out for itself. Which is why I think Friend-Of-A-Friend architectures, which allow various spiders to work out the links for themselves, are ultimately better than an archipelago of unlinked proprietary systems. The other concern is …

The Pressure of Thoughts

November 15, 2003

It is not certain what physical, chemical or neural mechanism causes or generates the changes in air pressure in or near the ear in response to various thoughts. It is hypothesized that various thoughts have varying intensities which cause involuntary muscle contractions or movements on a microscopic level in or near the ear, which generate pressure changes in or near the ear due to the compression of the air local to the ear. Nevertheless, regardless of the exact physical, chemical or neural mechanism, empirical testing has confirmed that thoughts generate small pressure changes in or near the ear of the …

A History of Colour Systems

November 10, 2003

John Gage recounts the story told by the painter William Williams in 1787 about an entomological illustrator who, “living in a remote country, unacquainted with artists, or any rational system of colours, with a patience that would have surmounted any difficulties, had collected a multiplicity of shells of colour, of every various tint that could be discerned in the wing of that beautiful insect [the butterfly]; for he had no idea that out of two he could make a third, by this method he had collected two large hampers full of shells, which he placed on each side of him, …

Goodbye Blue Jam

November 6, 2003

Yesterday, Tsai Ming-liang’s short The Skywalk is Gone and feature Goodbye Dragon Inn at the London Film Festival. I’ve seen his The Hole before, and wasn’t impressed, but these, yesterday, were something special. There are plenty of reviews of them around, pointing out the influences of Tati, Antonioni and the rest. But to me, the spirit of both films was more in the vein of Chris Morris: the long, weird scene with the smoking man at the row of urinals, the sinuous, nut-crunching girl, and much else in the feature, and the dénouement (if you could call it that) of …

Petrescence

November 3, 2003

Agricola, the seventeenth-century metallurgist […] spoke of a juice (succus) that was a stone-forming spirit (lapidificus spiritus). Robert Boyle, one of the founders of modern chemistry, called it a “petrescent liquor,” from the Latin word petra, rock; and he thought there might be special juices for metals and other minerals […] There were moments in the sevententh century when no one could admit that fossils might be the records of animals that lived before Biblical creation […] It was supposed that “stone marrow” (merga) “dissolved and percolated” through the earth, sometimes forming bone shapes and other fossils. Alternatively, people thought …

What Painting Is

November 3, 2003

I’ve been reading James Elkins’ (yes him again) What Painting Is. The book is about painting as the act of doing things with paint: the work towards the Work, as it were. Not about Art or Representation, or even stories about painters: the book tackles the viscous, tactile, impossible task of making something sublime through actions with oil, water, stone, pigment. There aren’t, he argues, art-critical ways of talking about painting at this level, and the book draws broadly from the language and practice of alchemy to navigate its way around these unspeakable things. Elkins’ face-to-the-canvas discussion of the physical …

Half-Artificial Intelligence (From Back-Office to Back-Brain)

October 29, 2003

Prediction of an emergent trend: integration of cheap overseas labour into ‘intelligent’ systems, to fill the gaps where ‘hard AI’ still fails. The press is making a lot of ‘offshoring’ — the movement of call centres, support departments and the like to countries where educational standards are high, and labour is cheap. Ignoring the politics for a bit, this is interesting in other ways: once the infrastructure for such services is in place, the supply side of this market will naturally be looking for higher-margin ways to exploit any surpluses. Imagine similar businesses offering the ‘clever, value-added bit’ to intelligent …

Viewmaster goes Atomic

October 26, 2003

Speaking of 100 Suns, what could be more then than a Viewmaster reel of 3D images of atomic tests? Coming soon at Atom Central. I only stumbled over this because I’m still hunting for the image that I hoped would be in 100 Suns — a Rapatronic photograph of a desert test that I hope I can find and post later, with some thoughts. Actually, I’m off to search the amazingly comprehensive The Bomb Project for it. This might take some time…

Two Things

October 24, 2003

That thing that happens sometimes, when you are lost in thought and you kick your foot against something in the world, fiercely hard, by accident, and suddenly you are aware that you have feet, and of the world, and it’s very funny, in a Zen kind of oh-here, the world kind of way. Today I took my headphones off in the Number 38 bus at Victoria, and the bus conductor was ringing the bell steadily, slowly, like a call to prayer, every note dying before the next.

Heft

October 18, 2003

Back to Heidegger: that tools which are ‘ready to hand’ (zuhanden) disappear into the task, and only become again ‘tools’ to us (as being, in themselves, things) when we put them down. I’ve written before, wondering about tools which we never put down — the tools which once we start using them, are internalised into our augmented experience — tools which become so much a part of our embodied being that we can never see them again in their own thingness. The word, not the axe. Also, possibly, pervasive tools like the mobile phone, certainly the internet, for some of …