As a follow up to my blogpost the other day about New Aesthetic as not-only-visual-but-also-something-else, I kept wondering about other possibilities. Overall, what I find interesting in NA is that algorithms produce new cultural forms... and that it's not just about visual representations. One of...
Representing the city as it's lived: livelihoods
It's been few days that I'm following the the livehoods.org/ and it's quite interesting. The project is defined as follows: "Livehoods offer a new way to conceptualize the dynamics, structure, and character of a city by analyzing the social media its residents generate. By looking at people's chec...
"The Unknown Glitch"
Read in SPACEWAR: Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums by Steward brand (1972): Alan Kay: "They had a thing on the PDP-l called 'The Unknown Glitch' ["Glitch" - a kink, a less-than-fatal but irritating fuck-up]. They used to program the thing either in direct machine code, direct...
Mythologies update?
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Bot activity on Wikipedia entries about Global Warming
Looking for material for an upcoming speech, I ran across this research project (by digital methods initiative) that inquires into the composition of issues on Wikipedia by contributors, and consequences for the (possibility) of carrying out public debate and controversy on articles surrounding Glo...
Is the New Aesthetic only about visual stuff?
The panel about New Aesthetic at SXSW last month left me with the impression that NA is all about visual representations: "One of the core themes of the New Aesthetic has been our collaboration with technology, whether that’s bots, digital cameras or satellites (and whether that collaboration is co...
Rotary dials as game controllers
Working on the book about game controllers, I did some research about the first game peripherals. This is actually chapter 1... and one of the most intriguing example is certainly the existence of rotary dials. Potentiometers and knobs were of course the first lineages in terms of game controllers;...
Vending machines and their cultural implications
Yesterday, in a very small village in the French Alps, I ran across this fascinating bread vending machine. It made me think about other encounters with not-so-common machines such as a book delivery system in Seoul: Or this pr0n vending machine in Torino: And the camera/umberall combo in Bergen...
Joypad/lego hybridization
Why do I blog this? This "Genesis Lego by Jomind" is a weird and curious hybridization of a standard controller (a Sega Genesis pad) and a combination of Lego bricks. I take it as an interesting example in the process of creolization, corresponding to the first steps. ...
Awkward strokes minimized with Dvorak keyboard
Why do I blog this? Simply because I love this visualization as a way to show path-dependence. ...