Why Text? – Charlotte Frost: from furtherfield, a really interesting article on how text has become the dominant medium for expressing, and thinking about, net.art (and perhaps conceptual art at large). I think I like it in how Derridean it actually is – we think in writing, nothing happens outside of text, for we cannot leave the symbolic order of which we are always already a part.
I remember going to see Manuel de Landa, author of 10,000 Years of Non-linear History, speak briefly about genetic algorithms at Buffalo a few years back. It’s funny; even as someone who categorically believes ‘Artificial Intelligence’ to be a paradox (if my works don’t tell you, I believe intelligence to be, largely, an embodied phenomenon), I am whole-heartedly behind this kind of evolutionary experimentation. Altho I doubt I (or George Lakoff) will be proved wrong, I’ve been known to eat my words before. In the meanwhile, programming computers to play out trial and error at a rate exponentially faster than humans could, and tossing apples into any batch of oranges now and again, could undoubtedly make for some efficient, and likely strange, technology. From the linked article, “It has proved difficult to clarify exactly how these circuits work.” Talk about a black box.
The artthrob project this month is – well, actually… there are two sound projects, and then a ‘back at the ranch’ feature. First is a call for sound – as mp3s – for a remix work by petit sono, and the second is a collection by Otis F Odder.
The ranch bit, which is much more exciting for Joburg, actually features work by my students at Wits School of the Arts, giving them praise for the interactive installations at their mid-term show. The article has a bad link to their work, which is actually here. Above is a pic of Saul Garcia inviting onlookers into his interactive performance, Departures.
(photo credit: christo doherty)
networked_performance: beginning today, I’ll be a guest blogger on turbulence’s networked_performance blog, reporting live from South Africa! I’ve been given mostly free reign in developing a small team of South Africans who want to be involved in the blog, and potentially the conference in 2006. Feel free to contact me if you are in the Southern African region, and have thoughts, comments, projects or proposals that you feel belong on the site, or might fit the conference bill. Please provide links when you can, and let me know if there are images online, or if you can email me some (and how big they are).
Slashdot | Sun Working to Obsolete Motherboards:
“Sun is developing a new technology that promises to increase computing power by eliminating the need for physical, soldered chip-to-chip connections on the motherboard. Called ‘proximity communications’, it portends the ability for chips to talk to one another wirelessly just by being next to each other. Potential applications in computer design abound. Apparently this is part of Sun’s Hero program, recipient of a $50 million grant from DARPA’s High Productivity Computing Systems program to rejuvenate supercomputing in the US and regain the lead lost to Japan, in particular to NEC’s Earth Simulator, ranked as the most powerful supercomputer in the world.”
Hey everyone. I just started installing plugins on my blog. I’ve got the spellchecker (which is fairly easy to find), and now ImageManager, which should allow me to upload and edit my blog images on the fly, right from my browser. This particular blog entry is being sent to a pop3 account via email, to try and blog without a browser at all (let’s hope it works!). Does anyone know how I might send an image to my server as an attachment if I
wanted? It’d be great if there was a standard naming mechanism that I could then use an img tag with…. Any takers?