User:Francg/expub/media-writing/draft-19April

Drafts, refs, thoughts...

Which are the aspects of design, art practices and technology that really interests me?.

Alternative methods, activism, underground - accessibility vs exclusivity, piracy, audio, gadgets, diy, Puredata software, create an electronic sequencer, feedback loops from different audio/video inputs, experiment with microphones, webcams, monitors, data bases, digital archives, finding out how to use optical flow in python by using many video inputs simultaneously connected, the sound of mobility perhaps, different cameras pointing onto specific urban pathways where people’s interaction generates audio responses. Thinking of an installation of big dimensions where monitors are piled together, each of them showing the camera’s live input. Research on sensor technologies: which technologies use such devices and to what purpose? Will there be any social implications? What we people then become if used at an individual level?

Have a look at:

The 3D Activist cookbook

Life exists only in action. There is no innovation that has not an aggressive character. We implore you – radicals, revolutionaries, activists, Additivists – to distil your distemper into texts, templates, blueprints, glitches, forms, algorithms, and components. Creation must be a violent assault on the forces of matter, to extrude its shape and extract its raw potential. having spilled from fissures fracked in Earth’s deepest wells The Beyond now begs us to be moulded to its will, and we shall drink every drop as entropic expenditure, and reify every accursed dream through algorithmic excess.

How to think like a computer scientist: learning with Python One of the reasons why I like Python is that it provides a really nice balance between the practical and the conceptual. Since Python is interpreted, begin- ners can pick up the language and start doing neat things almost immediately without getting lost in the problems of compilation and linking. Furthermore, Python comes with a large library of modules that can be used to do all sorts of tasks ranging from web-programming to graphics. Having such a practical focus is a great way to engage students and it allows them to complete signif- icant projects. However, Python can also serve as an excellent foundation for introducing important computer science concepts. Since Python fully supports procedures and classes, students can be gradually introduced to topics such as procedural abstraction, data structures…

Always on. Language in an online and mobile world. Naomi S. Baron
The challenge is not words but technologies and the systems we build upon them for communicating with one another. Those technologies include personal computers and mobile phones, and the systems have such names as email, instant messaging (IM), Facebook, and blogs… My ultimate interest in this book is to understand the synergy between technology and language, not to produce a timely data-reference guide.

I’m very into you. Kathy Acker and McKenzie Wark (emails correspondence)
Here before you is the surviving correspondence between Kathy Acker and McKenzie Wark. These emails were hastily wrinen, casual and often indirect; they crossed "in the mail" and beth the sequence and references may confuse the reader. The authors barely knew each other, the correspondence lasts a little over two weeks, and their relationship lasted only a few weeks beyond the last of the letters.

The filter bubble. What the Internet is hiding from you.
The Internet software that we use is getting smarter, and more tailored to our needs, all the time. The risk, Eli Pariser reveals, is that we increasingly won’t see other perspectives. In The Filter Bubble, he shows us how the trend could reinforce partisan and narrow mindsets, and points the way to a greater online diversity of perspective.”
“You spend half your life in Internet space, but trust me—you don’t understand how it works. Eli Pariser’s book is a masterpiece of both investigation and interpretation; he exposes the way we’re sent down particular information tunnels, and he explains how we might once again find ourselves in a broad public square of ideas. This couldn’t be a more interesting book; it casts an illuminating light on so many of our daily encounters.”

Cyborg. Caronia
In the post-Fordist era of digital networked media the cyborg unfolds itself in the dissem- ination of multiple bodies: on the Internet, in the shift of individual identity, in the new col- lective aggregation connected by software. It bridges virtuality and concreteness, possibility and necessity. The cyborg thus becomes a eld of social con ict, one of the new gures in which the bio-political perspective is embodied.

Diversity of plays. Fuchs.
Diversity of Play provides a critical view on the current state of digital games from theoretical, artistic, and practical perspectives. With an interview with Karen Palmer and essays by Astrid Ensslin, Mathias Fuchs, Tanya Krzywinska, and Markus Rautzenberg, the book explores the uncanny in games, the power of “unnatural” narratives, and the exceptions and uncertainties of digital ludic environments.

The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence. Ray Kurzweil.
“Ranges widely over such juicy topics as entropy, chaos, the big bang, quantum theory, DNA computers, quantum computers, Godel’s theorem, neural nets, genetic algorithms, nanoengineering, the Turing test, brain scanning, the slowness of neurons, chess playing programs, the Internet—the whole world of information technology past, present, and future. This is a book for anyone who wonders where human technology is going next.”
“A compelling vision of the future from one of our nation’s leading innovators. Kurzweil brings serious science and a twinkling sense of humor to the question of where we are headed ... With his pioneering inventions, and his penetrating ideas, Kurzweil convincingly takes us through what promises to be the most pivotal of centuries.”
“An extremely provocative glimpse into what the next few decades may well hold ... Kurzweil’s broad outlook and fresh approach make his optimism hard to resist.”

THE ADAPTIVE BRAIN
THE MAKING OF A SYNTHETIC BRAIN REQUIRES NOW LITTLE MORE THAN TIME AND LABOUR. . . . SUCH A MACHINE MIGHT BE USED IN THE DISTANT FUTURE . . . TO EXPLORE REGIONS OF INTELLECTUAL SUBTLETY AND COMPLEXITY AT PRESENT BEYOND THE HUMAN POWERS. . . . HOW WILL IT END? I SUGGEST THAT THE SIMPLEST WAY TO FIND OUT IS TO MAKE THE THING AND SEE. ROSS ASHBY, “DESIGN FOR A BRAIN” (1948, 382–83)