The social worth of art without value
Today’s topic is participation in art. The texts behind this article make a particularly convincing case that we’re in dire need of dismantling of surface-le...
computational arts
Thoughts on climate change sensing and environmental citizenship
Before you read on, refresh your Whitehead and process philosophy. If we are to reimagine how environmental sensing is being conducted — under which premises...
Subverting techno-colonialism
The international aid sector today struggles to shed vestiges of Western colonialist worldviews and tendencies — and, arguably, actively perpetuates the same...
Machine-mediated humanitarianism
Computer vision — the process by which a machine learns to assign humanly recognisable meaning to concepts that are utterly alien to it, such as arrays of RG...
Empathy’s Uncanny Valley: Ubiquitous Computing
Humanity’s affinity with the human-like follows a particular growth curve: while affinity grows steadily as the observed entity becomes more human-like, ther...
And now, for something completely different: the Non-human Turn
I am fascinated by the non-human turn’s perspective of relinquishing human creative primacy, and removing humanity from the fictitious focus of attention. In...
The Otherness of Execution
Pattern matching and recognition, the “gut feeling” of almost-understanding or, at least, knowing to differentiate the is from the is not is a human evolutio...
On Mimicry and Aliens - Figuring the Human in AI
Suchman touches upon a crucial aspect of what it means for an AI to be human: how is being human figured, according to which perspective, and how does our tr...
Computational Aesthetics and Informational Antimemetics
McLuhan exposes the fact that a new medium is like a virus for which humanity hasn’t yet developed antibodies. The superstimulation comes from both the amoun...
Statements, Logic, and Control: A summary and critique of Andrew Goffey’s “Algorithm”
Goffey’s paper focuses on teasing out the connection between algorithmic abstraction and the discursive power that the same abstraction represents, if seen a...