“The more you study humans, the more you see that we’re machines. The more you study machines, the more you see that they evolve and … seem to mimic an organic evolution to a state which eventually has to be sentient.”
The New Normal
“Like all technologies, light reflects larger expressions of power, carving up an architecture of visibility that shapes how lives are led at night, providing shelter for some and harmful exposure for others.”
“…as familiarity with coding increases, more people will use that skill to produce music or art. There are people who say ‘I spend all day behind a computer; the last thing I want to do after work is look at a computer again,’ but for me, the computer is not a burden but more like water. I don’t think I’m alone in that regard.”
“For me, personally, there’s no separation between my activities as a citizen and my activities as an artist.”
Hyperemployment
Ahead of the sunsetting of Adobe Flash on Dec 31, the Internet Archive announces the preservation of Flash content—SWF files—through emulation. First introduced by Macromedia in 1996, the software was vital for dynamizing the early Web. “From roughly 2000 to 2005, Flash was the top of the heap for a generation of artists, animators, and small studios,” writes archivist Jason Scott, warning that a big part of Internet history is now “in true danger of sinking beneath the sea.” To run Flash files without the discontinued player, the non-profit digital library incorporated Ruffle, an in-development emulator, into the site. Thus far, more than 1,000 Flash classics have been ‘resurrected.’
“If the surface internet is like Art Basel, then the darknet would be your artist-run space in a dirty basement in Bushwick.”
In their latest investigation, London-based research agency Forensic Architecture reconstruct the Beirut port explosion that killed more than two hundred people, wounded over 6,500, and destroyed large parts of the city on the evening of Aug 4. Using open-source information including videos, photographs, and documents provided by the independent Egyptian online newspaper Mada Masr, project lead Samaneh Moafi and team provide a meticulous, evidence-based picture of the events and “the multiple layers of state negligence” at play that day.
“GPT-3 is an extraordinary piece of technology, but as intelligent, conscious, smart, aware, perceptive, insightful, sensitive and sensible (etc.) as an old typewriter.”
AGF
Extinction Stories
“It’s equally clear that a massive paradigm shift will be needed to combat the deep-seated belief—which has been entrenched by decades of post-World War II economic policies—that growth is ‘the equivalence of life,’ and ‘not to grow is equivalence of death.’”
