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all watched over by [bugs] of loving grace

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Not simply a cryptocurrency, Maecenas touts itself as a blockchain platform that, according to its creators, will ‘democratise access to fine art’. ‘For the first time,’ the Maecenas website enthuses, ‘technology will allow investors, collectors and owners to exchange shares in paintings and sculptures instantly, akin to the way stocks of a company are traded today.’ (...) In this strange new future, art collectors and dealers will no longer worry about buying, selling, shipping and storing artworks. Instead, such works will all disappear into freeport vaults, while galleries and investors speculate on the rising value of a Jeff Koons or a Gerhard Richter, trading blockchain certificates with each other. 

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Sound, the Way the Brain Prefers to Hear It

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/06/science/06sound.html?_r=1&hpw

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Mead recipe: dilute honey with water, stir twice a day, wait.  

Fermentation begins after 24-48 hours. After a week, the fermented honey-wine (mead) can be enjoyed green, low in alcohol yet lively with essence. Or you can let it continue.

Generative-poetry recipe: text-corpus analysed by neural net, wait.

After each reading of the corpus (a.k.a. ‘training epoch’), a neural net can produce/save a model. Think of the model as an ecosystem produced by fermentation, an idea, a bubbling contingency, a knot of flavours, a succulent reservoir, a tangy substrate that represents the contours, topology or intricacies of the source corpus. Early models ( a model is usually produced after the algorithm reads the entire corpus; remember, each reading of the corpus is called an epoch; after 4-7 epochs the models are still young) may be obscure but are often buoyant with energy (like kids mimicking modern dance).

(...)

Eventually fermentation processes halt. In the case of mead, this may occur after a month; with neural nets, a process called simulated annealing intentionally decreases the learning rate every iteration; so the system begins by exploring large features then focuses on details. Eventually the learning rate diminishes to zero. Learning (fermentation) stops.

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(...) To be specific, Errazuriz didn’t hack Snapchat and tag its model of the sculpture but created his own, identical version with his studio, CrossLab, and dropped it at the same GPS coordinates as Snapchat’s. He then created his own free app, ARNYC, through which you can access the graffitied Koons if you’re within 300 meters of it in Central Park. The vandalism here is more symbolic, but it still raises necessary questions about control and privatization of digital real estate, and how massive corporations can co-opt this endless canvas of pixelated pseudo-reality. (...)

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Humani Victus Instrumenta: Ars Coquinaria

1569. Unknown Master. Italy

Copper engraving. 379 mm x 277 mm 

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“Today, computing mainly automates things for you, but when we connect all these things, you can truly start assisting people in a more meaningful way,” Mr. Pichai said. He suggested a way for Android on people’s smartphones to interact with Android in their cars. “If I go and pick up my kids, it would be good for my car to be aware that my kids have entered the car and change the music to something that’s appropriate for them,” Mr. Pichai said.

What’s illuminating is not the triviality of Pichai’s scenario — that billions of dollars might be invested in developing a system that senses when your kids get in your car and then seamlessly cues up “Baby Beluga” — but what the urge to automate small, human interactions reveals about Pichai and his colleagues.

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“My name is Simone Giertz, I am the ceo and director of a company called Artificial Stupidity”

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Housed in a rectangular acrylic tube with crank mechanisms (plus seats) at each end, the ‘off the grid’ device latches onto any curious visitor who sits down and reaches in: grab one of the mechanism’s leavers and a pair of cuffs that double as electrodes will ‘trap’ your arm in place and stimulate your wrist muscles with small electrical jolts. As the muscles contract, you involuntarily crank the mechanism’s leaver, generating kinetic energy the machine (or rather its battery) feeds on. Keep cranking and the machine will pause the stimulation, let go and the tingling shocks return. This ‘ad infinitum’ energy cycle is only broken – and the visitor freed – when another visitor reaches for the opposite leaver, thereby becoming the new host. (...)

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By production fetishism I mean an illusion created by contemporary transnational loci that masks translocal capital, transnational earning flows, global management, and often faraway workers (engaged in various kinds of high-tech putting-out operations) in the idiom and spectacle of local (sometimes even worker) control, national productivity, and territorial sovereignty. …production has itself become a fetish, obscuring not social relations as such but the relations of production, which are increasingly transnational. The locality…becomes a fetish that disguises the globally dispersed forces that actually drive the production process.

Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large (via thisiswaterrr)

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In ordinary inference, the being of the finite appears as ground of the absolute; because the finite is, therefore the absolute is. But the truth is that the absolute is, because the finite is the inherently self-contradictory opposition, because it is not. In the former meaning, the inference runs thus: the being of the finite is the being of the absolute; but in the latter, thus: the non-being of the finite is the being of the absolute.

G. W. F. Hegel, Science of Logic, trans. A. V. miller, p. 443.

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We can see through the identity principle, but we cannot think without identifying. Any definition is identification. But definition also approaches that which the object itself is as nonidentical: in placing its mark on the object, definition seeks to be marked by the object. Nonidentity is the secret telos of identification.

Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics. (via mir-nicht)

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The transorbital (If you are unfamiliar with the word ‘transorbital’, its definition is “Crossing through (If you are unfamiliar with the word 'through’, its definition is "In one side and out (If you are unfamiliar with the word 'out’, its definition is "In a direction away (If you are unfamiliar with the word 'away’, its definition is "From a particular thing (If you are unfamiliar with the word 'thing’, its definition is "An entity, an idea, or a quality perceived, known, or thought (If you are unfamiliar with the word 'thought’, its definition is "Past tense and past participle of think.”) to have its own existence.“) […]

Definition Book, Sam Coppini (2014)

Made as part of NaNoGenMo 2014.

It starts as a simple 8-word sentence, but the program randomly chooses words to define for the reader, and keeps defining words until the book is at least 50,000 words long.

(via p-dpa)

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open-sourced or out-sourced?