School of Machines, Making & Make-Believe in Berlin, Germany
This now page shares what’s occupying my time at the moment. If you have your own website, you might want to create one as well. Learn more about me or read my CV.
The exhibition at Kunstquartier Bethanien featured Gallery 404’s latest extension, The net.art Restoration Project of Gallery 404.
The net.art Restoration Project of Gallery 404 presents a vision of what semi-automated cultural preservation might look like. The visitor helps train five screen net.art experience guides visitors through the restoration of a digital artwork from the 1990s. It outsources the difficult labor of restoration to machines to provide dubious results. Machines that moderate our experience of the present today will inevitably mediate our relationship to the past and profoundly impact our understanding of the future. Try it here.
The exhibition runs throughout August.
xCoAx 2024 at Fabrica in Treviso, Italy
I presented Between Chaos and Order at the 12th Conference on Computation, Communication, Aesthetics & X in July. xCoAx 2024
The abstract:
“Between Chaos and Order” delves into the relationship between cryptography and computation, highlighting the place between input and output - the space of computation. Here the dual meaning of “code” is on full display. As source code facilitating clarity and order and as a secret code meant to feign chaos. In both cases the resulting artifacts have a certain aesthetic sensibility that is only clear through their specific cultural context. This is demonstrated through an examination of three computational artifacts: Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Gold Bug,” Alan Turing’s notebook on cracking the Enigma machine, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s publication “Cracking DES.” Each object is appraised through the lens of Information Aesthetics as a method of piercing through the technical ingenuity to examine each as an act of human expression. Along the way, this essay asserts the value of certain practices when considering computation as a cultural resource worthy of examination and preservation.
Yorba
I’m currently working as Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at Yorba. We were recently reviewed in PCMag and covered TechCrunch/Yahoo! News!
We’re looking to work with people interested in Self-Sovereign Identity, Clojure, and decentralized storage. Get in touch if that describes you or someone you know.
Beyond the Frame
There have been several updates to Beyond the Frame. First off, you’ll notice the new logo The new Beyond the Frame logo. The Beyond the Frame Logo by Alma Gianarro is licensed by Beyond the Frame under CC BY-SA 4.0
in the upper right-hand corner. That logo was introduced in a new essay called “Untangling Non-Linearity.” This essay considers the direct and indirect impact of the humble linked list on culture and computation.For those of you new to the concept, the linked list is a way to associate data in computer memory. The incredible flexibility of this simple concept is part of a zeitgeist that spans everything from films edited by Walter Murch, the dawn of Artificial Intelligence, and even the World Wide Web’s hyperlink.
The newest entries are “What If Data Is a Bad Idea?” and a review of a collection of Philip K. Dick short stories.
Reading
My reading list is overflowing, as usual. I recently finished A History of the World in 12 Maps by Jerry Brotton (2014) and The Timeless Way of Building by Christopher Alexander (1979). I’m currently juggling these books, amoungst a few others:
- In altre parole by Jhumpa Lahiri (2015) (my first book in Italian!)
- The Observable Universe by Heather McCalden (2024)
- Data and Reality by William Kent (1978)
- The classic An Introduction to Information Theory: Symbols, Signals and Noise by John Robinson Pierce (1961)
- Prophets of Computing: Visions of Society Transformed by Computing edited by Dick Van Lente (2022)
- 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene (1998)
Recent Memory
Beyond the Frame’s “On the Internet, We Are Either Artists or Bureaucrats” (2020/2024) was mentioned by Joe Hallenbeck’s in both “Small Web” and “Disinformation Theory” on Joe’s Digital Garden. Hallenbeck observes in response:
A bureaucrat, however, is a slave to the machine. They opine because it is required – favorite, retweet, boost and register their engagement in the most formal and banal of processes. Shouting into the void is not the basis for a community.
I wrote an update for “On the Internet, We Are Either Artists or Bureaucrats” (#licklider) to build on Joe’s thoughts.
It was a pleasant surprise to have “Notes from Ambient Church” (2020/2024) mentioned in On an Overgrown Path; Overgrown Path has long been a favorite blog of mine. As a response, I updated “Notes from Ambient Church” with an addendum to address how encoding music as notation ensured that classical music would endure. But at the same time this practice has seemingly placed limits on what is acceptable within the genre.
The Gift Shop at Gallery 404: A gift shop was recently added to Gallery 404.Gallery 404 is a gallery that exhibits net.art as it appears today. It deals exclusively in broken art. See my announcement of its launch in 2020.
I’m very excited about this development. Read the press release.
Morpheus Biblionaut: I’m happy to see Morpheus: Biblionaut (2009) once again. I wrote the music to this piece of trippy electronic fiction many years ago. But it was lost with the death of Flash. Aaron Miller recently did the hard work of preserving this on YouTube and it’s now viewable. Credit also to the piece’s original authors, Travis Alber and William Gillespie.At one point I attempted to preserve Morpheus: Biblionaut using Rhizome’s Conifer to make a runnable archive. It mostly works but the sound is unfortunately unreliable.
Prophets of Computing: My contribution to Prophets of Computing: Visions of Society Transformed by Computing, “Microcomputers for the Masses. Jack Tramiel and Commodore” was recently published. Prophets of Computing: Visions of Society Transformed by Computing, ACM Books/Morgan & Claypool, New York, NY, 2022
The physical copy boasts an elegant layout and a fine attention to detail by the book’s editor, Dick Van Lente. My chapter examines the history of mass market information processing devices in the global marketplace leading up to the personal computer. It argues that the machine’s consumerist roots are its defining characteristic - rather than a tool for augmented intelligence, computers are tools for consumption.