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Cybernetic Subjectivity and Information

Cybernetic Subjectivity and Information

The image above attempts to illustrate some of the core elements of what we could call ‘cybernetic subjectivity,’ that is, how the process of ‘subjectification’ might occur within a cybernetic framework. Here, we refer to Michel Foucault’s idea of...
The Zero UI Music Player

The Zero UI Music Player

One of the most iconic computers in cinema is certainly HAL9000 from Stanley Kubrick’s epos 2001: A Space Odyssey. With all inner workings hidden beneath a red light in a camera lens, the mischievous A.I. created an eerie atmosphere...
AI: is it just buzz or is it really changing the web design world?

AI: is it just buzz or is it really changing the web design world?

“A.I. Websites. Build for Humans.”   It has been quite a while since the non-stop futuristic flashy banners began showing up on my browser. The Grid is an AI web-builder that will build a website for you in a couple...
Spotify the Data Sage.

Spotify the Data Sage.

Is Discover Weekly a step forward or a step back? In the good ol’ days people discovered music by listening to the radio and recording the music on audio tapes. The disk jockeys were the opinion leaders that could...
Digital Modularity: The Roland System-1M

Digital Modularity: The Roland System-1M

In the past year synthesizer manufacturers Moog and Korg have released re-issues of their famous analog synthesizer models of the past. Just as many other companies that reacted to the nostalgia surge of the past 15 years, so did...
rMA Thesis Conference 2015: (pre)Cyberspace Perspectives on Information Technologies

rMA Thesis Conference 2015: (pre)Cyberspace Perspectives on Information Technologies

The following is a modified transcript of my research presentation for the 2015 Research Master in Media Studies Thesis Conference. My thesis is an exploration of magical writing practices in contemporary digital culture. This was too much to talk...
The posthuman cyborg: Technological telepathy

The posthuman cyborg: Technological telepathy

Researches have recently published an article where they have done an experiment with some kind of technological telepathy. A man in India wearing a BCI (Brain-Computer Interface), has successfully transmitted different kind of words through thoughts to a man’s...
Is it cyborg o’clock yet?

Is it cyborg o’clock yet?

This year has been exceptionally fruitful for the fans of wearable technology. Last week, we were introduced to a new child of the wearable technology era: the Apple Watch. On September 9, Apple revealed its own long-anticipated smartwatch –...
Unplugging the cyborgs

Unplugging the cyborgs

While this week’s tech-press has devoted much space to the launch of yet another better, bigger and more amazing set of consumer electronics, it was a seemingly unexciting object with the looks of a humble notebook-charger passing by the...
The Cloud: The Cost of Digital Comfort

The Cloud: The Cost of Digital Comfort

Last week’s Internet sensation, the leakage of compromising pictures of approximately hundred (mostly female) celebrities, has evoked different reactions that can be divided into three categories: Excitement about the exposure, Indignation about the violation of privacy, and Fear for...
Invading Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect and the Ecology of Fear

Invading Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect and the Ecology of Fear

Sonic Warfare: Sound. Affect and the Ecology of Fear is a book written by Dr. Steve Goodman, who has a PhD in Philosophy, but to a whole group of people he might be  better known under his alias: Kode9,...
We Are Dread: A Review of the Dread Exhibition at De Hallen, Haarlem

We Are Dread: A Review of the Dread Exhibition at De Hallen, Haarlem

    By Lani Shadduck & Lucy Chinen “Dread trembles in my pocket. Dread chirps incessantly. Dread flashes and bounces. Dread summons me a hundred times a day to pay attention to my phone or my laptop, and stiffening...
Virtual reality rebooted: Can duct tape fix (virtual) reality?

Virtual reality rebooted: Can duct tape fix (virtual) reality?

‘Imagine a wraparound television with three-dimensional programs, including three-dimensional sound, and solid objects that you can pick up and manipulate, even feel with your fingers and hands. Imagine immersing yourself in an artificial world and actively exploring it, rather...
On the Nature and Culture of Photography

On the Nature and Culture of Photography

The praxis and technology of photography has seen dramatic transformations over the last century. The most obvious transformations taking place in the last decade of the 20th century, marking the shift from analog to digital photography. Yet another shift...
New Media in Brazil: An interview with the curator of FILE

New Media in Brazil: An interview with the curator of FILE

FILE stands for International Festival of Electronic Language and is the biggest festival of new media in Brazil. The event happens annually in São Paulo and eventually in other cities of Brazil and holds projects, installations, screenings and presentations...

Love in the Time of Call-era: Rap music videos and the infectious relationship between humans and mobile phones

Attraction: Mobile tools R. Kelly ft. Nas “Did You Ever Think” (1998) The access point of your curiosity is the body, an exciting, new gadget. J. Macgregor Wise describes one perspective of human-technology relations as a received view in...
App review: Sleep as an droid. Or as a cyborg?

App review: Sleep as an droid. Or as a cyborg?

I love to sleep. So much that waking up early on Monday for morning classes is a hard and laborious task. I always set my alarm clock about half an hour early to compensate for the time spent snoozing...
The Switch: from Matthew Fuller to mobile apps

The Switch: from Matthew Fuller to mobile apps

Erupting Irruption Ask Elk Grove, launched ten days ago for the city of Elk Grove, California, numbers among the newest localized smartphone applications for reporting civic repairs. Most follow agendas similar to GRCity311, an app developed for Grand Rapids,...
Let’s talk iPhone? App-so-lutely!

Let’s talk iPhone? App-so-lutely!

The iPhone 4S In the advent of the “Let’s Talk iPhone” event, people were already looking for tutorials  in order to sync and back up all of the various apps they have gathered from the moment they “went apple,”...
For the Love of Material!

For the Love of Material!

Posthumanism, Protocol and Techno-Craft at Mediamatic’s Ignite Amsterdam 10 If androids dream of electric sheep, we posthumous dream of the Jetson family’s flying car. “Posthuman” because, as foreseen by early prostheses now as natural as eyeglass, human identity consciousness...
Book Review: opaque presence: manual of latent invisibilities ed. Andreas Broeckmann and knowbotic research

Book Review: opaque presence: manual of latent invisibilities ed. Andreas Broeckmann and knowbotic research

opaque presence instructs toward a mythology of suspended origin. Such a creation myth is necessarily one of destruction. Fully actualized, opaque presence could deposit the naked and the clothed in the Garden of Eden as a garden, an unbroken...

The human race towards immortality or stupidity.

The idea of immortality plays a significant role in the human life. Within every generation, and within every culture this is an issue. The Chinese incorporate this with Ba Xian, the eight immortals. Within he Indian Mythology there is...

Man and/or machine

The BBC recently broadcasted ‘James May’s Big Ideas’. In this sequence of documentaries May, probably best known as anti superhero in ‘Top Gear’, explores in the episode ‘Man-machine‘ some projects on cyborgs, avatars, artificial intelligence and robots. Unfortunately, the episode isn’t...

Cybernetics in the Lowlands

Although the place to be for technological dreams is, or was, Silicon Valley in the United States, the Lowlands have their own valley: Eindhoven. In the seventies and the eighties a museum called the Evoluon exposed modern technology that...