Author Archives: Nicolas Malevé
Geoff Cox, from Speaking Code to algorithms
Geoff Cox discussing the ecology of algorithms at the occasion of the launch of the Cqrrelations website. “What would algorithms say if they could speak? We could say the same of data of course. If it was allowed to speak what would it say about itself? It probably wouldn’t say it is raw and unmediated. […]
Algorithms before computers
“The only way you could formulate a complete rule (in premodern sensibility): you had to foresee the exceptions, it is both specific and supple. The habit doesn’t simply enforce the rule, it embodies it, just like this spearbearer statue embodies the canon of male beauty. More than that the habit’s discretion is not supplementary to […]
The Variability of Vision
LATE IN 1967 a book was published in England which is as charming as it must be fascinating to all who are interested in the theory and practice of interpretation. Its principal author is the Dutch naturalist and ethologist Niko Tinbergen, who combined with a friend and artist to photograph the tracks left in the […]
Upside-down inversion goggles experiments
Living In A Reversed World documents an experiment by Erismann & Kohler during which the subjects were required to wear goggles transforming their perception, between six to 124 days. The film is narrated by James J. Gibson. More on the experiment: http://www.awz.uni-wuerzburg.de/en/archive/film_photo_and_tone_archives/video_documents/th_erismann_ikohler
Every contact leaves a trace.
Both questioned document examination and computer forensics belong to a branch of forensic science known as “trace evidence,” which owes its existence to the work of the French investigator Edmond Locard. Locard’s famous Exchange Principle may be glossed as follows: “a cross-transfer of evidence takes place whenever a criminal comes into contact with a victim, […]
Deep addressability
[…] deep addressability would allow for the identification not only of things with mass but also of relations between things. Once again, each letter in the sentence you are reading right now could have an address, but your act of reading of each one of them, those immaterial relations between two things, it and you, […]
If all you have is duct tape, everything starts to look like a duct
From Perl, the first postmodern computer language, by the Practical Extraction and Reporting Language (Perl)‘s creator, Larry Wall. “Or think about shell programming, and reductionism. How many times have we heard the mantra that a program should do one thing and do it well? Well…Perl does one thing, and does it well. What it does […]
Comparative Ways of Seeing
Your browser does not support the video tag. In the frame of Ways of Machine Seeing, a series of experiments in collaboration wit Geoff Cox on the the four episodes of the BBC documentary series Ways of Seeing. In this probe, the same algorithm runs an object detection script using two different training sets. For […]
R-G-B. Peter Campus
If we are to avoid the problem of creating a visual system that will reduce the capacity of the eye, it is necessary to disassociate the video camera from the eye and make it an extension of the room. Peter Campus Video as a Function of Reality, 1974
A Brief History of ‘Pixel’
Figure 1. The first appearance of picture element, in a news item in Wireless World and Radio Review, about a demonstration by Ives at Bell Labs of a 50-by-50-element television system. A few RCA researchers, notably Albert Rose and Otto Schade, continued to use picture element to examine the theory of imaging, but with differing […]