Author Archives: Nicolas Malevé

You were asked to draw an angel

Playing with Quickdraw

In the cage

It had occurred to her early that in her position–that of a young person spending, in framed and wired confinement, the life of a guinea-pig or a magpie–she should know a great many persons without their recognising the acquaintance. That made it an emotion the more lively–though singularly rare and always, even then, with opportunity […]

This divine scanner

In How One Sees, Siegfried Zielinski and Franziska Latell trace the genealogy of vision. Quoting the philosopher Abu Nasr Al-Farabi (870-950), the authors write: Optics teach “according to the true circumstances of what is looked at to find the matter, the quantity, form, position and order and the other things which of the things is […]

Correspondences

Binford, O.T. & Nevatia, R (1977) Description and Recognition of Curved Objects, Artificial Intelligence 8(1):77-98.

Native contours

In this experiment [Hochberg & Brooks, 1962], a human baby was raised until the age of 19 months under the constant supervision of his parents who avoided exposing the child to line-drawings or two-dimensional pictures of any kind. Although the baby accidentally had opportunities to glance at some pictures on a few occasions, at no […]

Emotion and intelligent artifacts

“In a footnote Pickard reports that in lab experiments with students playing the computer game Doom, signs of stress came less with the appearance of a new deadly enemy (the intended site of emotional affect) than during times when students were experiencing difficulty configuring the software.” in Suchman, L. (2007) Human-Machine Reconfigurations. Cambridge University Press, […]

Damnatio memoriae

Recarving Nero

Portrait heads of the emperor Octavius Augustus. “The Joslyn portrait displays clear indications that it was recut from another person’s likeness, limiting the sculptor by dissimilarities to Augustus’ features in the original subject. Recut portraits in general exhibit asymmetries, undercutting, and unnatural planar features where a chisel or other implement has been used to remove […]

Artificial intelligence

Research on the Softening of the Brain, Léon Rostan

A dilation of the soul-itself

Aurelius Augustinus was born on 13 November 354 to the small-landowning Aurelii of Thagaste, an “obscure provincial city” in the uplands of Roman Numidia; and in the year of his birth the Christian emperor in Milan devised this new imperial epithet: “Eternity.” He died as Augustinus Hipponiensis, in the Vandal-besieged city of Hippo Regius —fronting […]