Author Archives: Nicolas Malevé
Arcane 17
Arcane 17 is a text by André Breton written at the end of the war while traveling on the East Cost of Canada. Arcane 17 is a book object that contains text, images and objects.
The Annotator
A report from one of the Cqrrelations working groups: From the start we were interested in how a Gold Standard is established, a paradoxical situation where human input is both considered a source of truth, and made invisible. Annotation here means the manual work of ‘scoring’ large amounts of data that can than be used […]
A quirk of temporal memory
[…] which is a quirk of temporal memory – one tends to fill in gaps with data only acquired later, sort of the same way the brain automatically works to fill in the visual gap caused by the optical cord’s exit through the back of the retina. David Foster Wallace, The Pale King.
Unpredictable enough
Gödel proved that within any formal system sufficiently powerful to include ordinary arithmetic, there will always be undecidable statements that cannot be proved true, yet cannot be proved false. Turing proved that within any formal (or mechanical) system, not only are there functions that can be given a finite description yet cannot be computed by […]
Text-ures 3
A man goes to see his optician and asks for a pair of reading glasses. The optician: I already gave you a new pair last week. The man: I have already read them.
Forensic Architecture
Dump of notes taken during the presentation of Eyal Weizman at the the seminar Culture@Work What is an evidence? How to socialize it?
Text-ures 2
Lapsus by the Google Books OCR program. The visual approximations of the algorithm for the word arms and anus are similar enough to create some confusion. Mentioned by Nanna Bonde Thylstrup in her talk The politics of archival assemblages in the seminar Culture@Work
Two species of bits
A digital universe – whether 5 kilobytes or the entire internet – consists of two species of bits: differences in space and differences in time. Digital computers translate between these two forms of information – structure and sequence – according to definite rules. Bits that are embodied as structure (varying in space, invariant across time) […]
The gradient is a net we throw out to sea
“But classical science clung to a feeling for the opaqueness of the world, and it expected through its constructions to get back into the world. For this reason it felt obliged to seek a transcendent or transcendental foundation for its operations. Today we find—not in science but in a widely prevalent philosophy of the sciences—an […]