Category Archives: Snippets
A printing press of one’s own
A museum without walls has been opened to us, and it will carry infinitely farther that limited revelation of the world of art which the real museums offer is within their walls: in answer to their appeal, the plastic arts have produced their printing press. Museum Without Walls, André Malraux.
Containment
The minimal message of a photograph may be less simple than we first thought. Instead of it being: I have decided that seeing this is worth recording , we may now decode it as: The degree to which I believe this is worth looking at can be judged by all that I am willingly not […]
Regression = prediction
[…] these sorts of problems break down into two types: regression problems, in which you need to predict some number, such as weight, given a bunch of other numbers, such as height; and classification problems, in which you need to assign a label, such as spam, given a bunch of numbers, for examples word counts […]
Innate species
Although every “acquired species” comes through imagination, Bonaventure creates another category of species, called innate species, that are imprinted directly on the memory. Bonaventure writes, “Memory has to be informed not only from the outside by phantasms but also from the above, by receiving and having in itself simple forms that cannot enter through the […]
like four-eye machines made of elementary faces linked together two by two
[…] The face is not a universal. It is not even that of the white man; it is White Man himself, with his broad white cheeks and the black hole of his eyes. The face is Christ. The face is the typical European, what Ezra Pound called the average sensual man, in short, the ordinary […]
All form is a face looking at us
If as Serge Daney writes, “all form is a face looking at us“, what does a form become when it is plunged into the dimension of dialogue? What is a form that is essentially relational? It seems worth while to discuss this question taking Daney’s formula as a point of reference, precisely because of its […]
Sehen wie ein Scanner
Culture has not only created epistemology, but indeed also signal-processing machines, which are then by definition detached from culture: they do not ‘count’ semantic aspects; they do not view images as icons; they do not perceive sound as music; and they read texts with the aesthetics of a scanner, by Optical Character Recognition. Wolfgang Ernst: […]
Pixel
As with their ancestor, perspective, today’s binary seeing machines, have managed to convince us that now we really can possesses an infallible method of representation: a system for the automatic and mechanical production of truths about the material world. That is, if we buy the new 15-megapixel cell-phone with the Adobe plug-ins that will no […]
Computational linguistics as seen by Stanislaw Lem
One day Trurl the constructor put together a machine that could create anything starting with n. When it was ready, he tried it out, ordering it to make needles, then nankeens and negligees, which it did, then nail the lot to narghiles filled with nepenthe and numerous other narcotics. The machine carried out his instructions […]
Anarchive, Wolfgang Ernst
“The term archive has been the dominant metaphor for all kinds of memory.” Listen online An interview made by SON[I]A.