Category Archives: Snippets
Scandinavia is a joke
Ellef Prestsæter: Did you feel that you were collecting evidence for a specific archaeological argument? Jacqueline de Jong: Yes, sure! It was the argument that there had been people, like the Visigoths, travelling all over the globe. Jorn wanted to show that the images are the same in Italy, Spain, Portugal, wherever you go.
Agatha Christie smoking Asger Jorn’s cigar
Ellef Prestsæter: Readers of Concreta, beware! … Engaging with you, Asger, in the context of this special issue on Vandalism and Iconoclasm calls for a strict demarcation between vandalism on the one hand and iconoclasm on the other. While the Scandinavian Institute of Comparative Vandalism (SICV) connects you intimately with the concept of vandalism you […]
Black boxing conversion
[…] Bernhard Siegert: In a way, you can describe the business of cultural techniques as the opening up of black boxes. If you think of concepts or even symbols as black boxes, when you open them up, what comes out are cultural techniques. One of the things I have been studying recently is the very […]
Capta
Etymologically the word data is derived from the Latin dare, meaning ‘to give’. In this sense, data are raw elements that can be abstracted from (given by) phenomena – measured and recorded in various ways. However, in general use, data refer to those elements that are taken; extracted through observations, computations, experiments, and record keeping […]
Tabou
Words banned by proclamation and restored through expiatory ceremonials. The Abipones as declassifiers? Dans la langue des Abipones du Paraguay, on introduit des mots nouveaux chaque année, car on supprime par proclamation tous les mots qui ressemblent aux noms des morts et on les remplace par d’autres. On comprend que de tels procédés liquident la […]
Bag of aerial words
Appearing in the New York Times, a posting by Mark Vanhoenacker about flight. The world’s airspace is divided. There are various sorts of divisions. To the pilots who cross them every day, their borders form what we may regard as the countries of the sky. […] An airplane typically navigates through sky countries along a […]
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.
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) […]