Tag Archives: memory

How to develop a picture from a corpse’s eye

“The morning of November 16, 1880, Wilhelm Friedrich Kühne (1837–1900), a professor of physiology at the University of Heidelberg, dissected the head of an executed murderer in his dark room within minutes of the man’s death. Kühne worked around the contracting muscles in the left eye socket to remove the eye and develop an image […]

Bochman’s face recognition system

The Major Bochmann was head of the passport division on the Eastern side of Checkpoint Charlie […]. He developed a facial recognition system, designed to teach the border guards to scrutinize faces and look for features that cannot be altered. The aim was to assess the authenticity of passport photos for those who were trying […]

How the brain recognizes faces

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 […]

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.

Templates after the fact

The edits of the declassifiers do not merely hide some content to preserve secrecy or privacy. They also underline the repetitive nature of the requests and controls that are taking place in the administration. The words that are “redacted” become like variables in a template.

The declassifiers

A declassified document is a document that ceases to be classified as secret. The process of declassification is not a simple publication of a once secret document. It leaves its traces on the document. When the document is released for public scrutiny, parts of it may still be removed. The classification of the paragraphs is […]

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.

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 past is woven into it

Hito Steyerl interviewed by Marvin Jordan Read the whole interview on Dis Magazine […] A while ago I met an extremely interesting developer in Holland. He was working on smart phone camera technology. A representational mode of thinking photography is: there is something out there and it will be represented by means of optical technology […]