Discussing his book Jpegs (2009), the German photographer and artist, Thomas Ruff explains that while downloading images from the Internet he noticed the pixellated quality. “It created quite a painterly, impressionistic structure, and rendered parts of what was often an ugly image very beautiful. I looked into it, and found the Jpeg file-compression software was …
Category Archives: objects
Lingering scopic regimes
Christian Metz is usually credited with the first using the concept “scopic regime”. Of course the term “scopic” has a different genealogy, taking in Lacan’s “scopic field” and the split between the eye and the gaze in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (1986: 67-78}, through feminist film theory (Mulvey 2009) and on to Slavoj …
Thing of the day
It started with a Kinder Egg. A present from my son for a hard-working proto-academic slaving over a keyboard. Inside, a pink poodle carrying what looks like a very frothy cappuccino and talking on her mobile phone (got to be a she, pink, bow in the hair… I’ve read semiotics). A thing. Even stripping aside …
Mackenzie: network and the conjunctive
Adrian Mackenzie’s focus is on the experience of ‘wirelessness’ which he frames through a reading of William James’ ‘radical empiricism’. In order to deal with the way that wirelessness is articulated through protocols, regimes of digital signal processing and what Paul Dourish and Genevieve Bell call the “infrastructure of experience” (2007), Mackenzie develops a particular …
Munster & Lovink: bringing network down to earth
While some writers have embraced or extended the concept of ‘network’ as a tool to imag(in)e the media ecology or information topology emerging around and through the Internet, others have been wary. Prefiguring many of the current discussions about ‘cyber-scpeticism’ (Lanier 2010, Turkle 2011, Carr 2010, Morozov 2011, Harkin 2009), Anna Munster and Geert Lovink …
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Galloway & Thacker: antagonistic clusterings and enfolded alliances
Like Castells, Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thacker also draw on a variation of information theory within their account of network as a political ontology (2007). They use a discussion of graph theory, which “provides us with a standard connect-the-dots-situation” (p31). This means: “a number of relationships can be quantitatively analyzed” (p31) and gives them the …
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