Spinplayer
http://automatist.org/poc/spinplayer/ Clicking the image (in the actual interface) toggles playback. Originally I was thinking to mimic the motion of two spindles of a cassette but the maths got a bit...
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“A word is worth a thousand vectors”
Image caption: Class and gender: dimensions in a vector space? Title of presentation by Chris Moody presenting an algorithm named word2vec, that represents words as vectors in an abstract space of...
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Addressing the gender gap…
Two recently encountered examples of messages attempting to address the gender gap typical of many (free) software and technology projects; the first is I think rather more emblematic of the problem...
View ArticleBotopera: Opening
A séance with the public domain, chatbots on an IRC interface and a plotter animate authors whose work has entered into the public domain 70 years after their deaths. In keeping with the theme of this...
View ArticleChatting with the dead: Professor Oblivion
David Cronenberg’s Videodrome includes the character Professor Oblivion, a McLuhan-esque figure who responds only through the medium of video. Spoiler alert: In the course of the film, Professor...
View ArticleEliza
The mother of all chatbots is Joseph Weizenbaum‘s Eliza first developed in the late 1960s. Interestingly, ELIZA was in fact the name of the general purpose program that would converse with read input...
View ArticleChatting with the dead: Autoicon
Autoicon is a CD-ROM project by UK artist Donald Rodney who, in response to diagnosis of sickle-cell anemia, created works that explored the idea embodying himself in various media and forms. Named...
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Live long and process…
Image by Jillian Steinhauer. A nice article on “spocking currency” and the built in “anti-counterfeiting” algorithms built in to Adobe Photoshop....
View ArticleArchitectures over Frameworks
Today via Hacker News… Do Not Learn Frameworks, Learn the architecure Remember the old principle that each module should perform just one function? In case it performs two or more functions, we should...
View ArticleScraping with CSS and (pure) Python
Code discovery of the day: cssselect2 by Simon Sapin, a pure python implementation of fancy CSS3 selectors. Here, I’m scraping some data based on the “unique selector” Firefox gives for a table element...
View ArticleBotnet Workshop at H&D
Together with An Mertens, we ran a workshop at the Hackers & Designers Summer Academy 2015. Continuing work with IRC chatbots, the workshop was a crash course in the inherent sociality of software...
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Share your location
Software, like literature, not only relies upon but reframes language. “Sharing” is a particularly contentious nexus in a Web 2.0 economy. Here, the browser prompts the user to share in response to a...
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Rules to prevent installing OpenWRT?
OpenWRT routers have increasingly become part of my practice setting up local networks for events. The story of the origins of OpenWRT as the result of the GPL is a really telling one, and a positive...
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make: *** No rule to make target ‘Idiosyncratic’, needed by ‘all’. Stop. #error_messages #make
View ArticleSome links from Hacker News this morning all in ways about the (im)permanence...
HTTP is obsolete. It’s time for the distributed, permanent web Some great snapshots from early operating systems such as GEOS on C64 and polaroids from the development of the mac. Finally a “white...
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BOTOPERA @ poetry festival + art book fair, wiels
We (An Mertens, Anne Laforet, Antonio Roberts, Gijs de Heij & myself) performed and installed the “botopera” this weekend at Wiels. It was interesting to see this work in the context of an art book...
View ArticleWriting and Unwriting
After a long gestation period, Writing and Unwriting (Media) Art History: Kurenniemi in 2048 has been published! Edited by Joasia Krysa, and including a contribution written by Geoff Cox, Nicolas...
View ArticlePermaPics
Using hashes to provide “distributed image hosting”? http://ipfs.pics/ https://github.com/ipfspics/server http://ipfs.pics/QmaD2H6Rv9jCFRCPVFqLRwpBaXzvuXiKraFcCSoZS2FX2T
View ArticleGated platforms
Part of the ongoing transition of big commercial online platforms away from a promiscuous and porous web to a “gated platform” and “developer sandbox”. Of note is the language of “authentic...
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