For Italian artist Leonardo Ulian, this is our universe. At its center: a microchip. Beyond: resistors, capacitors, inductors, transistors.Ulian’s “technological mandalas”—webs of circuitry in the form of the Hindu or Buddhist symbolic diagrams of the cosmos—are icons for an electronic age, and he’ll be exhibiting them this fall in Milan.
Charting the Geo-History of Culture
Bigger data gets the bigger picture . . . in this case, the big picture in the form of an amazing visualization of global cultural evolution. In Europe. Things move slowly at the beginning, when the only stars and centers of cultural gravity are Athens and Rome. Watch Europe flicker through the “dark” ages until the Renaissance lights up the map. Of course, things really get going in the nineteen hundreds with the industrial revolution.
Reincarnation 2014
Welcome to the latest virtual reincarnation of digitalsouls.com — as a WordPress site.
Reincarnations of digitalsouls.com include its first online appearance as a collection of simple html pages (1997-2000). In 2001, the site saw a new reincarnation as a PHP reactor (2001-3). This virtual reincarnation was followed by a very successful life as a PHP Nuke. During its life as a PHP nuke, digitalsouls.com evolved and grew through multiple versions of that publishing platform (2004-2013). Today, after a rather brief incarnation as a Joomla site (2013-14), digitalsouls.com emerges once more in its latest virtual reincarnation, this time as a WordPress site.
Dr. Hugo: Body Language Sequences
Dr. Hugo Heyrman’s online selection of short video loops offers a glimpse on the complexities of human behaviour and interactions. An intriguing mixture of urban anthrop
ology and behavioral psychology, Heyrman’s work combines the elements of a virtual siteseeing tour exploring the streets of Antwerp, Netherlands, with the aesthetics of choppy motion loops – micro shorts, as Dr. Hugo calls them. The online work is part of Dr. Hugo’s Museums of the Mind.
Brian Eno: The Big Here and The Long Now
The Big Here
It was 1978. I was new to New York. A rich acquaintance had invited me to a housewarming party, and, as my cabdriver wound his way down increasingly potholed and dingy streets, I began wondering whether he’d got the address right. Finally he stopped at the doorway of a gloomy, unwelcoming industrial building. Two winos were crumpled on the steps, oblivious. There was no other sign of life in the whole street.
“I think you may have made a mistake”, I ventured.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); :GOTO 10
This installment of MIT Press series Software Studies has an unusual title, at least for the non-coding population. It is a single line of BASIC that, if the code is executed, prints an infinite string consisting of two characters, selected at random. The last instruction at the end of the program line (GOTO 10) instructs the computer to go back to the beginning of line 10 of the program, execute its instructions, and generate and print out another character based on the algorithm.