First, you’ve probably already seen the first images from the James Webb telescope, but I for one am not tired of them yet. This tweet puts the “deep field” image into perspective . “Revenge of the Earthworms” by Moira Donovan The spread of jumping worms throughout the United States, and now Canada, threatens the health …
Tag: photography
September 2021
Once again, a little bit of a random assortment this month: Video: “When Stuff Gets on the Camera Lens,” by Mike Rugnetta Mike Rugnetta used to be the host of Idea Channel, from PBS Digital Studios. That show used media theory and philosophy to think about pop culture, and somehow managed to walk an extremely …
July 2021
I’ve got kind of a miscellaneous set of things to read for this month, without much of a theme, so I will just get right to it: 1) “The Rotting Internet is a Collective Hallucination”, by Jonathan Zittrain Once a year, I teach a class on technology and democracy. One of the ideas that I …
May 2021
I’ll start off this month with some music, beginning with this playlist by Jace Clayton, for ArtForum. Jace Clayton is also DJ/Rupture, and he’s probably best known for finding and promoting interesting new music from parts of the world that aren’t the United States or Europe. (I quoted from his book Uproot, about the way that digital culture is changing …
Models We Live By
First, some shameless self-promotion: I made an album, and you can listen to it (and buy it!) here: Moving on… There’s a well known Borges story called“On Exactitude in Science”, in which the desire for a perfectly accurate map eventually results in “a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and …
Boundary Work: Year’s End
Running through my head all day today is the phrase “start as you mean to go on.” I don’t really believe that the first day of the year will somehow determine the shape of the rest, but, even if the specific point at which we designate the end of one year and the start of …
November 11, 2018: Seen and Unseen
I’m going to acknowledge up front that my theme this time may be a little bit tenuous. I’m talking broadly about awareness as much as literal sight, but a number of the things I’ve been thinking about do have to do directly with the visual realm. “On the Nose”, by Chris Ip, describes the work …
October 10, 2018: Keeping It Real
Like, I think, most of us, I’ve found the news from the last several weeks…troubling. I thought writing about some things I’ve enjoyed recently might lighten my mood a bit. I don’t have a real theme this time around; there’s no particular connection among these things, so this is more like the recommendations posts as …
May 26, 2018: Plastic Fantastic Ekphrastic
In “We Made Plastic. Now We’re Drowning in It”, Laura Parker’s recent cover story for National Geographic, the fundamental point— we make and throw away a lot of plastic, and this very bad— is not surprising; what she (and the photos, by Randy Olson) does most effectively is convey the scale. Because plastic wasn’t invented …
September 24, 2017: What is Lost
I’ve recently begun playing the game Nier Automata, which takes place (as so many things do) on a far-future earth where machines have taken control, exiling humanity to the moon, from which they stage attacks on the machines below. Describing that setup by itself doesn’t do the game justice; it’s beautiful to look at, the …