January 2011
“MacIntyre maintains, however, that the system must be understood in terms of its...”
– Alasdair MacIntyre on money « Prospect Magazine
“I believe DotOrg was under pressure to come up with what was called...”
– O RLY?
Google Finds It Hard to Reinvent Philanthropy - NYTimes.com
Salman Rushdie and David Cronenberg on videogames....
David Cronenberg: Do you think there could ever be a computer game that could truly be art?
Salman Rushdie: No.
There's a beautiful game called Myst. Have you seen that?
I haven't seen that. They say this is democratic art, that is to say, the reader is equal to the creator. But this is really subverting what you want from art. You want to be taken over and you want to be-
Shown something.
Exactly. Why be limited by yourself? But they say, "No, it's a collaboration."
I like computer games. I haven't played many. At the Super Mario level I think they're great fun. They're like crosswords because once you've beaten the game, you've solved all its possibilities.
There's nothing left.
Whereas this is not true of any work of art. You can experience it over and over. And if you come back to it in five years it's a different work, it's a different thing. There's a different thing between a puzzle and a book. These are just very clever puzzles and they are very enjoyable and they require certain skills which are quite clever, useful to develop. Sometimes they make you use your mind in very interesting ways because it requires natural steps. You have to think in ways you wouldn't expect in order to find the solution. But it's just a game.
You would say, then, that a game designer could never be an artist?
Never say never. Somebody could turn up who would be a genius. But if one thinks about non-computer games, there are many which people say have the beauty of an art form. People say that about cricket, people say about every game. But actually, they're not art. You can have great artists playing games. You can think about a great sports figure as being equivalent to an artist. I could see that there could be an artist of a games player, a kind of Michael Jordan of the Nintendo.
They have those competitions internationally.
In the end, a work of art is something which comes out of somebody's imagination and takes a final form. It's offered and is then completed by the reader or the viewer or whoever it may be. Anything else is not what I would recognize as a work of art.
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WatchSent to me by a bunch of different friends; thx to all of you.
“A research group led by Stanford bioengineering professor Ingmar Riedel-Kruse has developed several real video games, inspired by Pac-Man, PONG and other classics, starring live organisms. “The basic idea,” explains Riedel-Kruse,”is to create games where a player has ability to interact with living matter...
“I’m currently dating a can of Heinz tomato soup in Barcode Kanojo, but it wasn’t...”
– Though I’ve been obsessed with barcode-based play for over 16 years now, it was Christmas Gorilla who brought this to my attention a few months ago, and Matt Webb to remind me of it on his blog.
Sexy Beans | Five Players
“Hey everything bagel, you don’t have everything on you, so shut the fuck up.”
– Jeff Baker (via petervidani)
“It’s true that the United States’s educational system is measurably slipping....”
– FUCK. YES.
The Nation: The ‘Sputnik Moment’ That Wasn’t
(via azspot)
“William Gibson in the NYT:
“Virus-writers seemed, at least at first, to...”
– Somewhere in the back of my mind, when Gibsonian events happen here in Universe A, and Gibson himself didn’t see them coming, I feel like he sort of let us down. Reading this, I see that perhaps he shares that fear. All of which is a compliment.
25 Years of Digital Vandalism - NYTimes.com
: What if the shantytowns and bidonvilles... →
Years ago I did a one-week workshop at Fabrica with about 20 students that were truly from all over the world. I wanted to warm up by having them describe their homes, so that we could establish a vocabulary of territorial domain. I also had them locate their homes on Google maps satellite view, which I though would just be a way we could get a sense of where they were from.
Of the 20...
oversets:
thenotes:
Last night as I was going to bed I took a moment to email myself the formulation “Dog choking on food = America.”
You beat Hemingway by a mile.
“Russia Today’s report, which emphasized that the video game was made by...”
– Yes, Walid Phares is such a fucking expert about games and terrorism that he didn’t mention that Hezbollah has a group dedicated to making video games designed as rudimentary terror propaganda and training.
Which has nothing to do with the idea that anyone uses neutral cultural artifacts with...
“Not exactly “ludic proxy” (term minted by @slavin_fpo = game-induced...”
– http://t.co/v5wVhRM From: Twitter / irwin: Not exactly “ludic proxy” …
“I began to think more scientifically as to the years like the 80s, and maybe the...”
– John Nash A Brilliant Madness
“For the second year in a row, the U.S. military has lost more troops to suicide...”
– CQ (via kateoplis)
Ruin value - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia →
kenyatta:
Ruin value (German: Ruinenwert) is the concept that a building be designed such that if it eventually collapsed, it would leave behind aesthetically pleasing ruins that would last far longer without any maintenance at all. The idea was pioneered by German architect Albert Speer while planning for the 1936 Summer Olympics and published as “The Theory of Ruin Value” (Die...
Fernand Braudel on the trans-Mediterranean Trade... →
In Turkey in the sixteenth century [snow] was not merely the privilege of the rich; in Constantinople, but elsewhere as well, Tripoli in Syria, for instance, travelers’ remarked on merchants selling snow water, pieces of ice, and water-ices which could be bought for a few small coins.’ Pierre Belon relates that snow from Bursa used to arrive at Istanbul in whole boatloads. The snow trade was so...
