Meanwhile, at Serpentine Arts Tech

*Via email. Hello Friends, Today we’re excited to launch our new online home for Future Art Ecosystems. Initially, Future Art Ecosystems (FAE) was inspired by the artists we (the Serpentine Arts Tech team) worked with to create artworks that deployed a variety of emerging technologies such as AI, VR and game engines. Through these collaborations […]

Precursors of the web and social media on Geocities

*It’s like discovering that wax cylinders once held popular music. https://blog.geocities.institute/archives/7358 *Olia Lialina: “Those who don’t remember the web before platforms, tend to believe that for 10 years web users stared at their monitors in anticipation. Actually they were made to believe it. First by Web 2.0 proponents, and nowadays by aggressive Web3 campaigns that […]

Retnik 6E6 Russian military multitool

*That’s some Russian milspec, all right. They’re in the private market, and they arrive wrapped in protective wax paper and preserved in “arsenal grease.”

Meanwhile, at Next Nature

Cultivating the future: the evolution and promise of lab-grown food. Remember our 2018 petition rallying for public tastings of in vitro meat? It stirred up quite the storm, even sparking a lively parliamentary debate in the Netherlands. A lot has happened since then. Meat from the lab is already approved to be on the market […]

“A Coder Considers the Waning Days of the Craft,” in the New Yorker

*I would recommend reading that, because the secondary and tertiary effects of this are just beginning. *Also, archiving today’s digital crafts that will be swiftly forgotten, that will be quite an interesting challenge, much like preserving silent film. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/11/20/a-coder-considers-the-waning-days-of-the-craft (…) In a 1978 essay titled “On the Foolishness of ‘Natural Language Programming,’ ” the computer […]

Leatherman’s FIAT car

*This is the broken-down, second-hand Italian car that caused Tim Leatherman to create the original “Leatherman Survival Tool” in the 1970s.