The uncanny valley is getting crowded. A female-modeled version of Geminoid, roboticist Hiroshi Ishiguro's creepy android, is now appearing opposite a human actor in Japan in a short play entitled Sayonara�as in, "sayonara, humans."
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Zadie Smith, Facebook, and social coding
Zadie Smith's dissection of The Social Network is smart and illuminating. But when she turns to the broader question of the cultural and human dimensions of social networking, things get complicated.
Read More »Morning groove: James Blake, “Limit to Your Love”
Electronic musician James Blake covers the Feist song "Limit to Your Love"�I've been haunted by this track for a couple of days, and I've finally figured out why.
Read More »8-bit prime cuts
Artist Jude Buffum has created a series of portraits of beloved Nintendo characters (like Gesso, above) in the form of butcher�s diagrams�bringing together his love of gaming and meat.
Read More »British Library ponders video game archive
The British Library is the original deposit library: as with the Library of Congress in the United States, publishers are required to deposit copies of works distributed under their imprint. Now, according to a report in The Independent, the British Library is considering extending the 350-year-old idea of the deposit library from books to video games, creating a permanent record of the gaming industry in Britain.
Read More »The scanner without us
Digital filmmaker Fran�ois Vautier installed an ant colony in his scanner and scanned it every week for five years. The movie he made of the results is fairly astonishing. It's high-tech ruin porn at insect scale.
Read More »Dystopian steampunk filesharing grooves
So, this video's got it all: off-the-grid filesharing, subcontinental slum-techno-chic, secret police in steampunk plague helmets, and a plot that remixes District 9 and Children of Men.
Read More »Peer-to-peer goes off the grid
Artist and technologist Aram Bartholl is mortaring USB drives into brick walls and curbstones throughout New York City and inviting people to use them to share files. His "Dead Drops" project offers a glimpse of a utopian, DIY darknet in RL.
Read More »Advertising and pseudoscience: the Polamolecule
Some "products dive even deeper," says Joshua Glenn, "down to the cellular level�where a shampoo's ionic, nanorobotic, or I-don't-know-whatic technology causes the cells within a single strand of hair to oscillate through rejuvenating vibrational motions."
Read More »What Technology Wants: Kevin Kelly and uncanny tools
In 'What Technology Wants', author and Wired founder Kevin Kelly elaborates a theory of technology that emancipates tools from the bondage of human hands. In the weeks to come, I'll be blogging my reading of Kelly's challenging and provocative work.
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