07 10/20
20:08

Comparisons: nine

Collaboration Competition
Horizontal networking Vertical hierarchy
Best practices Regulation
Stake holders Interest groups
Consensus Doctrine

Anderson, Steve F. Technologies of Vision. The MIT Press. 2017. p. 16

Compare: Comparisons

22 10/18
20:56

Sinusoidal function

Tags: , | Categories: art, digital media, machine

Study Nr. 01 of a sinusoidal function


Made with processing

06 12/16
14:39

Portable Moving Images: defence 

Tags: | Categories: art, digital media

Public defence of the doctoral thesis: Portable Moving Images: a Media History of Storage Formats

 Ricardo Cedeño Montaña

Throughout the 20th and 21st centuries small-gauge film formats, consumer videotape formats, and low-resolution digital video files fostered the easy generation and transmission of moving images. Each of these media have emphasised the media’s portability as the defining condition for media production. The subject matter of this dissertation is a description of the media storage formats that have constituted the material and technical basis of amateur and DIY productions of moving images. It inquires into the effects that the technical features of such formats – their form and structure – have had on the visual qualities and dissemination of amateur moving images.

07 December 2016 12 pm

Interdisciplinary Laboratory Central Laboratory. 

Sophienstr 22b. 10178, Berlin,  Germany. 

08 09/16
10:42

Media Archaeology of the Digital Moving Image: Motion Prediction or the Demise of the Frame

Next week 15 September in Chicago,  I’ll be presenting a short paper at the​ Inaugural Communication & Media Studies Conference.
 
Media Archaeology of the Digital Moving Image: Motion Prediction or the Demise of the Frame
 
Abstract
 
At the coding level, in a video codec such as H.264/AVC the otherwise basic unit of all moving images from film to video, the frame, is only an address where chunks of pixels coming from different moments in time are put together. This paper historically explores two mathematical theories from the 1940s that paved the way for the digital video compression formats during the 1990s. The first is the prediction theory by Norbert Wiener to improve anti-aircraft artillery during WWII. And the second are the crypto-analytic techniques formulated by Claude E. Shannon for the transmission of messages over noisy channels. Both theories resulted in algorithms to statistically predict missile paths and encrypt military communications. Today, they are the backbone of the video compression formats installed in discs, TV receivers, online streaming and video conferencing services, camcorders, and mobile phones. This media archaeology on the digital moving image argues that the consequence of turning each displayed picture into a rigid arrangement of pixels and its construction into the statistical prediction of the pixel’s values is dramatic. This historical analysis shows that prediction has generated an entirely new type of moving images in which the temporal coincidence of all pixels within the frame is unnecessary.
 
Inaugural Communication & Media Studies Conference.
University Center Chicago, Chicago, USA
15-16 September 2016
 
Here is the entire program:

http://www.cgpublisher.com/conferences/348/web/program-detail.html

12 06/15
14:46

idiots, hand workers, philosophers

Tags: , , , , | Categories: digital media, machine

According to Vilém Flusser, Plato establishes three possible relations between us and the world of the Ideas. First, we cannot remember the Ideas and therefore staying in the world of appearances. He calls those in this sort of relation: the idiots. In case the we do remember the Idea, there are two options. First, we could press the ideas out of the appearances and become hand workers or artists, politicians in Plato terms. Or second, we could turn and look directly at the ideas in which case we become theoreticians, philosophers in Plato. Plato mistrusted the artists of the politicians because in their handling of the appearance, the emerging idea is any the original pure Idea. It is a distortion. Their handling prevents access to the Idea as such by presenting a simulation. That way it is explained the hatred some monotheistic religions have to images.

 

Platonisch Pyramide nach Flusser.

Platonisch Pyramide nach Flusser.

 

In a cybernetic fashion, Flusser presents us a contemporary example of image creation. Someone thinks a space and atemporal ideas, he then codes them into a computer and this in turn produces an image that corresponds to the pure idea he had thought. This is a pure image of the pure idea because it is based on various technical codes such as a Cartesian coordinate system and symbolic operations with numbers. The image then turns into drawings and plans for an aeroplane that a series of automatic robots build.
 
Plato would take the person thinking the image and sitting in front of a computer as a true philosopher because these images are pure theory. They are processes of thought not or representation. The computer and the robot merely substitute for the hand workers. And those who pay and trust their lives to what the robots have built are the idiots.
 
If the person’s interest lies exclusively on the theoretical beauty and the process of thought of the image, he or she might be then a philosopher or a pure artists. Someone who has access the second degree of imagination brought by the technical images. This pure artist does not seek to imagine a particular aeroplane or any contrete entity. Her or his focus is exclusively on the abstract idea. There is no imitation nor simulacrum. Others, the politicians or in a more contemporary accent, the robots, would take this image-idea and imitate it and use it as a model. This pure artist experiences the pure idea, while the robots only try to press an appearance out the idea, whether it is an aeroplane or anything else.
 


  • Flusser, Vilém. Ein neuer Platonismus?. In kulturRevolution: modelle von gehirn und seele. Nr.19. November 1998. Klartext Verlag, Deutschland.

29 01/15
22:52

Peter Sunde at Transmediale 2015

Peter Sunde words at the opening ceremony of transmediale 2015. 28 Jan 2015 HKW Berlin, Germany.

The centralised model has destroyed the internet. We’ve lost and corporations have captured us all. We even carry the sensors, mics and cameras to monitor us. Don’t play the game: give up.

Update: Sunde’s base text published on Wired UK.

15 01/15
10:59

Freedom in your computer and in the net

Richard Stallman’s talk at the Chaos Computer Club in Hamburg, Germany on 29 December 2014.

Freedom in your computer and in the net.

For freedom in your own computer, the software must be free. For freedom on the internet, we must organize against surveillance, censorship, SaaSS and the war against sharing.

01 01/15
13:14

Free software 30 years

| Categories: digital media, software libre

Let’s start the 2015 with free software!
Comencemos el 2015 con software libre!

Video by the FSF.

15 12/14
10:00

10 09/14
17:26



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