Programming in Arabic, Computers Watching Movies, spent, wwwtext, literally mining computers

By Alexis Madrigal | March 12, 2015 | 4:48pm

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Today’s edition is guest-edited by subscriber Dorothy Santos, a writer, editor, and curator focused on new media and digital art, the internet of things, augmented reality, online performance, gaming, and political aesthetics.

1. Character-based coding: arabic programming language artwork of Ramsey Nasser.

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Arabic programming languages with the honest goal of bringing coding to a non-Latin culture have been attempted in the past, but have failed without exception. What makes my piece قلب different is that its primary purpose was to illustrate how impossible coding in anything but English has become. The process behind making it makes this very explicit.”

2. Artist creates software that shows Computers Watching Movies.

“Computers Watching Movies was computationally produced using software written by the artist. This software uses computer vision algorithms and artificial intelligence routines to give the system some degree of agency, allowing it to decide what it watches and what it does not. Six well-known clips from popular films are used in the work, enabling many viewers to draw upon their own visual memory of a scene when they watch it. The scenes are from the following movies: 2001: A Space Odyssey, American Beauty, Inception, Taxi Driver, The Matrix, and Annie Hall.”

3. Play Spent, text-based game experience where you are given $1000 to live (for one month and as a single parent).

“Spent was launched in February 2011 as a collaboration between McKinney and Urban Ministries of Durham.”

4. wwwtxt resurrects the voices of digital pioneers from the 80s and 90s.

“In 1995, commercialization, a swelling population, and the multimedia revolution began to shape Web 1.0 and the modern Internet. 1980–94 represent the final years of a much smaller, non-commercial, and text-dominated Internet. The users of this era were not only programmers, physicists, and university residents—they were also tinkerers, early-adopters, whiz kids, and nerds. Their conversations and documents—valiantly preserved by digital archivists—are fractured across numerous services, increasingly offline-only, and incredibly voluminous (100GB+). wwwtxt digs deep and resurrects the voices of these digital pioneers as unedited, compelling, and insightful 140-character excerpts.”

5. Technological objects transformed back from into mineral form.

Artists Revital Cohen and Tuur Van Balen created H/ALCUTAAU (2014) by taking “precious metals and stones mined out of technological objects and transformed back into mineral form. The artificial ore was constructed out of gold (Au), copper (Cu), tantalum (Ta), aluminum (al), and whetstone; all taken from tools, machinery and computers that were sourced from a bankrupt factory.”

On Fusion: This church has a drone.

Today’s 1957 American English Usage Tip:

disgustful was formerly common in the sense of disgusting, but has now been so far displaced by that word as to be a NEEDLESS VARIANT in that sense.

The Credits

1. animalnewyork.com 2. bengrosser.com 3. playspent.org | @latooles 4. wwwtext.org 5. cohenvanbalen.com

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