Tag Archives: computing

sentry gun redux

Posted on by March 31, 2012
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Some things won’t lose their fascination—especially when a certain morbidness is involved, as it seems. Just the day before yesterday boingboing’s ↑Mark Frauenfelder pointed to Bob Rudolph’s ↑project sentry gun, an open-source sentry gun controller. Well, seven years ago ↵on xirdalium I reported Aaron Rasmussen’s ‘quintessential sentry gun.’ As far as I can see all his websites meanwhile have vanished—I only found the 2006 article ↑Sentry gun sees, computes and shoots at BU [Boston University] Today, which gives an idea towards where Aaron may have headed, plus refound his original document [lavishly illustrated] ↓How we built the quintessential sentry gun … Continue reading →

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material cyberculture

Posted on by March 30, 2012
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[abstract:] This essay offers a polemical exploration of spatiality in new media culture, one based on a materialist, as opposed to a ‘ virtualist’ paradigm. Its goal is to intervene in the thought processes of liberal-phenomenological cybertheory. The latter tends to see computer users as consumers, rather than producers, within national and global economies. Because of this leisure-consumption orien tation, theories of new media are easily appropriated within ideologies of postindustrial capitalism. This has led to some oversimplified models of spatiality in cybertheory, many of which proceed from the premise that the material world is fast disappearing under the pressures … Continue reading →

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cues in cyberspace

Posted on by March 30, 2012
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[abstract:] Although the relative paucity of social cues in computer-mediated communication poses problems of the organization of social relations in cyberspace, recent studies have begun to focus on the ways in whicht this deficit is managed. This article contributes to this research by addressing the question of how participants distinguish between contexts in online discourse. Data on cues, and on naming practices in particular, in text-based virtual realities called MOOs illustrate the structure of contexts and the dynamics of contextualizing communication and interaction in cyberspace. JACOBSON, DAVID. 1996. Contexts and cues in cyberspace: the pragmatics of naming in text-based virtual … Continue reading →

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corporeal virtual reality

Posted on by March 30, 2012
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[abstract: ] This paper considers the experience of embodiment in current and (possible) future virtual reality applications. A phenomenological perspective is adopted to explore user embodiment in those virtual reality applications that both do and do not include a visual body (re)presentation (virtual body). Embodiment is viewed from the perspective of sensorial immersion, where issues of gender, race, and culture are all implicated. Accounts of “disrupted” bodies (for example, phantom limb and dissociation of the selffrom the body, paralysis, and objectified bodies) are advanced in order to provide a context for understanding the ways in which embodiment in virtual reality … Continue reading →

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turing’s cathedral

Posted on by March 26, 2012
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Here’s the official synopsis of historian of science ↑George Dyson‘s latest book ‘Turing’s Cathedral’ (2012): “It is possible to invent a single machine which can be used to compute any computable sequence,” twenty-four-year-old Alan Turing announced in 1936. In Turing’s Cathedral, George Dyson focuses on a small group of men and women, led by John von Neumann at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, who built one of the first computers to realize Alan Turing’s vision of a Universal Machine. Their work would break the distinction between numbers that mean things and numbers that do things—and our … Continue reading →

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arkham city rant

Posted on by March 18, 2012
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This was intended to become a longer rant from me—after the installation of ‘↑Batman: Arkham City‘ (Rocksteady Studios 2011) crashed my brand new system so badly that I had to jump back several recovery points to get it up and running again. But then, on ↑the official forums, I found the posts and threads by KIO. His forum post signature already sums it up: ‘DRM limitations are a punishment for the paying customer and an encouragement to seek better service elsewhere … And then they complain about piracy.’ No reason any more for me to write myself, because KIO already … Continue reading →

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hardware rant

Posted on by March 16, 2012
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It really was high time. It was a bit more than five years ago that I ↵built my system. So a serious hardware upgrade was overdue. The necessary research done, I ↵ordered the needed parts. Until now I didn’t get around to insert those parts—last Saturday I did. I hoped to do, that is, because last Saturday the journey only began.     Unpacking the mainboard (Asus Sabertooth P67), then installing the CPU (Intel Core i5-2400) and RAM (Corsair Vengeance 16GB) on it. All that went in a breeze.     Next I ripped out the old mainboard and replaced … Continue reading →

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the construction of social computing

Posted on by March 7, 2012
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Just yesterday I received an e-mail from ↑Maurizio Teli [whom I know from back in 2005, when we met at the Cyberspace conference in Brno, Czech Republic] containing a call for papers for a workshop he is organizing together with ↑Vincenzo D’Andrea and ↑David Hakken. The workshop will take place at this year’s annual meeting, called ↑Design and displacement—social studies of science and technology, of the ↑Society for Social Studies of Science (4S), taking place 17 through 20 October 2012 in Copenhagen, Denmark. Here is the workshop’s full abstract: In the last few years, the label “Social Computing” (SC) has … Continue reading →

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