Category: Art

  • a Rube Goldberg machine made of fucking corpses

    Plenty of critiques of the NFT “art” scene exist, but they—neither unreasonably nor unnecessarily—tend to focus on the (socio)technological side of the phenomenon. These two essays from back in June cropped up on Metafilter yesterday, coming at it from a more art-critical and political-economic angle… and while they’re pretty depressing in many respects, it’s a…

  • never an especially attractive quality

    A snip from an essay well worth reading in full, otherwise offered without comment: … the issue isn’t negativity per se, which has its place in the fandom ecosystem. The issue is how to talk about things you love (or hate) impersonally. What is lost in fandom is ultimately detachment. Detachment can coexist with love,…

  • contract/bridge: Auger (2013), Speculative design: crafting the speculation

    Auger, J. (2013). Speculative design: crafting the speculation. Digital Creativity, 24(1), 11-35. This justly well-cited paper is in some respects a tour through the work of Auger and others (mostly RCA-aligned, I think?) in the decade prior to its publication in 2013. My purpose in writing it up is to extract and summarise the methodological…

  • rocket from the crypto / two dead letters

    Chairman Bruce appears to be repubbing longreads from the now defunct Beyond The Beyond blog. This is a weird experience for me—distinctly atemporal, to use the man’s own term—because I recall reading this stuff at the time. And so it’s familiar and just-like-yesterday, but also so alienated and impossibly historical… I mean, I can’t recall…

  • some kind of code for consumerism at its most insidious

    I’ve got a little girl who’s seven, and she lives in a world that’s all potentially magic. Within her imagination, the possibility of supernatural things sits alongside school and real things. There’s no distinction. At the same time she’s kind of assaulted by magic. What she watches on TV, the magic there is some kind…