Bogotissimo!

From Wired, via maverickmath:

Two comprehensive analyses of antidepressant trials have uncovered a dramatic increase in placebo response since the 1980s. One estimated that the so-called effect size (a measure of statistical significance) in placebo groups had nearly doubled over that time.

It’s not that the old meds are getting weaker, drug developers say. It’s as if the placebo effect is somehow getting stronger.

The animal was clearly in distress, or perhaps berserk. The President confessed to having had limited experience with enraged rabbits. He was unable to reach a definite conclusion about its state of mind. What was obvious, however, was that this large, wet animal, making strange hissing noises and gnashing its teeth, was intent upon climbing into the Presidential boat.

The incident itself is hilarious, but this description (by then Press Secretary) is pure genius.

continho modernoso.

I’ll be speaking on the e-poetry 2009 festival this wednesday in Barcelona. My subject will be digital works that make the rather absurd demand that the viewer read their source codes. Philosophy of the Silverbox, a collaboration with Giselle Beiguelman, will be in Bienal Arte Nuevo ‘09 in Mérida, Mexico, opening on the 28th.

Also on e-poetry, there will be a work by Maria Mencía in which I was a technical collaborator. ^^

massive bubble blowing in Manchester.

From The Telegraph:

Experts predict that consumer demand, already growing at 60 per cent a year, will start to exceed supply from as early as next year because of more people working online and the soaring popularity of bandwidth-hungry websites such as YouTube and services such as the BBC’s iPlayer.

It will initially lead to computers being disrupted and going offline for several minutes at a time. From 2012, however, PCs and laptops are likely to operate at a much reduced speed, rendering the internet an “unreliable toy”.

[...]

Ritter’s report will warn that an unreliable internet is merely a toy. “For business purposes, such as delivering medical records between hospitals in real time, it’s useless,” he said.

So, bandwidth is becoming scarce again. We heard all this less than a decade ago: sure, the Internet as it was could still be used for e-mail (the object of choice for derisive comparisons), but when media-rich applications came around, which were just around the corner, things would change. Videoconference research by 2002 assumed expensive hardware and expensive pay-by-minute corporate plans; telephony might change its piping radically, but would still end up being charged as usual; video would be bought and downloaded on-demand. The bubble burst only reinforced the notion that the Internet business model was untenable, and that it was just a matter of time till online services were normalized into the old modes.

Sure, it is possible that at some point availability will be overcome by demand. There will come a time the tubes will be clogged, and we will have to unearth all those regrettable QoS protocols of yore, perhaps even the beast that went by the name of RSVP, and leave anarchic ol’ Internet for people who use email. I suspected at the time, though, and even moreso now, that this was not so much about a short-sightedness over the exponential growth of transmission capacity (brought by innovation in software as well as in hardware), but that there was an eagerness to see infrastructural scarcity back into the game. It was a problem people saw too big an opportunity to cash in with. One will need to do better than this to scare the public into buying it - once people do, though, there will be no technological revolution to revert it.

Title: Dead pixel in Google Earth
Year: 2008
82 x 82 cm burned square, the size of one pixel from an altitude of 1 km.

Let me count the ways.

—

Bruce Sterling once wrote the sentence: “It’s war to the knife in the neon-lit backstreets of cyberspace.” And much else besides.

He could write the next Palmer Eldritch, which he won’t; he will still be the guy who once wrote the sentence: “It’s war to the knife in the neon-lit backstreets of cyberspace.”

—

I would like to found the José Saramago Award for the obvious and heavy-handed, so that I could hand it to Richard Powers every year. I read Galatea 2.2 a few years ago; when I think of its last 50 pages - I’m being literal here: my jaw still locks, my teeth are still grinded.

—

Up to this date, William Gibson still thinks that Japan is the future.

—

Sure, you can add the cyber- prefix to the once fashionable word punk. You can associate yourself with Philip K Dick, the adorable schizophrenic hack. But Science Fiction, quote unquote, is perenially haunted by the ghost of Isaac Asimov. Being into it indicates an Asimoviness of the soul. The didacticism, the will to enlighten; the authoritarian exercise of the hypothetical society, with a clear-cut moral lesson in the end; the surrendering fascination-cum-despair over the thought of giant robots fighting. Daze over gimmicks, gadgets and devices (the most interesting thing about Batman is the bat-belt, right?). Nerds trying to be hip but never wavering nerdy self-righteousness, desire for control, anxiety, anal-retentiveness:  more heavy metal bands, more adventures of Hiro Protagonist.

—

Which is a pity; what is there to write about, in 2009, that is not about technology? That is not, in a certain sense, also science fiction?

Ehm: A survey of teens and young adults released last week reported that 1 in 5 teens — and one-third of 20-somethings — have electronically sent or posted online nude or semi-nude pictures or video of themselves.

Of course, producing such pictures of minors amounts to child pornography, even if the photographer is himself underage and the victim, himself. So teens are being brought to court over such self-pics. If found guilty, they are, you know, child molesters. Besides the jail time, and the social stigma, they are forced, for example, to keep a certain distance from schools and other places minors dwell. Note that in most Western countries, possessing these pictures and videos is also in itself a crime.

Zany, isn’t it? And 1 in  5 teens, report says. But let us stop for a moment and consider: what exactly needs to be changed in the laws? What legislation would cope reasonably with this new situation? You see, that’s not such an easy question.

Altermodern is the new YBA. Beware.

(And by the way: declaring that “post-modernism is dead” makes little sense; po-mo was, among other things, when we became skeptical about metanarratives - periodization and the Zeitgeist being clear examples. In other words: post-modernism is when you realise that the avant-garde artist arguing that the current style is dead and must be replaced by the kind of stuff he makes - for such are the times, so dictates History - is just silly.)

meanwhile, there’s this and this.

On how to hack electronic road signs.

Where in the World is Loira do Banheiro? was mentioned at yesterday’s Estado de Sao Paulo newspaper. There’s a cute little screenshot of it and all. I should have checked if everything was working normally beforehand, though, because it wasn’t. Everything’s fixed now. ^^

The first trap, we learned, would lead us back to the streets of Rayuela, to the structuralist frenzy of the couplage and the combinatoire; or to the Proppian machine that vows to tell, by permutations of a fixed program, each and every possible fairy tale that could be told. The hero is herein transformed into a goose. Oulipo.

The second trap leads to where it’s led us: Ludology, Cybertext, “Interactive Fiction,” the consecration of the Choose Your Adventure Book as very serious experimental fiction or, alternatively, a bizarre mass migration from Experimental Fiction to Videogame Studies. Either the added difficulty is now paradoxically a tool for reader’s immersion (as Murray would have it), or the participation turns reading into a game - the Aarseth alternative -, with a story that fades into backdrop.

Plot-based hypertext, with its interlacing stories and its mysteries to be navigated through - from Infinite Jest all the way to Joyce’s afternoon - looks today like clumsy first attempts, Meliès magic tricks to be shelved under Historical Curiosities hardly one or two decades after their bombastic inceptions. Plot, so unfashionable throughout the past Century (it was, it was), was never the point. Some recognized this from the start - Caitlin Fisher, Shelley Jackson - and plot couplage gave way to the associative operation of memory, or to an identity that is dispersed and diffused in the body, quite non-cartesianly. Almost before everybody else, Milorad Pavic invented the Encyclopaedia: linking as an explosion of the point of view, the multitude of perspective, veiling as it reveals, ever incapable of retrieving the original, the thing in itself in the gleam of its presence. The Dictionary of the Khazars is the story of the failed reconstruction of the Dictionary of the Khazars. But where does this lead us?

Of course, it doesn’t need to lead us anywhere. We don’t need to go anywhere. We can stay put, or we can go at our own pace, excited with the long footnote.

The book is a convention: the XVIII/XIXth turn of the Century reader is trained, Kittler and Hayles reckon, to disregard whatever is specific and variable in the physical artifact of the book, and focus instead on the legal fiction of immaterial text (or, according to Hayles, to the legal fiction of style). Whatever media effects cannot be effectively erased in the cognitive process of reading become an intromission. Contra this a tradition of “Artist’s Books” - lovely artifacts nobody reads -, and William Blake, and the history and pre-history of printing itself (the Incunabula, the Golden Ratio in Gutemberg’s page).

Is immaterial text to be denounced? Insomuch as “immaterial text” is an entity that can only comfortably manifest itself in print, why, of course. It is an awfully impractical idea. But please, good folks at the ELO: let us not denounce immateriality, for literature has always been, in the good sense, immaterial, and being media-specific has little to do with being immaterial or not. Even though there is still a readership for Jane Austen’s novels, media have effectively freed text from the “recording of the Real” and the “hallucination of the Imaginary” Lacan-Kittler speak of, and can now focus on the by definition untouchable realms of the symbolic, where it, in a sense, belongs. The struggle with materiality as condition will only eventually restore text to a novel concept of immateriality. Literature won’t be reduced to videogame and animation by today’s material constraints just as the embellishment of the medieval page did not make of literature one of the visual arts.

The MIT Press is having a winter white sale.

noindex, nofollow meta-tags: more necessary than ever.

A group of neuroscientists have come forward on Nature to call for the right of (responsible) use of nootropic medication. Their points are as follow:

1. Based on our considerations, we call for a presumption that mentally competent adults should be able to engage in cognitive enhancement using drugs.

2. We call for an evidence-based approach to the evaluation of the risks and benefits of cognitive enhancement.

3. We call for enforceable policies concerning the use of cognitive-enhancing drugs to support fairness, protect individuals from coercion and minimize enhancement-related socioeconomic disparities.

4. We call for a programme of research into the use and impacts of cognitive-enhancing drugs by healthy individuals.

5. We call for physicians, educators, regulators and others to collaborate in developing policies that address the use of cognitive-enhancing drugs by healthy individuals.

6. We call for information to be broadly disseminated concerning the risks, benefits and alternatives to pharmaceutical cognitive enhancement.

7. We call for careful and limited legislative action to channel cognitive-enhancement technologies into useful paths.

They list 4 drugs in the article (Ritalin, Adderall, Provigil, and something for Alzheimer I hadn’t heard of), but they should have gone into more - making a case for Adderall, which are amphetamine salts, is more troublesome than for Bupropion, which hits on the same receptors but is famous as smoking cessation medicine. Otherwise, it was about time this began to be heard. Hope the debate will be less stale than the one on recreational drugs. ^^

Des Imagistes online.

Tom Moody writes about a recent schism in Digital Art and proposes a new taxonomy: “new media artists” vs “artists with computers.” Here:

New media suggests a respect for hardware & software and belief in their newness, something artists with computers don’t care about. New media involves a finicky devotion to programming and process, whereas artists with computers are bulls in the Apple Shop. (…) Lastly, new media artists define themselves in relation to Lev Manovich’s principles (”new media objects exist as data,” etc.) and artists with computers find those confining, impractical, and overly utopian.

Boy, do we even need to state this? The kids that are making fancy wallpapers and squiggly trippy things in Processing do not belong with the conceptual artists with works about code they can’t write themselves.

By the end of the post:

New media artists scoff at the art world’s notions of art yet want very much to be approved according to those criteria.

Tom Moody is saying: what the coder guys do is not art, but there is no telling them that. His divide is clear: there are “new media artists”, as there are, for example, “circus artists.” Nothing wrong with that. And then there are Artists, capital A, and among those, there are some who happen to be interested in computers right now. High Art and Low Art, all over again - do we really want to start this discussion? I don’t even think the two groups are moving apart - they have always been separate, far apart in spirit, and only meet when they are lumped together by curators and critics who don’t know any better. This is not the case with photography, that, early experimentation aside, branched out in different movements from a fairly singular origin. Lush, superficial spectacle and arid, challenging works you need the catalog to understand do not mix, and there are more, rather than less, people who don’t understand this today.

=o

i made this. you play this. we are enemies., a, er, game-art work, is making the links rounds this week. Suffices to say that net-art pretty much started with dadaist collage, and it’s been a while since then, and I don’t get the what whole new excitement is all about. The oft-copied recipe now includes a ball you can move around, which I guess is why this is cool again.* And: screenshots, newspaper cuts, logos for large Internet corporations, self-reference, text about links: everything feels so dated!

Taking the opportunity to bitch some more: at least we are not seeing another offshoot of the weaker theories of Electronic Fiction. A misguided emphasis on interactivity - and, for some, even on immersion through interactivity - back in more innocent days eventually led theorists, Stuart Moulthrop all the way to Janet Murray, to shift interests from literature to videogames, where the stuff might find some practical use. Losing your scholars to Videogame Theory is quite a punch on the stomach. Poor e-lit.

* of course you could use just the same argument over the jodi link there.