metaphor

Inscription of the Girly Man: The Politics of Stupidity in the Age of Intelligent Machines

This set of texts constitute the catalog for the installation "Inscription of the Girly Man." It's essays cover topics which range from language and machines, to the function of material metaphor in art, and finally to the vagaries of contemporary political rhetoric.

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The Micro-Mechanics of Material Metaphor

What started one place ended in another; in between it passed through something.

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Inscription of the Girly Man

Inscription is an exploration of the aesthetics of power in relation to the task of writing. Here, in a time when the neo-fascist spirit is casting a shadow across the political culture, and when the possibility of meaningful political discourse seems more and more remote because of it, there is a relationship between the wealth of violence–war, images of brutality–and the poverty of our communications. There is a relationship between the denigration of thoughtfulness as weakness, femininity, and gayness, and the impossibility of halting the campaign of aggression that the U.S. has embarked on, or of furthering stalled progress in the domain of civil rights or economic justice.

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A Children's Game Transformed by the Solvent of Computational Method Thus Allowing for the Displacement of a Moral Overlay ...

... by a Free Play of Algorithmic Patterning. In modeling the game Chutes and Ladders on a computer, we gain insight into the nature of both games and computation. The computer version, unlike the rule bound cardboard version, is unfixed, thus allowing for the displacement of a moral overlay by a free play of algorithmic patterning. The abstraction of the model preserves a structure but unleashes a principal of variation: the computer makes every constant a variable (as Marcos Novak observes as he describes the liquefaction of architecture). The arbitrariness of particular rules becomes evident.

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10 concepts of computation (arranged in order of increasing outrageousness)

The ideational threads that weave their way through this list summarize the obsessions that motivated my work during the five previous years. There is a trajectory here: from a concern for the abstract, theoretical underpinnings of computer technology, to the intertwining of technical and cultural logics in the lives and politics of the people who create and use computers.

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colorSpace

Color is imagined as a space. We see colors as distributed throughout a cube with black on one corner and white on the opposite corner. Red, green, blue, cyan, magenta, and yellow each have a corner. The rest of the colors-more than 16 million of them-are distributed as a gradient cloud in between.

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