Posts from ‘November, 2008’

Towards the end of his epic history of the concept of “milieu”, Leo Spitzer briefly goes over the origin of the closely-related English word, “environment” – which was coined, it turns out, by Thomas Carlyle in an article on Goethe, published in Miscellanies (1827).
And “what is particularly interesting is the fact that the lines in [...]

Jon Tan discusses the aesthetics of web typography.
Employment lawyers are busier than ever.
Nick Monfort of Grand Text Auto asks, “Is game development an artistic practice? That is, is the making of a game like the making of an artistic work - visual, plastic, literary, performative, or otherwise? This is a different question. I am not [...]

If animal scientists have traditionally assessed primate “intelligence” with explicitly anthropocentric criteria — language capacity, for instance — it should also be pointed out that these assessments have been carried out at the neglect of the ways in which animals actually do experience the world. As Kaplan & Rogers (2002: 502) recently observed:
“In the main, [...]

In the 90s, when multiculturalism had the Right on the ropes, racism, so the story goes, was forced to move between-the-lines (of populist conservative discourse). As Žižek observes in The Universal Exception:
“In the election campaigns of Jesse Helms, the racist and sexist message is not publicly acknowledged — at the public level, it is sometimes [...]

In a post on “Anthropology as connoisseurship”, Rex of Savage Minds observes:
Obsession with the details also does not fly well in an age when what we are supposed to be doing is creating generalizing social science. So perhaps connoisseurship as a model of anthropology has drawbacks both for the politically engaged and the scientifically neutral. [...]

The problem with this “experiment” is that the second question put to the executive - ‘This business plan will maximize profits but help the environment’ - does not correspond to the first question (’This business plan will maximize profits but harm the environment’). It’s a false, forced analogy - with predictable results.
There’s a good reason [...]

Branding strategies and the marketing studies that inform them are increasingly taking into account the rules and conventions that shape consumer attention.
According to the New York Times, in a forthcoming article, “The Power of Strangers,” (to be published in The Journal of Consumer Research) Rosellina Ferraro, an assistant professor of marketing at the University of [...]

Tom over at Mind Hacks makes a few interesting observations regarding the disjunction between real and virtual selves. Referencing Clive Thompson’s Wired article, he notes that, in the video game Mirror’s Edge, “the visual cues about what your character’s arms and legs are doing (they appear in shot as you run and jump) makes the [...]

London, November 26: Geoff Manaugh of BLDGBLOG with Antoine Bousquet of Birkbeck College will present a public lecture on ‘Battlespace/s: Feral Cities and the Scientific Way of Warfare’.
Manaugh’s lecture will be an analysis of ‘cities gone wild’ and their relation to war, architecture, science fiction and geopolytics.
Being a fan of Rafi Segal’s important A Civilian [...]

17 to 18 April 2009
Binghamton, NY, United States

Website: http://pic.binghamton.edu/
Contact name: Hilary Malatino

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This conference seeks to explore the interconnectedness of technology,
relationality and practices of resistance. We conceptualize technology
broadly, as referring to systems, methods of organization, visual/imaging
techniques, and political strategies and tactics, as well as to specific
material objects and systems of objects [...]