http://www.mutuallyoccluded.com media & film, design, philosophy, politics Tue, 18 May 2010 02:12:52 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Via Mariborcan, see Open Reflections' round-up of (and commentary on) the major text, philosophy, and theory sharing sites, which are: Fark Yaralari = Scars of Differance Multitude of Blogs Museum of Accidents Discourse Notebook AAAARD.ORG However, as counterpoint to Janneke Adema's echoing of John Perry Barlow's well-known declaration that "information wants to be free", it ... http://www.mutuallyoccluded.com/2009/09/pirated-theory-sites/ A Los Angeles Times article on "Why text messages are limited to 160 characters" reveals an interesting connection between old and new media: Friedhelm Hillebrand, the man more or less responsible for this figure, consulted postcards in his search for an ideal length for short messages. Initially, Hillebrand's team could fit only ... http://www.mutuallyoccluded.com/2009/05/postcards-and-text-messages/ Jeremy Scahill is not pleased: The U.S. State Department has announced it is sponsoring a “New Media Technology” delegation to Iraq to “explore new opportunities to support Iraqi government and non-government stakeholders in Iraq’s emerging new media industry.” Of all of the areas in Iraq in desperate need of attention, its ... http://www.mutuallyoccluded.com/2009/04/new-media-technology-delegation-travels-to-iraq/ [caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="450" caption="'Stammbuch des Johann Christian Sigmund Mönch aus Jena'"][/caption] I love the idea that, as Ulla remarks in the comments, "we are really not that much more advanced than the 1700's ..." Perhaps we do, on the whole, tend to overestimate the degree to which new forms of ... http://www.mutuallyoccluded.com/2009/04/facebook-forever/ [caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="450" caption="Visualization of the frequency of the words 'socialism' (orange) and 'capitalism' (green) in New York Times articles since 1981. (by Jer Thorp)"][/caption] Jo Guldi of Inscape has a provocative post up describing how she used available web-based tools to produce a rather sophisticated analysis of the use ... http://www.mutuallyoccluded.com/2009/03/jo-guldi-on-mining-archives-for-knowledge-fissures/ From all that's written on the military and virtual reality, you might think that the equipment and apparatus we have come to associate with VR are exclusively military inventions, when, in fact, artists have played a much more profound role than traditionally credited. As Margot Lovejoy put it in her ... http://www.mutuallyoccluded.com/2009/02/art-and-the-origins-of-virtual-reality/ [caption id="attachment_827" align="aligncenter" width="450" caption="Staring at Cat Staring at Cat Staring, 2007, by Steve Bishop"][/caption] If wondering what it's like to be a bat, as the philosopher Thomas Nagel famously did in a 1974 essay, no longer sates our appetite for the futile, designing simulations for them might. For more than ... http://www.mutuallyoccluded.com/2009/02/presence-in-animal-behavior-studies/ The fascinating new study "If I Were You: Perceptual Illusion of Body Swapping" published this week by the Swedish researchers Henrik Ehrsson and Valeria Petkova has been making the rounds and drawing some press – see Neurophilosophy and Neuroanthropology for background and explanation - but what seems to have been ... http://www.mutuallyoccluded.com/2008/12/the-limits-to-body-swapping-with-a-large-green-box/ [caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="475" caption="Mark Tansey's "The Innocent Eye Test" (1981) uses the cow's iconic blank gaze to represent a failure of perception."][/caption] 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 ... http://www.mutuallyoccluded.com/2008/11/anthropocentric-bias-animal-vision/ 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 ... http://www.mutuallyoccluded.com/2008/11/anthropology-and-connoisseurship-in-an-age-of-social-media/