2011-07-27
post/8116432692
The work of art in the age of Googled reproduction:
I don’t want to call these digital objects “image economies,” I want to call them something like Google Clusters. Or maybe Pergoogles: These are iconic images — per Google.
Even that is a bit of a cheat, because obviously Google is responding to the specific words I choose. (The title of each image here corresponds with the search term I used; I didn’t use quote marks in my searches.) It’s easy to capture “Mona Lisa,” harder to see what Google makes of Warhol’s iconic soup can, or Michelangelo’s David (see below).
Nevertheless, I’m rather pleased with the results, all in all.
I’d love to see all these printed crisply, and very large, and displayed in a high-ceilinged and white-walled gallery. Or museum. After all, I think a case could be made for these as “digital readymades,” a term whose origins I don’t know, but that I’ve read applied to the“Photoshop Gradient” pieces by Cory Arcangel. Those are supposedly one-click affairs, and the ones I’ve seen I quite like. (Though I’ve only seen them online.)
(via krislane)
2011-07-22
post/7932585502
2011-07-02
“Not even numbers”
Dealtalk: Google bid “pi” for Nortel patents and lost (via):
“Google was bidding with numbers that were not even numbers,” one of the sources said.
“It became clear that they were bidding with the distance between the earth and the sun. One was the sum of a famous mathematical constant, and then when it got to $3 billion, they bid pi,” the source said, adding the bid was $3.14159 billion.
Well.
Firstly, of course they’re numbers. They might not be round numbers (by which, more specifically, I mean numbers with only one or two significant digits), but they are certainly numbers. Does “the source” also believe that humans should only communicate with the simplest of business jargon, because words are too confusing?
After all, comparing $3 with $3.14 is no harder than comparing $4 and $5, unless you’re in the early days of school.
Secondly, wasn’t their bid not pi, but π×10⁹? More accurately, π×10⁹ to either nine or eleven significant digits? (I suspect the former, since the other numbers listed are integer dollar amounts.)
Historical footnote: π wasn’t calculated to eleven significant digits until as late as 1400, by Mādhava of Sañgamāgrama, an Indian mathematician.
2011-05-30
post/6012422904
James Ball in the Guardian’s Comment is Free: Give Twitter credit for trying to stand up to the courts – unlike others.
Is it really true that four of the five old broadsheets have outsourced email to Google? It’s both plausible yet, somehow, deeply worrying.
2011-02-15
2011-02-04
post/3107579379
Google Art Project: Behind the Scenes at the Tate’s blog (via Robin Ray):
The version of Street View technology used in the galleries involved an extremely high tech and rather silly-looking trolley. It was to be pushed around the rooms at a particular speed and on a peculiar route, and seemed to me to be a marvellous combination of garden-shed and cutting-edge.
2010-12-17
post/2342145519
Popular plot devices in English fiction, 1920-2010 (via Danny O’Brien).
