Mens/Machine

Tracks in electr(on)ic fields/Sporen in het electr(on)ische veld/Empreintes dans les champs electroniques

Constant Verlag, 2008

p.31
Mutual movements started in the kitchen, the perfect place to reconsider human-machine configurations, without having to separate these from everyday life and the patterns that are ingrained in it. Would a different idea of ‘user’ also change our approach to ‘use’?

The Techno-Galactic Guide to Software Observation

Constant, 2017

p.4
Let’s smash our devices with a sledge hammer, throw them out, retreat off grid and out of sight, and live happy software-free lives. But this fantasy cannot hold, nor can it hold us. While ‘disconnection’ seems to be the latest luxury-item for tech-billionaires – the same gang that profits from the extension of connectivity – for most human and non-human inhabitants of this galaxy unplugging is not an option.

p.37
I remember the 3300 [manufactured from 1970 on] was a magnetic disk. We didn’t touch the machines, operators would change the disks, we could only access the typewriter / terminal. That was our most di-rect connection to the computer. The times were different.

Data Workers

Algolit, 2019

p.1
What can humans learn from humans, humans learn with humans, humans learn from humans, humans learn with humans, humans learn from humans, humans learn with humans, humans learn from humans, humans learn with humans?

Are you being served?

Constant, 2014

p.39
It’s important that we can have direct access to our machines.

p.4
Micro-hierarchies grow esily during this kind of events? In an attempt to prevent this from happening the roles of participants were continuously switched. Artists, sys-admins, academics and hackers performed as hosts, dish washers, speakers, themselves, gender aware human beings, tech specialists or workshop attendees.

Mondothèque, a radiated book

Constant, 2016

p.72
In Katherine Hayles’ chapter devoted to telegraph code books she observes how: The interaction between code and language shows a steady movement away from a human-centric view of code toward a machine-centric view, thus anticipating the development of full-fledged machine codes with the digital computer.

p.142
When I first noticed the sound, its circular cadence was soft and unobtrusive, almost protective, but now the more laps the clock-horse is running, the deeper the ticking and the neighing sounds are drilling into the hole. I picture this as an ever rotating metal worm inside a mincing machine. If I point my chin up, it bores through my throat!

An Mertens, Tot Later

Constant, 2011

p.76
Voor elke machine koos ze een vrouw, waarna ze machine en mens samen schetste, keer op keer en terug, zodat machine en vrouw op elkaar gingen gelijken als een hond en zijn baas en de machine uiteindelijk versmolt met het lijf.

p.91
Bij wijze van afronding van het verhaal en als troost voor het afscheid dat gepaard gaat met elk einde, beslissen we om als drie volwassen mensenvrouwen het café van Abdelaziz binnen te stappen voor een laatste Chimay.

Constant_V 2015 - 2018

Constant, 2019

p.82
The dualities point to the human desire to control, preserve and by extension to represent and reproduce life as a copy or simulation.

p.51
In all computer vision operations, there is the expectation that the gap between human perception and computer percption will be closed. But what if it isn’t? What of we discover that there is an area of intersection between human perception and computer vision, and that the contours of this area are problematic, fluctuating?

Footfall Almanac 2019

Alex Zakkas + Kurt Tichy, 2019

p.18
When observing the square from a pedestrian level, one quickly gets a sense of joining the ranks of a vast collection of human and non-human observers.

p.58-59
What that collective can be needs to be informed from the fact that we are dealing with many connected subjects, human, non-human, architectural atmospherical… They are all part of these observation sytems, so I am wondering how not to fall in the deafault framework of claiming your own data as an individual, but to respond as a collective, and what modes of collectivity are formed in response.

Collective Conditions reader

Constant, 2019

p.*
By ‘complex collectivity’ we mean, for example, non-normative human constellations, orcollectives where participants with radically different needs, backgrounds and agen-cies come together. ’Complex collectivity’ can be self-chosen, or be the result of structural forces such as laws, racism, technology, wars, austerity, queerphobia and ecological conditions.

p.*
Haraway does not actually approach a human/animal/machine nexus, though more recent theorizations of the nature/culture divide, by Luciana Parisi for example, demarcate the biophysical, the biocultural, and the biodigital.

I think that conversations are the best, biggest thing that Free Software has to offer its user

Constant, 2014

p.39
For me a machine has a rhythm, she has a cadence, a body, and herstate changes. There might be things that do not work but it can be thatyou have left in some mistakes while developing etcetera, but we will getto know the machine and we will understand.

p.178
And so we had to go back and create a new scheme for recording this type of information where we create a hash and we create a random number, we pair those up on the client machine but we only log the random number. So, from log to log then, we can track if people use the same image names, but we have no idea of what the original string was.

Frankenstein Revisited

Algolit/Constant, 2016

p.40
(F)or this first meeting between the machine and natural language, we looked into a more basic technical solution with which an artificial intelligence can imitate human expression: the Markov Chain. Our bot creates a dictionary from a given text, iterates through all the words looking for frequent couples of them and randomly generates new phrases based on these associations.

p.42
“It is utterly useless,’ replied Felix; ’we can never again inhabit your cottage. Uttering a few more months should have been condemned, although innocent; judge, therefore, if I fail there, I am poor and an entire revolution of the words they spoke sometimes produced pleasure or pain, smiles or sadness, in the language, the elements of which I covered it carefully with dry wood and leaves and placed wet branches upon it; and then, spreading my cloak, I lay by the warmth I experienced in watching my human neighbours. I was obliged to relinquish all attempt to destroy them.” This reading had puzzled me extremely at first, but by degrees to have familiarized the old man addressed me. “Of what a strange nature is knowledge!”

DiVersions v1.

Constant, 2019

p.3
DiVersions is an attempt to take into account the persistent complexities of human-to-human and human-to-machine relationships and the underlying tensions and conflicts that result from it.

p.13
What I’m trying to understand is the role of “binary separation” in machine learning.

Machine Research, A Peer-Reviewed Newspaper

Volume 6, Issue 1. Digital Aesthetics Research Centre Aarhus University + Constant, 2017

p.11
The song that pops into your head, the voice that you recognize, the familiar acoustic quality of a habitual space - these experiences comprise acoustic know ledge that are not limited to technical inscription by the machine, but which are no less material as they reberberate with in your own physiology.

p.20
This brought Euraca assembly to a testing the texting experiment through the so-c alled New Conceptualisms, the latest recogniza ble poetry wave characterized by its digital management of language masses and a non-human-centered “uncreativity”. The test served only to confirm a strong need to keep taking care of an aesthetics in languaging practices that does not link the machinic intervention with a loose and depoliticized kit for language gamers.

FLOSS+ART

Goto10, 2008

p.49
There are also good things about Gödel, Escher Bach. It is a book that exudes energy. Its gross generalizations make me think of Hofstadter as a high-speed idea-spewing machine that has little time to double-check every single fact. His book may even belo,g to a self-publishing tradition - he was afforded the luxury (at the time) of typesetting his own book.

p.114
Autocreativity is an action that is impossible to localize or subjectify. In digital networks, it is a dynamic process occurring in the relationship between network systems, technology and human beings; autocreativity appears as an explosion of forces.