Harun Farocki

HARUN FAROCKI. SERIOUS GAMES from: 06.02.2014 to: 18.01.2015 Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart – Berlin The Nationalgalerie mourns the death of Harun Farocki (1944-2014), who passed away on 30 July 2014 near Berlin. Harun Farocki’s four-part series ERNSTE SPIELE (SERIOUS GAMES) (2009-2010), recently donated to the NATIONALGALERIE by the Outset Contemporary Art Fund, is being […]

Room 237

Duality, blood, mirrors, the Holocaust and American genocide against the Native Americans are all things hidden somewhere inside Stanley Kubrick’s famous creep show The Shining. And now you can hear just about every single amazing Shining theory and idea in one documentary, Room 237. I think what makes a good piece of artwork is how much information it can convey […]

Reducing Long-Term Catastrophic Risks from Artificial Intelligence

Reducing Long-Term Catastrophic Risks from Artificial Intelligence Abstract Eliezer Yudkowsky, Anna Salamon Machine Intelligence Research Institute Carl Shulman, Steven Kaas, Tom McCabe MIRI Visiting Fellows Rolf Nelson In 1965, I. J. Good proposed that machines would one day be smart enough to make themselves smarter. Having made themselves smarter, they would spot still further opportunities […]

Obama’s Drone War – The New Yorker Article

THE UNBLINKING STARE The drone war in Pakistan. BY STEVE COLL At the Pearl Continental Hotel, in Peshawar, a concrete tower enveloped by flowering gardens, the management has adopted security precautions that have become common in Pakistan’s upscale hospitality industry: razor wire, vehicle barricades, and police crouching in bunkers, fingering machine guns. In June, on a […]

Ex Machina

THE TURING TEST detects if a machine can truly think like a human. The Bechdel Test detects gender bias in fiction. If you were to mash the two together to create a particularly messy Venn diagram, the overlap shall henceforth be known as the Ex Machina Zone. In writer/director Alex Garland’s thought-provoking new film we meet Ava (Alicia […]

David Lynch

Born in precisely the kind of small-town American setting so familiar from his films, David Lynch spent his childhood being shunted from one state to another as his research scientist father kept getting relocated. Attending art school in a particularly violent and run-down area of Philadelphia, inspired Eraserhead (1977), a film that he began in the early […]

George Condo

George Condo was born in Concord, New Hampshire, in 1957 and studied Art History and Music Theory at the University of Massachusetts in Lowell. He has occupied a prominent position in the art world for close to three decades. Mr. Condo’s art can be viewed as a multi-layered experience incorporating art historical references ranging from […]

Projection Mapping

Projection mapping, also known as video mapping and spatial augmented reality, is a projection technology used to turn objects, often irregularly shaped, into a display surface for video projection. These objects may be complex industrial landscapes, such as buildings. By using specialized software, a two- or three-dimensional object is spatially mapped on the virtual program which mimics the real environment […]

Rick Owens

Southern Californian Rick Owens began designing after a two-year stint in pattern cutting school in Los Angeles, where he founded his namesake line in 1994 and remained largely under the radar, with a small but dedicated following in the underground glam rock and grunge communities who prized his slim-fitting leather jackets and destroyed jersey knits. […]

Videodrome

Videodrome, 1983 – Set in Toronto in the early 1980s, it follows the CEO of a small television station who discovers a broadcast signal featuring extreme violence and torture. Layers of deception unfold as he uncovers the signal’s source and loses touch with reality in a series of increasingly bizarre and violent hallucinations. Writer/director David Cronenberg recalled […]