SpaceXponential

It is possible that art is nearer to the heart of creation than philosophy. It is therefore capable of letting something entirely new begin. The revolution can begin with as little as an unheard-of color, an unheard-of sound.  

"I set up situations that involve abandoning control and finding out what happens." And now, in his most improbable guise yet, as artistic director of the 2010 Brighton festival, Eno wants to programme works that demonstrate why surrender is key to the sort of music and art that excite him. "I came to this idea because I noticed that when I set up... See more

Del.icio.us made us realize the importance of archiving casual web (and other) research. That process has a lot of positive effects that are hard to explain until you’ve built a habit out of it. For one, there’s a self-discovery that happens when you revisit things you’ve accumulated over a period of time. You look back and begin to recognize... See more

Mountain climbers educated in the Alps discovered the vertical walls of granite in Yosemite in the 1930s and began to scale these monoliths. By 1941 climbers occupied a new permanent camp set up in the north side of Yosemite Valley, Camp 4. ... the geography of this scenius is unremarkable. Camp 4 is a nondescript, bland, dusty campground. Building... See more

 Attention is a finite resource, and how we choose to spend our attention online is, in some ways, a direct reflection of where human culture has gone in an era where access to information is basically unlimited. We are very much in our teenage years—that is, we suddenly have all these new capabilities and it’s really easy to just run wild. But... See more

Banks and other industries have “know your customer” rules so that they can’t do business with anonymous clients laundering money from criminal enterprises. Large social-media platforms should be required to do the same. That does not mean users would have to post under their real names; they could still use a pseudonym. It just means that before a... See more

Whereas the modern university segregated scholarship from curation, demoting the latter to a secondary, supportive role, and sending curators into exile within museums, archives, and libraries, the Digital Humanities revolution promotes a fundamental reshaping of the research and teaching landscape. It recasts the scholar as curator and the curator... See more