This marks the fifth and final installment in a genealogy of queer computing (Part One, Part Two, Part Three and Part Four).
Note from Alan Turing to Robin Gandy, March 1954.
Born in London in 1949, Andrew Hodges attended Cambridge University from 1967 to 1971, where he trained as a mathematician. While there, he encountered the work of Alan Turing for the first time, learning of his significant contributions to the history of mathematical logic—though not of his homosexuality.
Promotional video for Lovid, U R QR (2013).
This weekend, artist duo Lovid will premiere a new project titled U R QR. If you participate, various things will happen to you, including your face being painted in black and white blocks and then photographed; when combined, the resulting images will combine to form a functioning QR code. QR codes have been waiting for a really good art project to come along for a long time, and this could be their big moment.
In the aftermath of a tumultuous weekend in Istanbul, artist Merve Unsal reflects on the relationship between social media and the quotidian practice of protest.
Photograph by Ian Usher taken at Gezi Park on June 8, 2013, one week before the park was cleared by riot police backed by armored vehicles.
I grew up listening to what cities should and/or could be—my mother teaches urban planning at a public university in Istanbul, an institution whose beginnings in the late 19th century can be traced to the effort to change, adapt and preserve what was then the Ottoman Empire, and which later came to symbolize the (dis)continuity of modern ideals between the Empire and the Republic of Turkey. I learned about the neighborhood of Pera from architectural historian Dogan Kuban in efforts to make dinner conversation with my mom as a teenager. And yet, my relationship with the city that I lived in did not become tangible until May 30, 2013, when I went to Gezi Park after dinner.
The year 1980 is a generational point of demarcation in Turkey, a cut-off. The turmoil of the 1970s erupted in a military coup d'etat in 1980 that left an indelible mark on the generation that would become our parents; their generation was slapped—for lack of a better word—every ten years, 1960, 1971, 1980, even 1997. We—the kids born in the 80s—were raised to stay out of trouble.
[A recent survey in Gezi Park reveals that this is the first protest for many of the occupiers.]
Trouble found us, as the tents of peaceful protesters were burnt at dawn on May 31. Most of us watched the video of how the police treated the protestors in bed from our iPhones. The distance engendered by ...
This is the latest in an ongoing series of performance GIFs curated by Jesse Darling. Previously: Maja Cule, Legacy Russell, Jaakko Pallasvuo, Creighton Baxter, Genevieve Belleveau, Jennifer Chan.
Milking It
Marisa Olson, 2013
The chemical therapy the artist takes to cope with the death of a parent on chemotherapy causes the child to artificially lactate like a new mother. Here she takes matters into her own hands, deliberately "crying on command" to share a milky tear as evidence of this abject paradox.
Click here to view work (NSFW).
Artist and erstwhile Rhizome staff writer Tyler Coburn's recent project I'm that angel includes a book and performance narrated by a fictional “content farmer,” a writer (typically freelance) who creates large amounts of text that is designed for maximum traction with search engine algorithms. The performances typically take place in data centers or spaces in which the physical infrastructure that supports "the cloud" is made manifest.
Douglas Davis, "The World's First Collaborative Sentence" (1994). Detail.
On Monday, the New York Times ran an article describing the Whitney Museum's restoration of an early online artwork by Douglas Davis, The World’s First Collaborative Sentence (1994).
Many of the comments posted to the article offered sage advice for the conservation team, free of charge. According to Francesco of New York, “it was probably build in java or php and they need to update the server.” VJBortolot of Guildford, CT, expressed surprise “that the Whitney didn't … use an legacy browser … and run it in a Win95 environment on a vintage computer.” E.W. Chesterton of Palm Beach simply wrote, “Oh please! It’s html!”
Expert diagnoses notwithstanding, it’s well worth delving a bit further into some of the complex issues that emerged during the Davis restoration.
