Tag: cybernetics

Art, Algorithms, and the Physicality of the Virtual

Rebecca Perry January 7, 2020

Star Wars’ legion of fans were rewarded in rewarded in December 2019 with the long-awaited release of Star Wars, The Rise of Skywalker, filled with state-of-the-art computer graphics. 42 years earlier, George Lucas presented the first film in the series, Star Wars Episode IV—A New Hope. For the most part, Lucas’ 1977 work was a traditionally-produced film, which filmed painstakingly hand-crafted physical models of miniature spacecraft and terrain to create an alternate universe. But the film also featured several examples of the earliest computer graphics to appear in a feature-length production.(1) In the intervening 42 years, filmmakers embraced and evolved complex computer-generated visual effects into a sophisticated blend of art and technology which has transformed 21st century filmmaking and image culture more generally. (read more...)

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Weekly Round-up | June 2nd, 2017

Ian Lowrie June 2, 2017

This week’s round-up is a bit skewed towards essays and think pieces rather than the academic equivalent of cat pictures, which may or may not be a good thing, depending on how much you need to chuckle today. If you do find any more-diverting tidbits for our next round-up, please do pass them along to the editor. One of the values of anthropology is that it can do a good job of putting abstract, theoretical conversations about things like technicity in contact with profoundly concrete things like stone tools and human brains. Sapiens’ recent piece on brain evolution and tool use was fascinating, but perhaps tilted towards the concrete: we read it with an idle, speculative dream of a four-fields anthropology of science.   Nehal El-Hadi has a suitably haunting look at the spectral reproduction of Black death by contemporary communications technology at The New Inquiry (exemplifying a subtle and deeply ethical approach to using critical theory in (read more...)

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Hardwired Hayek: Lessons for economic anthropology from electricity markets

Canay Ozden-Schilling July 28, 2015

For most of its history in the US, electricity has been a monopoly commodity: in a delimited territory, only one company was legally allowed to produce and deliver electricity to consumers. This state of affairs started to be challenged in the 1970s, when, in accordance with the neoliberal wave, a number of infrastructural services (e.g., airlines, telecommunications) were deregulated, meaning, they were made competitive by law. Electricity followed in the 1990s. First, the Energy Policy Act of 1992 allowed states to break monopolistic utilities into separate production and delivery companies. This act also allowed states to take technological measures to ensure that new companies could plug into the electric grid to sell or buy electricity. And then the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) introduced the concept of electricity markets—computational processes through which prices are set for all buyers and sellers, and which are operated by non-profit operators of the transmission grid. I can’t stress enough the computational nature of these new markets: they exist because the grid is wired up with many kinds of sensors and computational devices that are calculating continuously and zigzagging “information.” Making these markets requires not just economists, but also engineers, programmers, traders, and database specialists—all concerned with making sure that the nature and order of information flows are just right. (read more...)

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