Readings

1 November 2011 • readings
tags: aesthetics, articles, books, comics, death, hauntology, history, imagination, machines, noise, novels, phonography, psychogeography, robots, science, television, texts, vampires, zombies

• Technology and the novel, from Blake to Ballard [read]
Tom McCarthy, The Guardian, Saturday 24 July 2010

• El elogio de la sombra [leer]
Jun’ichirō Tanizaki

• Lenore #1-13
Roman Dirge

• Psychogeography [read]
Merlin Coverley

• Words Made Flesh. Code, Culture, Imagination [read]
Florian Cramer

• Jacques Attali, author of Noise (1977). Speaking at the ICA, London, May 2001 [read]

Readings

7 September 2010 • readings
tags: articles, body, books, capitalism, civilization, fantasy, fiction, found, history, liberation, minimal, music, novels, plagiarism, poetry, politics, situationism, vampires

• Medicina tradicional china [leer]
Daniel Reid. Ediciones Urano. 1999.

• Anarchism: A Very Short Introduction
Colin Ward. Oxford University Press. 2004.

• The Laws of Simplicity
John Maeda. The MIT Press. 2006.

• A User’s Guide to Détournement [read]
Guy Debord & Gil J Wolman. 1956.

• On Found Poetry (A FOUND INTRODUCTION) [read]
John Robert Colombo
From Open Poetry, (Ronald Gross & George Quasha, eds., 1973)

• A Day in the Life of a Musician [read]
Erik Satie

• Dead and Gone
Charlaine Harris. 2009.

Readings

8 August 2010 • readings
tags: aesthetics, analysis, books, death, history, humour, murder, perception, religion, senses, situationism, suicide, zen

• Panegírico
Guy Debord

• Del asesinato considerado como una de las Bellas Artes [read in English]
Thomas de Quincey

• Consciousness and Perception: The Point of Experience and the Meaning of the World We Inhabit [read]
Sérgio Roclaw Basbaum. Revista Eletrônica Informação e Cognição, v.5, n.1, p.181-203, 2006.

• Preguntes a un mestre Zen
Taisen Deshimaru

Robota (working for the man)

1 August 2010 • out of context
tags: books, etymology, history, quotes, robots, work

“…it was here in the Czech theater that the term robot was first coined (from the Slavic “to work”) to describe human-shaped, mechanical automata that could carry out drudge labor.”

Sensorium, edited by Caroline A. Jones

“In an article in the Czech journal Lidové noviny in 1933, he [Karel Čapek] explained that he had originally wanted to call the creatures laboři (“workers”, from Latin labor). However, he did not like the word, and sought advice from his brother Josef, who suggested “roboti”. The word robota means literally “work”, “labor” or “serf labor”, and figuratively “drudgery” or “hard work” in Czech and many Slavic languages. Traditionally the robota was the work period a serf (corvee) had to give for his lord, typically 6 months of the year. Including Slovak, Ukrainian, Russian and Polish. The origin of the word is the Old Church Slavonic rabota “servitude” (“work” in contemporary Bulgarian and Russian), which in turn comes from the Indo-European root Serfdom was outlawed in 1848 in Bohemia, so at the time Čapek wrote R.U.R., usage of the term robota had broadened to include various types of work, but the obsolete sense of “serfdom” would still have been known.”

Wikipedia