square white world

– photo Takashi Murai, from here [an article in support of the bestiary]

in the 1930s, certain people saw what was going on. And they saw the general trends. I’m telling you there is a general trend. I am an expert and I’ve lived through it. Other experts have also lived through different facets of this—an American, a German and a French man, all experts on different parts of what is happening legislatively and what is happening in terms of the technology. Now we have all been intercepted permanently. This is a state change. This is not matter of simply a change to any individual. This is a sea change in politics and we are going to have to do something about it. If we don’t do something about it, we run the risk of losing the democracy we have treasured for so long.

– Julian Assange, here and look here too

I am dying without air

in this green

ghetto

Le processus est brutal. Ma pratique implique un passage à l’acteur permanent. Par la transgression de la frontière séparant le photographe de son sujet, je suis devenu l’objet de mes images, l’acteur contraint d’un scénario que j’ai moi-même élaboré. Le manque, la souffrance, le vieillissement de la chair, la nécessité de jouir et celle, plus subtile, de faire jouir, tout me ramène, à travers l’acte sexuel, à mon propre corps. Je ne peux photographier si je ne suis pas acteur à part entière des situations dans lesquelles je m’immisce ou que je provoque. Épicentre d’un champ de filtres, de prismes et de zones d’ombres, je photographie ce que je fais, je fais ce que je photographie. Tenter de rendre visible cette fracture nécessite de se trouver d’un côté ou de l’autre et d’avoir intégré la césure comme une partie de soi. Je me soumets docilement et, au fur et à mesure que je me perds dans ma pratique, que ma vie touche à la dissolution, que mon corps se disloque, que ma photographie me devient étrangère, je suis de plus en plus seul dans mon entreprise de reconstruction.

– Antoine D’Agata – from here

I was actually pursuing a link to Leigh Ledare’s work when I found this. No. No. What am I saying? I didn’t find it, I was lead to it. It already existed.

– more here

“what I like to call Killer Robots” – some crazy lady talking about the DANGER that robots may be developed – within the next twenty to thirty years – to autonomously kill humans. What a good idea!

What’s crazy about the lady is that her problem with killer robots was not that they kill but that they displace the human decision-making process. Usually so reliably ethical.

But as creators how do we actually feel about being destroyed by our creations? Well, put it this way, How did God feel?

“capable of delivering lethal force with no human intervention at all” – BBC World Service 13:05

Ban the golems! they say. Before they’re built. In that arbitrarily delimited futurity called the next twenty to thirty years.

Something needs to be said about this human judgement from which the murdering golems are spared but from which they come. We are being asked to use the same judgement to condemn… whom? what? the decision to pursue this research? those funding the research? the very human interests – in killing interesting people – implicated?

Sadly the story peters out in vague assertions that perhaps Killer Robots are illegal ideas and against humanitarian guidelines on murder. Which would make them like drones?