JWT Intelligence has reported on a burgeoning concept in retail stores where every visible product is for sale. OK, well, the idea is a little more complex than that. High-concept (and presumably high-cost) retailers such as Merci in Paris have opened self-contained retail experiences which contain finished, showroom-ready installations where, inde...

Since the earliest days of virtual chess and solitaire, video games have been a playing field for developing artificial intelligence (AI). Each victory of machine against human has helped make algorithms smarter and more efficient. But in order to tackle real world problems – such as automating complex tasks including driving and negotiation – thes...

STARTS, the European Commission’s science / tech / arts programme, has revealed its winners for another year. The Collaboration prize goes to the Barcelona district of Ciutat Vella, and the Exploration prize goes to  Bjørn Karmann and Tore Knudsen’s work Project Atlas. Ciutat Vella aimed to develop a new form of urban planning through big...

OH HELLO! I finished a job yesterday and as a result feel GREAT - even better, I seemingly managed to leave without alienating or upsetting anyone, although that will probably change next week when they realise that I have a secret backdoor login to the website and fully intend to go and make subtle but significant alterations to all the staff biog...

Professor Tim Congdon, a senior UKIP member and academic, in a short BBC online article entitled Brexit puts UK on new economic path , has probably written the clearest expression of the Leave campaign in terms of its economic ideas and plans post exit.  This is a critique of those ideas. In the wake of the Leave campaign winning the vote to e...

Oh God, it's going to happen, isn't it? IT'S FINALLY GOING TO HAPPEN! Hello again, by the way! I am reliably informed that everything really  is  now fixed with Imperica - thankyou, as ever, for your forebearance and patience as we once again cobbled the website back together again with sticks and sellotape and that weird gluelike substan...

UNESCO and the EQUALS Skills Coalition have launched a report into gender divides in digital skills, and how education can overcome the divide. We’ll start by quoting the introduction from the report, which is entitled I’d blush if I could: The title of this publication borrows its name from the response given by Siri, a female-gendered voice assis...

The Kissinger Twins - Kasia Kifert and Dawid Marcinkowski - have remade their 2010 interactive masterpiece Sufferosa for Instagram. Using features including Instagram’s IGTV and Insta Stories, the new work comprises three acts over twenty-four episodes. This is the launch of the first act, with the second and third acts to be launche...

Ján Pernecký is founder of Rese Arch, an organisation which supports and teaches conceptual and generative approaches to architecture, and is also founding partner of Bratislava agency Subdigital. Ahead of his talk at Sensorium in June, we asked Ján ​about architecture, the "digital", and generative...

We are at a critical point of the climate change and mental health crises. We are the most connected 'on demand' generation yet seem to have lost touch with who we are and where we fit in the world. We mediate our life through technology and screens. Are we ever truly where we are and present? I have just finished the research and development of my...

Change is everywhere; after all, as we know, it is the only constant. The work of Sissel Marie Tonn reflects change. By allowing the viewer to concentrate on the sensory and perceptual impacts to environments undergoing some sort of change, her work allows for its own narrative and a very real, very special sort of anthropological history. We caugh...

 HELLO! NORMAL SERVICE IS ONCE AGAIN RESUMED! That's right, it's ME! Not the algoversion - honest - but the REAL BOY, all flesh and sebum and mucus. ISN'T IT NICE TO HAVE ME BACK? The website should have been fixed, the mailer software should be working...all that remains is for me to finish penning this desultory excuse for an intro and hit '...

The lovely Danube-banked city of Bratislava plays host once again to Sensorium , Slovakia‘s biggest festival of digital art and culture, in early June. Held at the Pisztory Palace in the city centre, the festival will host the usual luminaries of digital arts and culture but also, for the first time, have a public programme to be held across the ci...

HELLO EVERYBODY! So, er, it's been something of a trying week what with the news and the life and the fact that the Imperica website basically combusted last week, leaving Poor Editor Paul with bits of HTML all over his lap and leaving YOU (you POOR DARLINGS) without an email version of Curios last week ( you can still read it here on the website t...

I AM BACK HELLO DID YOU MISS ME? No, of course not, you were all too busy stuffing yourselves with confectionery and weeping over the stigmata of the risen Christ, weren't you? Typical. Have you had a good fortnight? Have you 'enjoyed' watching people getting unaccountably cross at some children asking us to maybe not fcuk up their futures? Do you ...

A new series for BBC Radio 4,  Invisible Networks , starts today. Presented by James Bridle and featuring artists including our old friends  Julian Oliver and Danja Vasiliev , it "reimagines John Berger's Ways of Seeing for the digital age".  Also happening today is the very interesting-looking Glitches and Ghosts at Lancaster U...

Grayson Perry's latest sculpture,  ​Restituted British Head ​, is a nod to what it means to be British as Brexit is upon us. Whilst  ​Head of a Fallen Giant ​, his sculpture of a decade ago, was nostalgic, this one tackles Britishness head-on (pardon the pun). As we deploy the xenophobic-influenced economic suicide of Brexit, Perry has cr...

Have you seen retweets from Carlsberg where the original author is slagging off their lager?  carlsberg tastes like stale breadsticks — harleigh (@sharpdarts_) June 20, 2018 ​Rather obviously, there's some reverse psychology going on. As  ​ Marketing Week explains, Carlsberg is slagging off its past in order to attract you to its future. ...

Today at Milan Design Week, Sjoerd ter Borg continues his project Aesthetics of exclusion. Dutch Designer Sjoerd ter Borg organizes a competition between houseplants on the Milan Design Week. Botanica Variegata creates a system of classification and taxonomy of plants, according to their online presence on Instagram. An algorithmic structure a...

We had a species-defining moment this week - one of those rare times within a lifetime where you can step back and say “yep, that felt pretty significant, shame I’ll be worms by the time the long-term implications of it are known”. Yet did we stop staring at our jizz-filled navels long enough to enjoy it? Did we BUGGERY. Although ...