SO COLD. SO COLD. But no, it is not cold enough to go home from work, IT IS NEVER COLD ENOUGH TO STOP.  I'm late with this today, what with...well, what with having been a bit slow, in the main. Anyway, as a result you're getting little in the way of preamble; instead, enjoy this WARM AND SOOTHING bath of links I have prepared especially for y...

Larry Achiampong and David Blandy are the artists featured in an extraordinary new exhibition now running at the Arts Catalyst in central London. The first part of a series of film works by the duo, Generic Automata will aim to address the concepts of racial segregation and classification, starting with Charles Darwin. It was John Ed...

There was a time when our internet resembled the American economy of the historic Western frontier: unregulated, vast in opportunities and untouched by large firms. The world wide web was new and cyberspace was, for the most part, overloaded with useless information. "Chances are if you search for an item even with a very good search engine, most o...

The visitors started coming in 2013. The first one who came and refused to leave until he was let inside was a private investigator named Roderick. He was looking for an abducted girl, and he was convinced she was in the house. John S. and his mother Ann live in the house, which is in Pretoria, the administrative capital of South Africa and next to...

Computers, Privacy and Data Protection is an annual conference, now in its 12th year, run by a group of universities in Belgium. A spin-off exhibition and series of events, Privacytopia , enables an artistic view of contemporary cyberprivacy issues at large. Works to be shown include Archiving Faceless , a film by Bogomir Doringer (whose cover ador...

Ars Electronica and Waag Society have come together again to invite artists to submit their latest and greatest digital artworks to the STARTS (Science, Technology, Arts) price. As ever, there are two categories. The prize for innovative collaboration honours any pairing up of industry/tech and artists which had led to something truly creative. The...

A picture may be worth a thousand words, but there is nothing that persuades quite like an audio or video recording of an event. At a time when partisans can barely agree on facts, such persuasiveness might seem as if it could bring a welcome clarity. Audio and video recordings allow people to become firsthand witnesses of an event, sparing th...

​ I am really sad about Facebook. I got involved with the company more than a decade ago and have taken great pride and joy in the company's success … until the past few months. Now I am disappointed. I am embarrassed. I am ashamed. With more than 1.7 billion members, Facebook is among the most influential businesses in the world. Whether they like...

About a decade ago, the average internet user might well have heard of RSS. Really Simple Syndication, or Rich Site Summary—what the acronym stands for depends on who you ask—is a standard that websites and podcasts can use to offer a feed of content to their users, one easily understood by lots of different computer programs. Today, though RSS con...

From artist Bjørn Karmann, Alias is perhaps the first decent attempt to permanently intercept the way in which voice assistants, such as Alexa/Echo and the Google Assistants, work. As we all know, such devices are handy to have around the home but are a trade off for user privacy. These devices are essentially passive snoopers: recording machi...

P olitics is increasingly dominated by the 'struggle for recognition' – different social groups (genders, ethnic and religious groups, rural and urban dwellers) clamouring to be treated with respect and dignity in the eyes of others. Many feel forgotten, and they're increasingly angry about it. But identity politics is not going to peak with the el...

From the Photographer's Gallery: This exhibition presents the work of 11 contemporary artists and groups seeking to map, visualise and question the cultural dynamics of 21st Century image culture. Importantly, it investigates the systems through which today's photographic images multiply online and asks what new forms of value, knowledge, meaning a...

In a unique collaboration between the LGBTQ game archive, Berlin's computer games museum, Temple University and the Schwules Museum, the Schwules is now running an exhibition on the history of LGBTQ games and gaming. Over 30 years of gaming history is covered, spanning online communities, concepts, games themselves and even mods from fans. As ...

In the history of the quest for human-level artificial intelligence, a number of rival paradigms have vied for supremacy. Symbolic artificial intelligence was dominant for much of the 20th century, but currently a connectionist paradigm is in the ascendant, namely machine learning with deep neural networks. However, both paradigms have strengths an...

On  a Friday night in September 1982, teenagers poured out of the Fridhemsplan metro station. First just a few dozen, then hundreds, and soon more than a thousand of them filled the station's hall, the sidewalk, and the road outside. Eventually, they walked three blocks south to Rålambshovsparken, entering the grassy Stockholm park via a concr...

Ars Electronica has partnered with twelve other art and culture organisations across the globe to create the European ARTificial Intelligence Lab. The thirteen organisations will offer artists the opportunity to develop and realise ideas which combine neuroscience, AI, and digital art. A jury comprised of members from each organisation will ev...

Ignota is a new publishing house from Verso‘s communications director Sarah Shin, and the Serpentine‘s Ben Vickers. Themes covered by Ignota will include - and we quote - esoterica, thoughtforms, poetry, witchcraft, advanced technology, astrology, altered states, mysticism, gnosticism, ritual, speculation, psychedelics, metaphysics, yoga, the ...

Back in the early 1970s, America was on the precipice of a new and unprecedented technological epoch. A small, square piece of plastic called the floppy disc was about to hit the market. Intel was perfecting the first microprocessors. Engineers were developing a prototype of a cell phone, the DynaTAC. Notably, a once fantastical subdivision of comp...

It's obvious that in 50 years the amount of data collected about us will be much, much larger than it is now. By the middle of the century, all of us will leave a comprehensive, high-definition, information-rich digital exhaust everywhere we go. As the cost of adding computer chips to objects falls, our baby monitors, coffee machines, Fitbits, ener...

Last week I was followed around the Internet by a pair of shoes. I had looked at them online as a gift for my father-in-law, but he didn't like them, and neither did I. Yet no matter what site I visited, there they were, staring at me in their full moccasin glory. Digital advertising can be really annoying, but it can also be dangerous. It has rece...