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books

TEX – Digital Typesetting

[Original Post in German] Facsimile of the 42-line Gutenberg bible from the copy at Berliner Staatsbibilothek Preuss. Kulturbesitz. Peagant, NY 1964 “Gutenberg has in fact invented nothing: Already in the middle of the second millennium BC it would have been possible to print books in that sense. All technical requirements (presses, ink, pagelike pads, also […]

Categories
philosophy religion science and mathematics

Metaphysics, Speculation and Science

[Original German blog post] The scientist looks through the objective – does this render his research objective? The occasion for this post is a rather persistently held debate on Twitter, I would like to broaden my own points a bit. These touche only a part of this by and large amusing discussion that spun a […]

Categories
art books

Digital Printing for Art Books

[Original German blog post] During the debate about the changes in media and the future importance of the Internet, you could get the impression lately, that the age of printing would come to an end after 500 years. In deed many industries that make a living from printed media are in a state of retreat […]

Categories
books history literature

Ovid: Metamorphoses

[Original German Blog Post] Some text are said to have influenced a whole generation; some are even called centennial. But the content of two books have been infusing our so called occidental couture and particularly art and literature over the span of the last two thousand years: this is the bible and Ovid’s Metamorphoses Claude […]

Categories
history slow theory

The Army of Technological Slaves

[Original German Blog Post] “καρπὸν δ᾽ ἔφερε ζείδωρος ἄρουρα αὐτομάτη πολλόν τε καὶ ἄφθονον” Hesiod, Έργα και ημέραι “Machines exist to serve us. There is something to be learned for media makers from the culture of the Hacker: not to surrender to the machines, neither reject them, but to take advantage of the machines, to […]

Categories
magazine science and mathematics slow theory

Power or Action?

[Original German Blog-Post] Remember that time is money. Benjamin Franklin, Advice to a Young Tradesman When Benjamin Franklin had “snatched the lightning from the skies” with the lightning rod and “the scepter from the tyrants” with the American Independence, it was hardly possible to doubt words of this titanic hero of the enlightenment. His most […]

Categories
magazine web service

Wired Magazine

[Original German Blog Post] “We know a lot about digital technology, and we are bored with it. Tell us something we’ve never heard before, in a way we’ve never seen before.” That is the vision of Louis Rosetto. And motivated by this vision, he founded Wired in 1993 – the very year, when the Mosaic-Browser […]

Categories
architecture books history twitter

Fostering Slowness

The real innovation blogging brought to our media landscape has never been real-time. No, the most important difference between “regular” websites or portals and blogs is their archive and the beautiful possibilities for fostering slowness (philosopher Odo Marquard coined the phrase “Langsamkeitspflege” for a very similar concept). When German blogger and journalist Don Dahlmann wrote […]

Categories
slow theory

Virtual Broadcasting

[Original German Blog-Post] “What men share with all other forms of animal life was not considered to be human.” “Action, the only activity that goes on directly between men without the intermediary of things or matter, corresponds to the human condition of plurality … this plurality is specifically the condition — not only the conditio […]

Categories
everyday life philosophy slow theory

Slow Media and borrowed time

When more than thirty years are told, As good as dead one is indeed Goethe, Faust II “Why Slow Media?” This is certainly one of the questions we get asked most frequently on events and in many conversations. “Why do you ask for more slowness in media?” For me, Hippocrates’ famous aphorism Ὁ μὲν βίος […]