All Picks posted by Paul Feigelfeld
Almost over now. It ain’t dark yet, but it’s getting there. Maybe I will actually save one post for later. But today is about my friend Zoë Claire Miller, artist, connoisseuse of all things odd, and owner of Novak, The Critical Dog. In October 1666, two fishermen caught [more]
Friday night I met Eva by chance for the first time. Well, not really, but somehow yes. A little later Sandra and Linlin adorned me with a crystal necklace which everyone seemed to like, or they just found me ridiculous. Andreas of Die Welt said I looked like a [more]
I have been partially paralyzed from my psyche downwards this week and thus thinking has become a peculiar pastime. Two things, however, grabbed my attention. Our favourite computer worm Stuxnet seems to have gone rogue and is currently wreaking havoc on its own. I quote the goof people of [more]
As a reply to Xifan Yang’s post Shanghainese:
At Antje Majewski’s studio, with works currently on display at the Deutsche Bank Kunsthalle. Fucking corporate joint, good show, his assessment. Performative piece by Jonathan Monk at Phylogenesis of Generosity in the Prinzessinnengarten. Mural piece by Bettina Krieg. He also appreciates arts and crafts: vogueing in a perl [more]
Symbols become symbols only by changing sides. The most significant signifier thus is the empty space, the void, the abyss. It points to absence, lack, longing and desire. The Moebius strip, with his one singular side, eternally changing sides and staying the same, has to get lost in [more]
Aaron Brown is legally real. I quote: On paper, and in the digital realm, Aaron Brown exists. He has a State of Ohio driver’s license, identification proving that he is member of the Lipan Apache Tribe in Texas, and is licensed to operate a boat. Brown is also [more]
A couple of years ago I attended a summer school with lots of science historians and sinologists in Heidelberg, and met Solange. Solange Guo Chatelard is from all over the world, and is a serious researcher and filmmaker at the same time. We practiced post-colonial drinking, academic impressions, [more]
The corner where I live attracts mythical creatures. Every morning, rain or shine, a one-man bike protest cycles by, wearing a helmet, frantically blowing into a whistle, carrying a huge sign demanding something, and playing the (unrecognizable) demands from a tape recorder, which alternatively blasts a gift card [more]
(One day late) We met last night. We raised glasses to Jeanne, who’s done. We made Eva older. We spoke with Georg and Bobby about irony, and being resistant to it. We met Sandra, who is wonderful, I think. We tried to go on with Sam. We went [more]
For some reason, for years now every single time I sit down and think about what to write, the word “Spiegel” (mirror) pops into my mind. I don’t know why exactly. I pronounce it silently inside my head, a little like Beckett’s Krapp utters “spooooooool” now and again. [more]
We know that Maya Deren pioneered lolcat videos in her 1944 The Private Life of a Cat. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k_iFk1eU1B0 Apparently, film pioneer Georges Méliès was into raunchy stuff, too. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rYYdTAuGm34
As I wake up this morning, I aim to do as the so-called Weavrs (create your own) do and blog myself into existence. I dreamt I was sleep walking. Maybe I was. Nobody said anything in the apartment I’m crashing in. It’s Baltic sea weather outside. Weavrs are simple AI [more]
I was calling myself because I had misplaced my phone when suddenly this relic of mobile communication that is voice mail sprang into action and I found myself speaking to myself. The thing is, I recorded my voice mail message 13 years ago, when I was 20 and [more]
I watched this this morning, half awake. I’m not sure what to make of it. It is snuff sensationalism and emotional exploitation porn as much as it is a heart-wrenching and compellingly humane form of journalism the likes of which I have not yet seen. I have been [more]
From 1930 to 1933 von Neumann often lectured to college groups in Princeton and enjoyed it immensely. It inspired him and he usually spoke without notes. He was said to be an indifferent teacher. His lectures were popular, though he was not easy to follow because he talked [more]
I simply forgot to write yesterday. I always wondered what would happen if the divine order of 60 pages was disrupted. Apparently nothing.
Many doors to many new and old rooms these days, some missing, some still phantoms, some still without keys, some which might close, and some changing every day. I feel like I have been in transit for the better part of a long time, and probably some temporal [more]
I was talking with Sam about Sam this morning, while walking to the Center for Digital Cultures in Lüneburg. While I was detailing the situation – several conflicts and resolutions, paired with or impaired by a godforsaken time and ungodly level of toxicity – I had the most brilliant [more]
waun e schdeam soit waun i amoe a bangl reis zu deitsch: de bodschn schdrek – i hoff es dauad no a wäu bis zu den leztn schrek – waun i daun oesdan schdeabm soit so bit ich eich nua r ans: jo nua ka r eangrob aum zenträu! [more]
REVEL EVER, EVE! O EVE, REVEL EVER!
Travel + Leisure named Lesotho’s Matekane Air Strip one of the world’s scariest runways. The tarmac is only 399 metres long, and it ends abruptly at the edge of a couloir at 7550 metres. If you run out of runway before getting airborne, explained bush pilot Tom Claytor, “you [more]
Innovation is driven by laziness. I was just thinking about how great it would be to have an algorithm write all my texts. Writing is governed by Zipf’s law, also called the Principle of the Least Effort, which basically states that we become less creative in our choice [more]
“Below the 40th latitude there is no law; below the 50th no god; below the 60th no common sense and below the 70th no intelligence whatsoever.” Kim Stanley Robinson “The Devil’s Ballroom.” Roald Amundsen about Antarctica Of all the utopian fantasies of the 19th century, the exploration of [more]
I can’t write anything today, not to myself, not about anything, not to someone. So please enjoy Luis Bunuel making a Martini, Jermaine Jackson performing with DEVO and something I just found called Art School Girls of Doom http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOAjW3q7MDg&list=RD02Ltfc-IlJiYc
Alright, let’s self-reflect, let’s discoursify content management systems, let’s bore the living crap out of each other. Believe it or not, it’s ten o’clock in the morning and I am cooking soup with Sam. Another Sam. At the CDC, which might be the Center for Disease Control, the [more]
After Eva’s Sunday manifesto, it is admittedly hard to decide what, and how to write. How to continue, and what to decide. Let’s go where it hurts, she wrote. Austerity instead of oysters. She even used exclamation marks! Manifestos always make me sad. There is a distinct melancholy [more]
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Two years ago today, at dawn, my mentor, teacher, former boss and friend Friedrich Kittler died. I had been at the hospital for most of the night, as had a few other members of the family, friends, companions. When night fell and breaths became ever more irregular, making [more]
On October 17th, 1973, Ingeborg Bachmann succumbed to the burn wounds she sustained after falling asleep with a cigarette in her apartment in Rome in late September. She was 47 years old. She had been heavily addicted to all sorts of pills for a long time, her body [more]
No. Not Deep Throat. We missed it. October 15th was the annual Ada Lovelace Day, honouring women in science, technology, engineering, and maths. Each year, it is hosted by a different institution – Imperial College London this year – and accompanied by a string of events. For those of [more]
It’s a Sunday evening in late May and I am face down in my pretzel prawns at a small street restaurant in Kowloon, Hong Kong. I had spent the day on Lamma Island, losing ridiculous amounts of sweat and talking about snakes. The night before was spent aboard [more]
There is a Canadian company called D-Wave Systems which has claimed for several years now to build actual quantum computers. Nebulous mystery surrounds their claims, given that it is extremely difficult to determine whether their D-Wave 1 and 2 contraptions are actually making use of the quirky thing that is quantum reality. [more]
Once upon a time I was falling in love, but now I’m only falling apart http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OEWb7zhx-VU
Mark Henry Rowswell grew up in Ontario and came to China age 23 in the late 1980s to study Chinese. For some reason, he was on TV only a few months after arriving and even performed a comedic skit on CCTV’s New Year’s Eve gala, broadcast to around [more]
In 1985, George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley of Wham! embarked on a lengthy world tour, which would eventually culminate in a ground-breaking 10-day visit to China – the first ever by a Western pop group. One of their two managers – Simon Napier-Bell and Jazz Summers – had dreamt [more]
WeChat or 微信 Weixin is one of my favourite things in China. It’s like WhatsApp plus social networking, only better in a Chinese way, and has about 300 million users. After a night of running around and away all over Beijing in August, from strangely luxurious basement hotel [more]
My grandfather once got in a fight with Helmut Qualtinger. They were in the same Schanigarten in the Vienna Prater, equally piss drunk, and my grandfather furthermore pissed that Qualtinger had temporarily left Vienna to live in Hamburg. So he walked up to him and expressed his disdain. [more]
In 1934, an already middle-aged wunderkind by the name of Norbert Wiener embarked on a journey by ship from California to China via Japan. He had been invited to teach mathematics and electrical engineering at Tsinghua University in Beijing, by a former MIT graduate student of his by [more]
Bertrand Russell was traveling in China in 1920. Since the famous logician and co-author of the Principia Mathematica knew a lot about the logic of language, but nothing about Chinese, a young and dapper mathematician and philosopher named 赵元任 Zhao Yuanren accompanied him as an interpreter. Zhao had studied [more]
When I came home from the conference in Lüneburg, which ended with a lecture by a philosopher and behavioural scientist, who actually sang half of his lecture, spontaneously bursting into song, serenading tropical birds and their ritualistic synchronicities, I found a package containing a volume of Felix Salten’s [more]
My brother Lukas is a film director. He studies at DFFB in Berlin. His films are usually very stylized, elegiac, enigmatic and rough. Think Andrey Tarkovsky getting drunk with Ulrich Seidl, or Alejandro Jodorowsky going shopping with Michael Haneke. In 2011, however, he did a personal project outside [more]
I’m sitting in on a panel on “World Peace” after finishing up my own talk on Kittler’s source code as an historical source. His lega-C. Conferences make me stupid. I never tweet, only during conferences. Right now, the brilliant Ana Pinto is speaking about cybernetics and the fabulous [more]
I’m at the annual conference of the Society for Media Studies and there is no time to write something remotely poetic or meaningful. I am writing this on my phone. However, there is so much fantastic language here. I try to document it on Twitter. Follow me, if [more]
“We moved into the Heath. There were oilfields, and blackened earth. Jabos flew over in diamond shapes, hunting us. Blicero had grown on, into another animal. . . a werewolf. . . but with no humanity left in its eyes: that had faded out, day after day, and been replaced by [more]
A new land has risen from the ashes of tectonic annihilation. Sentimental sediments, seen from the French Pleiades high-resolution Earth-observing system, to form an almost geometrically precise circular island off the coast of Pakistan, emerged from the ocean after a 7.7-magnitude earthquake struck last Tuesday afternoon, 20km north-east [more]
I start the week with a morning visit to the dentist, and while the olaflur gel is setting and I think of Olafur Eliasson, I watch motorcycle speedway on the telly, which seems oddly anachronistic. I think about floss and loss, and all things dental and mental. Every [more]
Cognac, Grand Marnier, egg yolk, Piper-Heidsieck Red Top, nutmeg, and a late night Marlene Stark
I was thinking about writing something about a 1985 paper that a mid-level People’s Liberation Army officer named Shen Weiguang wrote in 1985, in which he coined the term INFORMATION WARFARE for the first time in history. I came across it in a paper published by an intelligence [more]
In the first days of September and on the very last day of summer, I was sitting at the English shore of Essex, watching the tide roll away and enjoying a few cups of bottle fermented Rosé sparkling wine called “Mount Bluff” with Eva, the artist David Gates, [more]
I dreamt I was foraging through the woods, close to the sea. The ground was strewn with flotsam, rotten chunks of wood cracking under my feet, some trees flattened, reminding me of the Tunguska event of 1908. I wasn’t alone, but I can’t remember who I was with. [more]
For the Fall/Winter Men’s Issue of one of China’s biggest lifestyle magazines – Modern Weekly -, I conducted an email conversation with media philosopher Erich Hörl. He is one of the philosophers currently involved in the ongoing Anthropocene Project at Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, as well as the author of a text published in the catalogue [more]
I woke up this morning and my vacuum was full. My mother asked me on Skype which party I would have voted for, had I the right to vote in Germany, which I don’t, being Austrian. I’m not sure if I’m going to vote in Austria next week, [more]