... rien ne pourra plus jamais faire sortir pour moi de ce sanctuaire doucement éclairé de Saint-Marc où je suis sûr de les retrouver parce qu'ils y a leur place réservée et immuable comme une mosaïque, ce soit mes enfants. jbenno.net/recalling-ve...
"... comme elle permet de ne rien regretter, en nous persuadant que nous avons atteint le meilleur, et que le meilleur n’était pas grand’chose — pour nous résigner à la mort.”
jbenno.net/memory-hygie...
"Socialist Economics in Yugoslavia
A Critical History" by Marko Grdešić, Mislav Žitko
This is a really interesting book with some hints of how to work towards alternative economies: www.taylorfrancis.com/books/mono/1...
"The Idea of AI Slop is Slop"
"The majority of human production has always been slop. Mediocrity is not a bug of technology; it is the baseline of culture." by @francescodisa.bsky.social @philosalon.bsky.social
thephilosophicalsalon.com/the-idea-of-...
AI - Is it creative or just crap? Our event at the Wheaton Institute, Dec 3 at 5pm, featuring great and fun student work on the most-hyped tech-bubble of 2025: wheatoncollege.edu/wiih/current...
my new class: Understanding AI - creative experiments with AI and applications outside the “ready-made”, “pre-packaged”, “shiny boxes” of Chatbots and prompt-based image generation, to get an idea on the true potential of AI (and also its limitations).
wheatoncollege.edu/academics/sp...
The great exhibition on Caspar David Friedrich in the Metropolitan Museum inspired me to finally translate and update an old essay on forests as metaphors and German romanticism: jbenno.net/waldeinsamke...
A smiling, sitting on a globe, hour glass holding skeleton symbolizing Death, being positioned under the "Ende" (German for "end") announcement in an early modern book. In this meme the hourglass has been changed with a smartphone symbol. The details are from VD17 1:034465H.
How to Spend Less Time on your Phone: Memento mori (Latin for 'remember (that you have) to die').
This meme is brought to you from #earlymodern #bookhistory and the #SmilingDeath himself.
I decided to start a #thread 🧵 of stories about legal residents and tourists being (illegally) arrested, detained and/or deported by the Trump regime. I'll only post stories from serious sources, as rumors and conspiracies are really not needed in this authoritarian moment.
Ugh. Talked this week and last to friends and former coworkers in the national security arena. It's far worse even than I had imagined. Our safety and security is being destroyed, not little by little but in huge chunks. I am left wondering if, six months from now, we'll have anything approaching a functional military, diplomatic corps, intelligence community, or national law enforcement. We'll have no allies who can rely on us. Our enemies will be inside all our systems, running rampant. The US as a world power will be crippled.
DC being DC you know people who know people. A friend writes the following, which I’m posting with permission.
Es wechseln die Zeiten. Die riesigen Pläne
Der Mächtigen kommen am Ende zum Halt.
Und gehn sie einher auch wie blutige Hähne
Es wechseln die Zeiten, da hilft kein Gewalt.
Am Grunde der Moldau wandern die Steine
Es liegen drei Kaiser begraben in Prag.
Das Große bleibt groß nicht und klein nicht das Kleine.
Die Nacht hat zwölf Stunden, dann kommt schon der Tag.
rather imaginative depiction of a Chinese man holding an amphid or toad on one of its hindlegs
a head, very red complexion, giantic nose and bushy eyebrows, no body instead tentacles coming out of the neck, wearing a crest of blue ostrich plumes
a griphin attacking a fairy who is coming out of a flower
some Chinoiserie in the Belvedere in Vienna, another Savoy palace. The family had a thing for chinoiserie and bestiaries (c. 1714)
"A state is destroyed by great men and the people fall
into the slavery of monarchy thanks to ignorance.”
ἀνδρῶν δ’ ἐκ μεγάλων πόλις ὄλλυται, ἐς δὲ μονάρχου
δῆμος ἀϊδρίηι δουλοσύνην ἔπεσεν #Solon
Students at Brown have used the Google Maps API to create a live tracker for traffic flows under congestion pricing in NYC. It includes a real-time diff-in-diff type comparison between NYC, Boston, and Chicago:
www.congestion-pricing-tracker.com
danke für den Hinweis! Das Interview hatte ich wohl vor vielen Jahren gelesen und die Verbindung zu Islands in the Net nicht präsent.
... hatte unlängst eine Reihe von Vorträgen organisiert, einer über Flusser, der andere mit Bruces: wheatoncollege.edu/academics/sp...
Videos sind noch nicht fertig, aber die beiden Vorträge hatten nicht allzuviel Überlappung ...
glaube ehrlichgesagt nicht :) Ein paar Texte sind tatsächlich auf Englisch übersetzt.
... but I miss the conversations. I miss meeting new people.
2017 I generally stopped using Twitter. While I can be found on Mastodon (mastodon.social/@jbenno ) and Bsky, I lost most of my social network in the transition. And now I don't know about what I should post anymore. Feeling self conscious and clumsy.
my line of books by Vilem Flusser on the shelves in my living room
Hi, @hakimboy.bsky.social nice to hear someone asking about Flusser! (I actually met him once in the year he died, but I was way too young to understand anything, at all). I would be very interested to chat! @bruces.bsky.social
We are hiring a professor of film and digital media at Wheaton College where I teach: jobs.wheatoncollege.edu/postings/4447
Please reach out if you have suggestions or comments or ideas to participate!
I was appointed Director of the Wheaton Institute at Wheaton College, where I also teach digital media. My project there will be 'AI Humanities': wheatoncollege.edu/wiih
my favourite museum in London. Have been there many times!
missing in this list: the wonderful "Insel Felsenburg" ("Palisades Island") by Johann Schnabel ("Wunderliche Fata einiger Seefahrer") de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insel_F...
Furthest I've been:
E: Tokyo
W: Vancouver
S: Singapore
N: Hammerfest
