#systemsthatmatter — Public Fediverse posts

Home is where the packages arrive: finally unpacked this great book from 1978.

#RobertPMulthauf #historyofchemistry #chemistry #systemsthatmatter

A great recent publication that builds on Yuk Hui and others. Arsenault aims to 'renew critical imaginations' by taking into account 'the non-universalism of technology and its cultural and civilizational particularities'.

"There is not just one wat out, but many ways out of our civilizational impasses."

#Cosmotechnics #LouManuelArsenault #SystemsThatMatter

Until now I had never read this classic booklet from 1989 and it only seems more relevant 37 years later.

"We need to ward off the entropic rise of the dominant subjectivity by all possible means".

#FélixGuattari #LesTroisÉcologies #ThreeEcologies #SystemsThatMatter

What is not to like: a theoretical physicist who is also a radical ecologist attempting to 'write with' Alexander Grothendieck about the need to betray technoscience in its current form and develop a form of knowing that affirms life. Unfortunately...

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#aurelienbarrau #alexandergrothendieck #systemsthatmatter

I am certainly a fan of Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent and especially admirative of the depth of her sources. Some aspects of this booklet from 2004 are a bit dated 22 years later, but most of it not at all. Interesting to realize that the hype around nanotechnology was as much generated by the overblown promises as well as the equally unrealistic predictions of the end of the world.

#bensaudevincent #systemsthatmatter

From a 1866 French book with instructive stories about physics.

#sudcharente #systemsthatmatter

Appr. 124 years of reaction-diffusion.

#sudcharente #systemsthatmatter

Cracked paint speculatively restructuring France.

#sudcharente #systemsthatmatter

From 1902, I believe one of the first books published by Pierre Duhem on the philosophical history of science. A very interesting topic, but I have to admit that after reading Hélène Metzger it is a bit underwhelming so far. Also referring to (some) previous scientific views as 'puerile' is not what I expected. Why write such a history ?

#pierreduhem #chemistry #historyofchemistry #systemsthatmatter

A classic book from 1987 ( the French is from 2017) by Guillermo Bonfil Batalla about the continued resilience of meso-american culture after five centuries of colonial horror.

#GuillermoBonfilBatalla #Mexico #SystemsThatMatter

For those in Brussels who are interested in such things: Hold the date !
On the 10th, 12th and 13th of September, the friendly people of Cinema Nova will be screening many of my films, including the most recent feature-length one (pictured). There will be a small exhibition of plots, prints and devices, and also an event around the "Liberate the Machines !" book. Looking forward to seeing you there !

#CinemaNova #MechanismsCommonToDisparatePhenomena #LiberateTheMachines #SystemsThatMatter

Cleaning up the studio before the summer break and re-encountering this intriguing analog computing setup that came with something else I was interested in. It comes from a Dutch engineering lab, but the previous owner did not know what it was or what it was used for.

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#analogcomputing #PhilbrickResearches #SystemsThatMatter

So this sheet of mica - that is what it said when I bought it - turned all cloudy and swollen after a few hours at high temperatures (over 500 C). This is not at all what I expected, does anybody know what could be going on ?

#OtherSemiconductors #79 #mica #SystemsThatMatter

Just out and just in: a beautiful book by the collective RYBN.ORG on the 'history of laborious informatics'.

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@NbYr @databasecultures #rybn.org #SystemsThatMatter

If it would be an analogue computer patch I would think one of the amplifiers had a problem; in order to prevent overloads I would stop the calculation and try to solve it by recalibrating.

#climateCrisis #SystemsThatMatter

Version five coming up of the unreasonable see-through oven needed to re-enact/replicate the Salt Transistor experiment.

#OtherSemiconductors #TheSaltTransistor #79 #SystemsThatMatter

I had never read Benjamin's "On the concept of history", the last essay he finished.
Oof, what a text.

#WalterBenjamin #OnTheConceptOfHistory #ÜberDenBegriffDerGeschichte #SystemsThatMatter

Today this transitioned from working in principle to working in fact, so now my Tektronix 7704A analogue oscilloscope has a functioning serial input for the readout system.

#OtherSemiconductors #79 #Tektronix #AnalogElectronics #SystemsThatMatter

Very happy to have been able to catch a(nother) speculative documentary magic lantern performance by the one and only Melissa Ferrari , at the Art and Media Archeology Summer School at the University of Antwerp.

#mediaarcheology #magiclantern #systemsthatmatter

Found this Robot model 70 Slow Scan Television Monitor from mid 1973, and with a bit of care it just works !
An image like this is quite straight-forward to produce, but getting it to show more complex imagery will be not so obvious. This is a long-exposure, the persistence of the tube is actually quite short, so the drawn image is always a lot less bright than the line drawing it. The CRT is supposed to be a P7, but I have never seen a P7 this green...

#Robot #SSTV #SystemsThatMatter

Picked up some recent books with trendy designs and cool subjects for the summer, hoping to catch up a bit with current discourse. One of them is this book from 2024 whose sheer improbability intrigued me since I found out about its existence. So far I find it is great, so I decided to socially perform my 'constitutive vicariousness' and 'necessary industriousness' by posting about it !

#GiorgiVachnadze #BecomingPress #SystemsThatMatter

The world's largest mica capacitor in 1926, one component in the "Imperial Wireless Chain" of long-range radiotelegraphy stations built by the British Empire in the 1920s. The mica inside this device was mined in India, the lady pictured for scale was certainly involved in its construction.

#capacitor #condenser #mica #Dubilier #SystemsThatMatter

During the writing I took some time off to contemplate this picture of a Soviet hybrid computer from the mid-1970s.

#HybridComputing #AnalogComputing #DialoguesWithMachines #SystemsThatMatter

Four crude circuit board additions that give a serial port to each of these Tektronix 7M13 modules from the early 1970s; now I can animate their electronic text display without having to use 228 pushbuttons.

#Tektronix #79 #OtherSemiconductors #SystemsThatMatter

A(nother) great book with a title that I don't think does it justice, but that must be me reading tangentially. But anyway a fantastic study of the medieval 'art-nature debate', and how the most valuable arts are perhaps not about making things by imposing forms but about helping nature along. Citing many Arab and European authors with very articulate views on bio-engineering, but then - say - seven centuries ago. Utterly fascinating.

#WilliamRNewman #Alchemy #chemistry #SystemsThatMatter

News just in from the funny materials department of the Guangdong Free-Trade Zone.

#OtherSemiconductors #79 #广东自由贸易区 #SystemsThatMatter

Yesterday I figured out how to automate entering text into a Tektronix text generator from the early 1970s, so that I can animate it.
A quirky protocol that is sort of documented except the exceptions...

#79 #OtherSemiconductors #Tektronix #SystemsThatMatter

Recently out and just in, what seems to be an excellent book on how negotiating technologies is negotiating what it is to be human.

#ThomasDekeyser #TechnoNegative #SystemsThatMatter

A rabbit-hole that exerts a strong pull, but so far I have been able to resist it: the history of techniques to display alphanumeric characters on cathode ray tubes.

This picture may very well be from the first fully electronic method proposed, invented at the Automatic Telephone and Electric Company in Liverpool in 1947. All glyphs are generated from sine-wave-like curves, truncated in different ways.

#vectorgraphics #SystemsThatMatter

Very nice to (literally) dust off, reconfigure and restart patching some of the high-bandwidth analog computing modules I built between 2015 and 2020. Nice as well to be using them for something else entirely.

#79 #OtherSemiconductors #analogcomputing #analogelectronics #SystemsThatMatter