Boids is an artificial life program, developed by Craig Reynolds in 1986, which simulates the flocking behavior of birds. The name “boid” corresponds to a shortened version of “bird-oid object,” which refers to a bird-like object. Taking the position of the bird-like object, how do other creatures sound like? The limitation of labelling computer-generated species after preexisting ones complicates our relation to the former. Digitally sythesized -oids lost in the deep sea, later found and played back in 2x speed. A group of dead -oids scattered along the timeline. It’s our choice to hear an -oid.

Unprecedented kinds of experience, and new modes of life, are now produced by simulations, from the CGI of Hollywood blockbusters to animal cloning to increasingly sophisticated military training software, while animation has become an increasingly powerful pop-cultural form. Today, the extraordinary new practices and radical objects of simulation and animation are transforming our neoliberal-biopolitical “culture of life”. The Animatic Apparatus offers a genealogy for the animatic regime and imagines its alternative futures, countering the conservative-neoliberal notion of life’s sacred inviolability with a new concept and ethics of animatic life.

Descartes famously believed that animals were living machines; he was said to beat, torture, and vivisect dogs simply to demonstrate that they had no feelings. He interpreted the sounds emerging from the dog’s mouth as mere physical reactions, just the mechanical result of air passing through a windpipe, not indicative of emotional self-expression. According to Descartes and many of his followers, animals were inferior to humans because they lacked the capacity for language. While scientific evidence as well as popular opinion about the emotive actuality and potential of animals has proven that they have inner lives, most do not speak ...

After humans destroy one another’s worlds, what will be left are the jellyfish. At least, this is the suggestion of the biologist Jeremy Jackson, who argues that the synergistic effects of the 6th mass extinction have led to the flourishing of some species — such as jellyfish. Such thriving is almost certainly not what Joseph Beuys had in mind when he argued that we are creating the “total artwork of the future social order.” But what would happen if we held these provocations together: that human auto-destruction is a creation for other worlds, other species … other others? Artworks for ...

The arrow arrives at its destination with a clamor, its blackness marking the arrival of thought from the outside: thought as problem, thought as sabotage.

For this PILOT issue, we have posted PDFs, bound and printed the publication over the first six months of 2011 in advance of launching. From now on, bulletins will be posted to this website as they are ready. If you would like to be told when a new season is complete, and the printed version available, you can join our mailing list. We begin with a plea to remember dead media by Bruce Sterling; an 8-part examination of the Octopus Vulgaris as a metaphor for post-symbolic communication (whatever that might mean) by Angie Keefer; a zero-sum conversation about Libraries and ...

Egyptian hieroglyph: Tongue, of an animal, probably bovine or …with many meanings over time: “Superintendent”, master, etc.

He used to wake at about three in the morning and sing. Sing the lines over and over, until he remembered them, I guess. Paddy had put us two fellas together in the same camp out at Coconut Wells, in those early days, and Butcher Joe would get me to smuggle in a couple of cans of VB. We would smoke rollies and sip our warm beers in the tropical night, having a laugh. Then, well before dawn, that singing would half wake me. This was what was called his nurlu, coming through from his Aunty’s spirit. The pictures in this ...

CAT MOM A. I drown ATLANTIS because it’s better this way. I drown AMETHYST because it’s better this way. I drown APOLLO because it’s better this way. I drown ARI because it’s better this way. I drown ARTY because it’s better this way. I drown APACHE because it’s better this way. I drown ABBY because it’s better this way. I drown ALFALFA because it’s better this way. I drown ALOYSIUS because it’s better this way. I drown ANIMAL because it’s better this way. I drown AMABLE because it’s better this way. I drown ADONIS because it’s better this way. I drown ...

As Terri Weifenbach observed varying bird activity in the back of her studio, she captured highly charged movements images in her characteristically delicate manner, interplaying with focal length and a range of natural colors. For her artist book, Weifenbach decided to isolate the birds from each numbered print found in her CAMERA ARTIST portfolio work of the same name. Cropped, the images are now black and white flying silhouettes distributed along the pages of the book.

Before fish and other vertebrates proliferated, it was the heyday of the cephalopods. Their descendants—squid, cuttlefish, octopus, and nautilus—are still around, coping better with human dominance than many fish. In the fourth episode of the podcast Ocean Wants, speculative writer Ingo Niermann, most recently of the book Mare Amoris, is talking to Danna Staaf, a trained marine biologist who wrote the history of the cephalopods. She speaks from her home in San Jose, California.

Dorian visits the stream to investigate gay frogs.