About the observatory
The Blind Machine Archive
A living record of what culture reveals when its signals are read together.
The Blind Machine is a newsletter about Pop Culture, Software Studies, Business Strategy, Media Platforms, Algorithmic Management, Game Design, and everything in between.
The project is written and directed by Yuri Lopes Pereira and is brought to you by the good people at chumbo, a contemporary art gallery.
The website has been online since 2015 as a semi-automated collection of good links about almost everything. Its newsletter was first sent in May 2018, returned in 2020 and again in 2024. It combines original essays with a hand-crafted selection of articles, videos and podcasts.
What the Archive does
This Archive is the project’s searchable record of accumulated reading, organized so that distant subjects can remain in contact. Each daily Archive Brief reads a small part of that record as an argument, following a current signal or returning to a forgotten cluster when the day is quiet.
The result is a way of noticing recurrence: the ideas, technologies and arrangements that change names while keeping their shape, and their power.
The thinking behind the archive is laid out in the field guide — what cultural intelligence is, and the five disciplines the archive reads across.