June 2013
11 posts
“Changing aesthetics: Shopping online for clothes typically involves scrolling through pages and pages of images. Mary Kantrantzou believes that this has lead to shoppers paying more attention to designs that stand out - in particular unusual colours or prints. She believes this has been a factor in the resurgence of print.”
—Soundboy: How the internet influences what we wear (via new-aesthetic)
“I wonder what Cayce Pollard would make of all of this. Her allergies would flair up instantly but as a slight itch instead of a searing rash. And then to paraphrase Gibson even further, it’s as if these places are creating negative space in the historical record of cafes.”
—Nevolution: Nighthawks
Nighthawks →
nevolution.typepad.com
There’s something about the simplicity of it all. they’re all very much rooted in the past, but in a slightly different past than what we’re used to. They’re not over the top reproductions, dripping in garish semiotics. The details are of an otaku level of sophistication. By moving further and further back into the past we hope to gain a more authentic nostalgic response. There’s a platonic realm of cafe or bar that they seem to be moving toward.
“We’re hungering for Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks in geo-tagged high definition; instead of the cheap revisionary print with Monroe, Bogart and Dean. Stripped back to it’s essentials but remade as a resolution independent 3D point cloud, with cold drip coffee, artisanal pastries, and obscure digestifs.”
—Nevolution: Nighthawks
“He has since left NASA to work at Google”
—Inside story: In praise of celestial mechanics | The Economist (via iamdanw)
“Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.”
— Brian Eno, A Year With Swollen Appendices (via volumexii)
May 2013
26 posts
“If the end of the twentieth century can be characterized by futurism, the twenty-first can be defined by presentism.”
—Preface & Narrative Collapse — Excerpts From Douglas Rushkoff’s Present Shock
Play
HAUTE POP: Douglas Rushkoff on "Present Shock" at SXSW - liveblogged →
hautepop.tumblr.com
Time has become the easiest way to think about what it means to live in the digital environment, and how this differs from what went before. What’s a minute? Used to be a portion of an hour - now it’s a pulse of a set length. A world where every unit may as well be interchangeable. Relational analogue clock time told a story, had a narrative and progression. Digital time is different.
Not saying it’s a worse thing, just a different thing.
“It’s entirely counter to the way he sees our society exchange and consume information these days. (“A book? Really? How anachronistic!”). He assumes you’re much more likely to receive its ideas in a blog post or magazine review — much like this one you’re about to read.”
—Obsessed with the Now: Douglas Rushkoff and the threat of ‘Present Shock’ | The Verge
“The solution, he says, is to allow the audience to become a part of the narrative. New forms like video games and Twitter let passive viewers become active participants.”
—Obsessed with the Now: Douglas Rushkoff and the threat of ‘Present Shock’ | The Verge
Play
Obsessed with the Now: Douglas Rushkoff and the threat of 'Present Shock' | The Verge →
theverge.com
His first chapter focuses on what he calls “Narrative Collapse,” a result of our short attention spans and need for instant gratification. It’s better in concept than the evidence he gives for it. He lumps most of modern entertainment (including, oddly, Seinfeld and Beavis and Butt-head) into something he calls “Now-ist Pop Culture,” that’s more concerned with making sense of the present, with self references and cyclical plots, than conveying the traditional Western story arcs we’ve known since Homer. We go for “heightened states” and problem solving in lieu of narrative.
“The Internet will kill everything you love. But by the time it dies, you won’t even care.”
—Squashed: If Yahoo buys Tumblr…
For all that Yahoo! completely screwed up and deleted Geocities, my Flickr photo stream is still there and works as well as it did in 2005. Not a single URL has broken, not a single image is missing.
I’ve read the stories of how upcoming.org, del.icio.us, and other companies were acquired, languished, and died. And Flickr’s persistence has led to its fall from grace as the most obvious place to share photos online.
But compared to technologies absorbed by Google, Facebook, and Twitter, that doesn’t seem so bad. Anyone here use Stikkit? How about dodgeball? Jotspot? Socialtext?
Use IFTTT —while it lasts— to archive your blog as you write it. Make multiple connections to the people you care about. Stay in touch. This, too, shall pass.
“Unable to create the future, we are equally frustrated in attempts to manufacture the past real newness might emerge out of radical nostalgia at the uncomfortable intersections of technology and history.”
—Nostalgia for the New
Nostalgia for the New →
strangeharvest.com
That which wishes to be nostalgic pastiche is where we find unalloyed modernity, an image of the past hung on armatures of high tech fabrication and sophisticated financial instruments. That which dreams of manifesting the future is mired in a historical fiction of the future
“A space colony is just a Dubai-style super-tall desert skyscraper – plus some zero-gravity bone depletion.”
—Bruce Sterling, ‘Bruce’s Sterling’s vision of the future city’ (2013)
“Increasingly, it feels like we live in a kind of Colonial Williamsburg for the 20th century.”
—Greg Borenstein, ‘On Thingpunk’ (2013)
"Fake realities will create fake humans"
“Fake realities will create fake humans. Or, fake humans will generate fake realities and then sell them to other humans, turning them, eventually, into forgeries of themselves. So we wind up with fake humans inventing fake realities and then peddling them to other fake humans.” - Philip K Dick (predicting, perhaps, the market for Twitter Non-People…)
“There is an aesthetic crisis in writing, which is this: how do we write emotionally of scenes involving computers? How do we make concrete, or at least reconstructable in the minds of our readers, the terrible, true passions that cross telephony lines? Right now my field must tackle describing a world where falling in love, going to war and filling out tax forms looks the same; it looks like typing.”
—ACM Web Science talk, as written | Quinn Said (via new-aesthetic)
April 2013
14 posts
“I am a preservationist trying to protect a human archeological site 233,000 miles away,” said Joe Reynolds of Clemson University in South Carolina.”
—Space Archaeologists Call for Preserving Off-Earth Artifacts | Apollo Program | Space.com (via iamdanw)
Internet of Dreams: "The Next Generation of Realism" →
internet-of-dreams.tumblr.com
Google earth version 6 was introduced as “the next generation of realism” on the company blog in 2010. A month later, at Le Web, Marisa Meyer (then VP of Location Services at Google) said, “We’re trying to build a virtual mirror of the world at all times”
The “next generation of…
Internet of Dreams: Improving Pre-Raphaelite Paintings for Fantasy Homes and Fetish Sites →
internet-of-dreams.tumblr.com
Here is one of Frederick Sandys’ most famous paintings. But this imagine is not an accurate depiction of the Pre-Raphaelite painter’s image of Mary Magdalene. The colors have been distorted and saturated to bring out that fantastic green, the richness of her red hair.
You can…
Internet of Dreams: "The Next Generation of Realism" →
internet-of-dreams.tumblr.com
Google earth version 6 was introduced as “the next generation of realism” on the company blog in 2010. A month later, at Le Web, Marisa Meyer (then VP of Location Services at Google) said, “We’re trying to build a virtual mirror of the world at all times”
The “next generation of…
The intersection of archive art and algorithmic art would perhaps be a sort of machine learning art; using algorithms paired to digital archives or data sets taken from the ‘real world’ to create a new hybrid culture that is neither nostalgic nor completely alien.
