November 2011
55 posts
“All over the country, police switched out their traditional uniforms for Battle...”
– Militarising the police from Oakland to NYC - Opinion - Al Jazeera English (via iamdanw)
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An Interview with William Gibson
AB: A number of interviewers have asked about your use of Twitter in Zero History, but I’m more interested in the Gabriel Hounds line, which is this very high quality, very rare brand of denim clothing. Like Cayce’s Buzz Rickson jacket in Pattern Recognition, it’s an almost fetishized revisiting of an older fashion, an older technology, yet still highly functional in addition to being cool. Is this how nostalgia plays out in an increasingly atemporal culture?
WG: That stuff is all very literally real, and I watch it playing out in our culture. I don’t know what it means, but I find it poignant, and admire and am friends with some people who do it. My friend Kiya, in San Francisco, will sell you a pair of $600 jeans, but only if you really want them. If you ask him why they cost that much, he’ll probably shrug and tell you you don’t need them. And his clientele isn’t particularly wealthy. Passionate, in a way. But I don’t see it as nostalgia, which I assume ordinarily to be the conservative modality. It’s about pushing back at the shabbiness of simulacra, maybe. Kind of a William Morris move for the 21st Century.
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Return of underground rave culture is fuelled by... →
Organisers of last week’s huge illegal rave in London say the phenomenon is driven by the lawlessness of the web and the politics of opposition
For some observers, last Saturday’s scenes evoked memories of the second summer of love – the tide of rave culture that swept Britain from 1988 into the early 90s. They recognised similarities in the context – an enduring recession, and a Tory...
Export to World →
The final results are paper representations of digital representations of real objects, including all the flaws that copying entails. The truly interesting and unexpected moment for this project was when we put the objects outside to take photos for the documentation. On the pictures, the objects give a bizarre, almost photoshop like impression, which we attributed to the fact that they had been...
The Coming Death Shortage →
tetw:
by Charles C. Mann
Medicare, Social Security, retirement, Alzheimer’s, snowbird economies, the population boom, the golfing boom, the cosmetic-surgery boom, the nostalgia boom, the recreational-vehicle boom, Viagra - increasing longevity is entangled in every one.
WW2 Tweets from 1939 (realtimewwii) on Twitter →
RealTimeWWII WW2 Tweets from 1939 Finnish army now fully mobilised along border with USSR: 337,000 men, but only 254,518 rifles. There are not enough uniforms or ammunition
RealTimeWWII WW2 Tweets from 1939 The Dutch army has cancelled all leave and stationed troops along the edges of flooded regions in preparation for a German attack
RealTimeWWII WW2 Tweets from 1939 The American Embassy in...
“the centrality of ubiquitous computing’s ‘‘proximate future’’ continually places...”
– via Yesterday’s tomorrows: notes on ubiquitous computing’s dominant vision
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“A society is being built in Liberty Plaza and in the network of affiliated sites...”
– Occupy: What Architecture Can Do: Places: Design Observer (via iamdanw)
“The world of tomorrow has usually been imagined first and foremost as a place —...”
– Building Expectation: Past and Present Visions of the Architectural Future
A Walk in the Ruins of Modernism →
Famously, that first implosion was dubbed the ‘Death of Modernism’ by Charles Jencks. Almost all traces of the sites life as a huge housing scheme have been erased. It is now a forest – a surreal and unsettling landscape that has grown out of the debris dumped on the site from other demolitions.
Pruitt Igoe is the site of a studio I’m running at UIC this semester. It takes Pruitt Igoe both as a...
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Futuro →
Spot of cross promotion here, but I was lucky enough to hang around a Futuro house.
