August 2011
29 posts
digitaltechnology allows us to tell tales in... →
linear stories still dominate the page, our TVs, our radios, our games consoles and the theatre. Yet the process of telling a story doesn’t have to be unidirectional
She shows that the death of the author is best understood as a relation to temporality, not only for the reader but especially for the writer.
“One of the most unifying aspects between our own organisation and other...”
– http://m.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/aug/12/youth-led-revolts-shook-world?cat=world&type=article
http://m.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/aug/12/youth-led... →
Elites have yet to grasp that hunger for meaningful grassroots change and the desire to reclaim agency over a future that appears depressingly predetermined, be it under the crony capitalism and police brutality of Middle Eastern despots or the more sanitised platter of unemployment and austerity being handed down by governments in the west.
But this year could still be remembered as one in...
London burning: history just went sci-fi →
It is worth looking at images of London’s violent weekend and asking how they make you feel. Far from fitting into any historical model, they seem to me to come from an imagined London, a horror scenario of the city as a blazing wilderness. Sci-fi nightmares of urban catastrophe resonate with these pictures because this is a city made strange. Whatever is going on here, it is not familiar,...
What will the homes of the future really look like →
London burning: history just went sci-fi →
It is worth looking at images of London’s violent weekend and asking how they make you feel. Far from fitting into any historical model, they seem to me to come from an imagined London, a horror scenario of the city as a blazing wilderness. Sci-fi nightmares of urban catastrophe resonate with these pictures because this is a city made strange. Whatever is going on here, it is not familiar,...
“it remains the case that these are shopping riots, characterised by their...”
– http://m.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/aug/09/uk-riots-psychology-of-looting?cat=commentisfree&type=article
Black Coffee Pop-up at Somewhere →
From today and for the next 10, Somewhere Store Gallery will be transformed into a pop-up black coffee brew bar showcasing the best single origin brews from Melbourne’s finest micro-roasters.
Curated by Mark W Free (Brother Baba Budan), The space has been designed by Matthew Clark with No Scribbes and Super Cube artwork throughout.
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Past-Tense Pop →
Whereas nostalgia is rooted in a sense of the past as past, retromania stems from a sense of the past as present. Yesterday’s music, in all its forms, has become the atmosphere of contemporary culture. We live, Reynolds remarks, in “a simultaneity of pop time that abolishes history while nibbling away at the present’s own sense of itself as an era with a distinct identity and feel.”
Beyond space-time: Welcome to phase space →
So what is phase space? It is a curious eight-dimensional world that merges our familiar four dimensions of space and time and a four-dimensional world called momentum space.
Momentum space isn’t as alien as it first sounds. When you look at the world around you, says Smolin, you don’t ever observe space or time - instead you see energy and momentum. When you look at your watch, for...
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“Helvetica is the purest product of a twentieth-century utopian typographic...”
– http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2011/aug/04/human-face-of-type/
“We have changed our assumption on this because the majority of Republicans in...”
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OpEdNews - Article: S&P Blames Republicans, MSM Fails to Report It
“Many major U.S. companies are making big plans to expand overseas even as some...”
– As U.S. stumbles, companies invest in consumer growth overseas - latimes.com
“Therefore, it seems to me that we need to become more adept at reading and...”
– Berry, David M. The Philosophy of Software: Code and Mediation in the Digital Age. Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.
via carvalhais (via purestform)
The Robot Readable World →
Implausible Futures for Unpopular Places →
It suddenly struck me that, given how long this sign has been here, what it depicted was, at best, a hypothetical future — and arguably a fictitious one.
It further struck me that there are vacant buildings much like this one, with no definitive future, all over town — all over lots of towns. In a sense, then, our city streets are full of fiction, or something very much like it.
...
The New Robot Domesticity →
Once some resolution is arrived at, it seems highly unlikely that the global financial system will simply settle back to the structure and functions of the pre “Great Debt Debate” era. A new configuration will emerge. Investors worldwide may actually be horrified that the only safe haven at the minute is short-term Treasuries and bank deposits backed by the FDIC. The contradictions here are...
All over the world, the capitalist states are taking austerity measures to slow the growth of their debts. It is obvious that this policy, since it slows consumption, can’t in itself sustain the growth required for capital accumulation. Where, then, can the necessary economic stimulus come from? For lack of alternatives, eyes are turning eastward. It seems that history, the supreme ironist,...
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http://gropius2010.blogspot.com/ →
‘Stop trying to seduce us with your visions of the Past’ is a multi-layered project that rotates around a central film piece. This film was shot on discontinued Kodak 16mm stock using a Soviet-era Krasnogorsk-3 camera in a field in Brandenburg, in the background of the shot can be seen the high-modernist tower blocks of Gropiusstadt, a suburb of the old Western Sector of Berlin,...
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WatchKevin Slavin argues that we’re living in a world designed for — and increasingly controlled by — algorithms. In this riveting talk from TEDGlobal, he shows how these complex computer programs determine: espionage tactics, stock prices, movie scripts, and architecture. And he warns that we are writing code we can’t understand, with implications we can’t control.
The Time Is Now for Brazil to Build a Strong...
The old symbols of American capitalism have been dying one after another: General Motors, Chrysler, Citigroup, Lehman Brothers, and now the latest sign of US decline, a last nail in the coffin of American prestige and leadership, NASA, the symbol of US space exploration is laying off about 7,000 employees, and at the same time placing the United States in a very humiliating position in having to...
“When the substances are placed perpendicular to each other, as on this grid,...”
– http://m.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/07/end-of-time/
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A handful of dust →
But modernism of the heroic period, from 1920 to 1939, is dead, and it died first in the blockhouses of Utah beach and the Siegfried line. Yet in its heyday between the wars, modernism was a vast utopian project, and perhaps the last utopian project we will ever see, now that we are well aware that all utopias have their dark side.
Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia were two utopian projects that...
