March 2012
62 posts
Something About The Lack of Futureness
Anyway. It’s not just sci-fi. I’m also depressed about the lack of future in fashion. Every hep shop seems to be full of tweeds and leather and carefully authentic bits of restrained artisinal fashion. I think most of Shoreditch would be wondering around in a leather apron if it could. With pipe and beard and rickets. Every new coffee shop and organic foodery seems to be the same....
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“I sometimes think all this talk of atemporality is an abdication of sci-fi...”
– russell davies: something something something
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“People have the ability to edit and broadcast their lives, and a lot of them are...”
– The Current Rage In Branding: Fake Authenticity Is Now A-Okay
The common denominator is, of course, authenticity and nostalgia for a time when things were “real.” J. Crew has been uncommonly smart in leveraging this trend without having to alienate their core customers by changing the brand and products too much. Instead, through an ingenious strategy of co-branding, they have extended their offering and brought in outside brands that possess that singular...
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Nevolution: The Altermodern Nomad →
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“Through the eyes of the nomad, time is somewhere that can be travelled to and...”
– Nevolution: The Altermodern Nomad
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Radical > Rhizome > Radicant
Through the use of lexicography, Bourriaud equates the Modern individual with that of the tree root, a Radical. While Modernity is predicated on a rupture with the past and a desire for progress, it was also concerned with it’s historical roots. The duality of the sprouting tree encapsulates Modernism and the Radical individual: focused on the future but aware of it’s heritage. Not content to view...
This notion of history as geographical and “constituted of multiple temporalities” is similar to the idea of Atemporality put forth by Bruce Sterling. He defines the difference between previous notions of history and our current one as a result of the intrinsic capabilities of the dominant medium of our day. The contrast between moving through a history book understanding the narrative as a linear...
“Our inability to move on from the past has made us unable to properly invent the...”
– http://mrstsk.tumblr.com/post/17586466159
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“I’d sit on my tatami mats in Osaka, watching London tourists line up in real...”
– http://mrstsk.tumblr.com/post/17586466159
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New Pop Music Sounds Like Its Predecessors →
Those who don’t have much personal investment in the idea that popular music should always be pushing forward probably won’t be especially troubled by the current pop scene’s muddled mix of stasis and regression. But those whose expectations have been shaped by growing up during more fast-moving and ever-changing pop decades — which is basically all of them to date except for the 2000s — are...
“We can access all this stuff with incredible speed and convenience, share it and...”
– New Pop Music Sounds Like Its Predecessors - NYTimes.com
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By questioning our reality, and proposing new alternatives, it does not mean that these will ever come about. Instead it lets us imagine a landscape where the normal constraints disappear. This can be very useful when it comes to design commercial or “practical” products too. In design, as in any discipline I feel, an over reliance on the “norm” or status-quo can be crippling. Speculative design...
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Critique on the Critical →
The future of design as a critical tool for debate is certain. But more than that, the evolution of speculative design to go beyond this task, to not only ask questions of the future, but to excite and propose alternative presents and ideas about reality is a vital role in the maturity of design as a discipline. I am not suggesting that we stop extrapolating into the future and wondering about...
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John Carter: don't mention Mars →
Woolly mammoth cloning deal signed.
A joint research deal was signed yesterday between North-Eastern Federal University of the Sakha Republic in Russia and South Korea’s Sooam Biotech Research Foundation, marking the beginning of a project to clone cells from woolly mammoth remains recovered from Siberian permafrost.
As previously reported here, a mammoth could be born in five years if successful. The team will replace the nuclei...
Jurassic katydid sings out after 165 million years... →
After examining the sound-making structures on its exceptionally preserved fossil wings, biologists have recreated its musical calls.
“Hublot’s own working replica of the Antikythera mechanism, scaled down...”
– Hublot painstakingly recreates a mysterious, 2,100-year-old clockwork relic - but why?
47 year old television signals bouncing back to... →
One theory is a massive cloud of asteroids is acting like a mirror in space reflecting radio signals from our past, back to us.
And speaking of which we have just started the digital recovery of signals that contain lost Doctor Who episodes.
Productive Dystopia →
Our narrative is modernity, and our dystopias are the super-planned, re-planned and unplanned environments of the modern world. The aberrations and abandoned spaces of our modern environments, the margins that are squeezed by the excesses of development, the new natures that are produced in lieu of what was natural, the waste that is left behind after the flight of capital— these are the instable...
In praise of lost time →
The next great design challenge would be to work with the grain of social media, its essential everydayness, while enabling both remembering and forgetting in a way that more constructively supports how we might relate to each other, and better build our representation of self.
“Ironically, we may get little sense of perspective when presented with an...”
– In praise of lost time - Design - Domus
“In other words, you gently accrete Facebook memories through your interaction...”
– In praise of lost time - Design - Domus
“Another example of evocative digital traces: accessing your phone’s maps...”
– In praise of lost time - Design - Domus
“By abrading the cultural delineation between the achievable and the imaginable,...”
– lunchtime-talk-designing-with-fiction
“The future when it arrives is more often than not as annoying, mentally...”
– Just A Note: Design Fiction Is Not Design You’d Do Anyway + Motion Graphics | Near Future Laboratory
Corner Convenience →
We did a Design Fiction workshop as a kind of follow on to the Convenience newspaper. Our idea was to take the observation that the trajectory of all great innovations is to asymptotically trend towards the counter of your corner convenience store, grocer, 7-11, gas station, etc. Discerning the details as to why this occurs isn’t our primary concern. It’s an observation that tells some stories...
WatchWhat about the forgotten underbelly of the mundane futures? The ordinary and quotidian. The things that are so tangible as imminent as to be almost ignored. Like the things one would find in the Corner Convenience store but were once fantastic, extraordinary, mind-boggling disruptive stuff.
Dance the flip-flop →
the flip-flop (n.) the process of pushing a work of art or craft from the physical world to the digital world and back again—maybe more than once
That’s pretty abstract. Here’s an example recipe:
Carve a statue out of stone. PHYSICAL
Digitize your statue with a 3D scanner. DIGITAL
Make some edits. Shrink it down. Add wings. STILL DIGITAL
Print the edited sculpture in plastic with a 3D...
“It is probably the fate of most fruits of the flip-flop, indeed most works of...”
– Dance the flip-flop
“Retro physible hackers will take up woodworking, just to “make something real”
– Rhizome | The Shape of Shaping Things to Come
Have we found the universe that existed before the... →
new-aesthetic:
Report from Austin, Texas, on the New Aesthetic panel at SXSW.
James Bridle, convenor, on the meaning of the New Aesthetic.
Joanne McNeil, editor of Rhizome, on the history of new aesthetics, on new perspectives, technologies and art.
Ben Terrett, designer, on the New Aesthetic in commercial visual culture.
Aaron Straup Cope, artist and developer, on drones, data and human...
iamdanw:
“I first started seeing them in Google Image searches; the most random queries were returning pictures of t-shirts, trucker hats, and especially ties that were truly uncanny. One could not, by looking at them, decipher how they had come about, what possible thought process lay behind them, who they were for, or why anyone would want them. They had something akin to the...
“[I propose] “a massive new program to build a permanent lunar colony to exploit...”
– Newt Gingrich, 2009 (really)
Fucking Lens Flare
emotouchscreenfuture:
… and the grey future clothes, and supernaturally clean children learning from screens, and old people comfortable with remote interactions
…its all the fucking lens flare again - i forgot about that.
…and the music, always an eternal Williamsburgkickstarter funding plea from 5-10 years out.
…techno lite, techno calm, light beat(z)
…subway trains right where you want...
Ghost Estates
davidbenque:
Ireland - photos by Valerie Anex Dublin Observer - Photo by Topgold Daily Mail The Bust From a Bird’s Eye View - Ireland After NAMA China has ghost estates too - the Journal
