June 2012
44 posts
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“The Carboniferous Room Portable forms a part of the Extreme Environment Love...”
– The Extreme Environment Love Hotel, Carboniferous Room Portable – di12
Watchiamdanw:
So I did a talk on the time Walt Disney bought a swamp and tried to do something utterly bonkers with it, how it became a theme park instead and the weird legal side-effects of this. (via Dan Williams – Walt Disney World: This was supposed to be the future | Ignite Bristol)
when the future weird becomes cosmopolitan →
The future weird is never a particular era. It is not a Now, but the feeling of foreboding that accompanies the unstoppable unfolding of history. It is the extreme likelihood of losing a game, the rules of which are going to be invented tomorrow.
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Watch
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Space travel, finance and what we are calling ‘big design’ are the emerging themes this year. As well as continuing to explore digital and science-related themes — especially their social and ethical implications — students are beginning to explore how designers can get involved with large systems and contexts such as global finance and geopolitics. Some projects explore alternative financial and...
Chinese spacecraft makes first manual docking →
Their mission, which is expected to last at least 10 days, is China’s fourth manned mission. Shenzhou 9 launched 16 June from the Jiuquan centre on the edge of the Gobi desert in northern China.
China is hoping to join the United States and Russia as the only countries to send independently maintained space stations into orbit. It is already one of just three nations to have launched manned...
Those who forget history are doomed to have it... →
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“Most likely, Beijing wouldn’t try to claim the entire moon, just part of it. For...”
– Red Moon Rising - By John Hickman | Foreign Policy (via iamdanw)
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A Brief History of Power – di12 →
This timeline is the culmination of research into the history of power in whatever form it takes. Starting with the end of the Roman Empire, we can see how power fractured and spread throughout history right up to the early 22nd century. The repeating booms and crashes of finance and the wars and revolutions of nations that drove change are largely noted as are some of the more minor events that...
Proposal for resuscitating prehistoric creatures
“Proposal for resuscitating prehistoric creatures” sets up the rebirth of cloned creatures, their wandering and their sound epic. They are seeking to evolve in our contemporary era. The designer, who became the heroine of a quasi-mystic epic journey, aims at resuscitating the sound of prehistoric creatures by reconstructing their vocal tract. This is problematic from the scientific...
“Yes, it is more accepted now, although it seems to be used more to describe...”
– Information – di12
Seeing the Future in Science Fiction →
The zeitgeist was chewy with space-flavored nuggets, morsels of futuristic design, precursors of a Tomorrow whose confident glow was visible beyond the horizon of all that was less wonderful, provided one had eyes to see it.
I was a native, I felt unquestioningly, of Tomorrow.
But somewhere along the way, during the decade after my argument with the Air Force man, Tomorrow went lowercase.
TIME INVENTORS' KABINET
Time Inventors’ Kabinet [TIK] is a collaborative experiment with time. For the last three years, a series of artists and thinkers have made an attempt to devise the future of an alternative and ecological time. This transdisciplinary project focuses on non-linearity and parallelism. All kinds of environmental information; be it a city, a field or beehive, can be transformed into sound and vision....
WatchOur 3G suit is intended for IVA, or Intra Vehicular Activity, that is, launch and re-entry, for commercial space providers both suborbital and orbital. Basically IVA suits are a safety backup in case of an emergency loss of cabin pressure, like the oxygen masks in commercial airliners. The future commercial space industry (SpaceX, Boeing, Sierra Nevada, Virgin, Armadillo, XCOR, etc) will need...
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“The Midsummer Chronophage was designed to sometimes stop or slow down to show...”
– BBC News - Midsummer Chronophage displayed at National Museum of Scotland
WatchMemento Mori is a health tracker and avatar display system that measures and visualizes the effects of health behavior to forecast how soon a person will die. Health is measured with a new metric: telomere length as an indicator of biological age. In calculus with life expectancy, biological age determines how much of a person’s life remains.
The tracker is a sensor that automatically monitors and...
Why The USSR Never Got To The Moon →
While the Saturn V made headlines shuttling US astronauts to the moon, the Soviet N1 rocket was made famous for a slightly different reason — when it blew up on takeoff it resulted in the largest, non-nuclear, man-made explosion of all time.
Explorers of Tomorrow →
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“Instead of falsifying the past to transform and rationalise the present, we...”
– Opinions are non-contemporary | booktwo.org
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Opinions are non-contemporary →
And at the end I said something about my current dilemma, summarised in the title quote above (which was said to me by a curator quitting her job), that opinions are no longer a useful or appropriate organising principle, that reckoning is no longer a scarcity, that the network now so obviously and explicitly extends beyond the bounds of any individual being able to say anything useful or...
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PopSpots - Album Cover Locations and Pop Culture... →
The Great Soviet Space Exhibition of 1927 →
In 1927, the Soviet Association of Inventors decided to hold an exhibition dedicated to the possibility of space flight. In spite of some financial and bureaucratic difficulties — the government claimed that the subject of spaceflight was “still premature and problematical” and would only serve to “stir up the masses” — an extensive display of Russian and foreign inventions...
Can the British Empire teach us about space... →
A colony in space will not share all of the same challenges as one in 19th century New Zealand. However, the approaches that the Victorians took to mitigate these risks are worth considering. They give us some basic pointers as to how these things worked then and, therefore, how they may be able to work now.
Ferropolis, a city of derelict machines →
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Cloned version of Austrian village opens in China →
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“In this sense, ruined places are temporal heterotopias, containing complex...”
– The Atemporality of “Ruin Porn” – Part I: The Carcass » Cyborgology
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“We remember the future, imagine the present, and experience the past.”
– The Atemporality of “Ruin Porn” – Part I: The Carcass » Cyborgology
The Unbearable Stasis of "Accelerating Change" →
The Monument to Electricity That Never Was →
In connection with our editorial of this month, we show on this page a monument dedicated to the age in which we are living. Electricity, more than anything else, has made our present civilization what it is, and if this civilization should be wiped out by war or some other cataclysm, nothing would remain to tell what Electricity did for the race during the past century.
Diamond jubilee: six decades of coronation chicken... →
Is the slow revival of this dish down to irony, pageantry, nostalgia or something entirely different?
Postcards Then and Now: Thames Ditton, Surrey,... →
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Postcards Then and Now →
Old postcards from the early 20th century, compared to the same view shown on Google Street View today. The postcards come from my own collection. Almost all of them are from England, mainly showing West London, Middlesex, Surrey, Berks and Bucks. Click on the postcards to see enlarged versions. There are also links to the modern equivalent on Street View.
