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Klaus Pichler - Skeletons in the Closet: Museum of Natural History, Vienna (2010-ongoing)
Artist’s statement:
“What does a museum look like...
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Russell Tyler, “Glitched” (2012)These are just too rad:
http://beautifuldecay.com/2012/10/23/russell-tylers-goopy-shapes/
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Big Rigs, Japan
Photograph by Roger Snider“Covered in chrome and gleaming neon, big rigs from across Japan shine at a truck show in Aichi...
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:: 3 Euro for a short film? ::The Centrifuge Brain Project :: is a brilliant little short film from Till Novak that follows the amazing research exploits of Dr. Laslowicz at the Centrifugal Research Institute in Florida, USA. :: I just bought the short film online for a tidy 3 Euros :: Of course you can watch it here for nix. But when presented with such an easy method to throw a few bob the artist’s way for something quite clever it wasn’t hard to part with, plus I get a sharp clean HD version for my troubles.
You too can buy it as a download from the The Short Film Shop (an incredibly valuable and worthy resource for independent film content) or you can get your dead media fix and purchase it as part of a collection on DVD from the FilmPorium.
If you like your cinema short and sweet and online I’d recommend subscribing to the KurzFilmAgentur YouTube channel. Much cool stuff to be had in their archive which dates back more than 5 years. Did the internet even exist back then!?
Plug It On The Window
:: Yanko Design magazine :: is featuring a cool bit of kit for those of us living in sunny environs or inclined to travel with a questionable battery charging methodology. The Window Socket designed by Kyuho Song & Boa Oh is a portable electrical socket that suckers itself onto a window - at a meeting, at a cafe or even in an airplane - and gives you that extra kick of solar power goodness you need to keep Tumbling forward.
via yanko design
News+ Minus the News
Full disclosure :: I subscribe to the digital edition of The Australian newspaper :: published by News LTD. This may seem at odds with my pre-disposed suspicion of a far-right Murdoch press hell-bent on pulling apart the last threads of our flaky democracy BUT there is some cold logic at work here: Keep the enemy close - understand their politics and make sure you can spot that wolf a mile off. But more practically, they cover rugby league with some dilligence, the arts section in the weekend edition is semi-noteworthy, they actually report - or mostly syndicate - stories from beyond these shores, they have the best cricket writer in Gideon Haigh - and when he gets going, Peter Lalor isn’t half bad either - and besides, it sure beats the hell out of the Townsville Bulletin.
So, as a subscriber to an ever evolving concept such as a digital subscription I am occasionally notified of an update to my user agreement and, when one has been hanging about dutifully paying my annual fee as long as I have, you sometimes benefit from the odd embellishment to the service; in this case “an exciting new world” called News+.
And what might a hip new initiative offered by a networked news service with all the trappings of a media empire which spans four corners of the globe with aspirations for my digital wallet such as News+ look like?
A giddy little kid with a birthday hat, dinosaur pajamas and dinosaur wallpaper. Isn’t that just a little bit of a weird approach to marketing the news?
Besides the obvious visual disconnect of this image with the reality that the news is often confronting, troubling and a bit nasty the symbolism of the art direction also seems to be a peculiar choice. Hasn’t the ongoing critique of the slow to evolve print media industry centered around the fact that they are like… uhm - dinosaurs?
Scroll down further and it gets even weirder. Above the slogan of “More of what you love” is a series of jack-in-the-box images of stuff that I - a loyal Australian newspaper subscriber - apparently love: a generic (is that Shane Watson?) Australian Test cricketer (c. 2012-2013) nearly getting his head knocked off by a brute of a ball: two painfully thin racetrack hussies in funny hats with eyes for anyone but me; some bloke who’s dinner has just blown up in his face; and a generic middle aged gentlemen playing with his daughter - something I can certainly identify with but not exactly compatible with reading newspapers.
But there it is, between the promises of “news on another level” and “access to more than 3000,000 articles” and “unrivaled coverage from our leading journalists”, the guts of the sales pitch: “trusted mastheads” The Daily Telegraph and The Herald Sun.
And that’s when it clicked. Me the loyal subscriber to Australia’s only national broadsheet The Australian was not being offered access to a deep rich incisive and internationally rich database of News LTD journalism. This was not, as I had hoped, the gateway to the type of useful and practical information source I could make good use of and what I had mistakenly believed to be the essence of this new fab thing called News+.
Instead, what I was being peddled was the fun safe happy version of this merry little harmless place we call Middle Australia. No refugees, rising sea levels, pro-democracy rallies or demented mass killings to be found here. This was a new super safe happy universe of birthday hats and printed designer pajamas. This is plush toy territory, this is Fox Sports, Taste, GQ, Andrew Bolt and Body & Soul nirvana:
“With news+ you can browse the best in fashion, food, beauty and travel, without leaving the comfortable dent in your couch. So put your feet up, and relax in style.”
This is news without the news. But it also comes in hard copy too. True to form your subscription can include a printed version delivered with a friendly - but none too offensive - “thump” on your driveway and dutifully delivered to your sofa by your pure bread designer puppy, just like an episode of Father Knows Best.
Once a dinosaur always a dinosaur.
Don’t have an Australian digital subscription? No fear, you can join the circus here: http://www.heraldsun.com.au/subscribe/learnmore/1/
Girl with a Pearl Earring and a Silver Camera. Digital mashup after
Johannes Vermeer, attributed to Mitchell Grafton. c.2012
“The altered image was first posted on Facebook on February 22 2012, and shared publicly the following day with the message “Trying to update a painting by Vermeer. This might be how it would look if it was painted today.” Hasan Hiyazy from his January 2013 article, Alteration and Invention: Raphael, Vermeer and the Mashup
via furtherfield and 3pipe
Data Crystals
It’s funny what you can stumble across when researching the aesthetics of super heroes, in particular our venerable caped crusaders Mr Superman and Mr Batman. The core task is all in aid of mapping an obvious aesthetic move away from the hyper-coloured mid-20th century iconography - cue lots of red, orange, sky blue, yellow and lavender, versus a more foreboding aesthetic in the new millennia, cue a lot more black, dark bloody maroon and steely blues.
Anyway, this of course is besides the point. The key thing here is that amidst digging up some fascinating digital ephemera (more on that shortly), every now and then I come across someone using a super hero narrative to support a more mundane blog post. In this case, data crystals.
In a story over at Technorati, Steve Woods summons Superman’s futuristic data centre in his Arctic Ice Palace - well, the 1978 version anyway - to assist in his description of a new technology being developed by Hitachi to store data - on crystals. The technology has the potential to last for “hundreds of millions of years” and like Superman’s cache of crystals greatly assist man’s quest to find the perfect method for the definitive archive. So you know, our budgie smuggling progeny, “far off in the future, can find them in a cool cave in a polar ice cap, and discover their super-secret origins.”
“Kyoto University’s Kiyotaka Miura developed the “semiperpetual” pieces of quartz glass for Hitachi, beginning with a square just two centimeters in width and a scant two millimeters thick. Inside this thin layer of crystal resides four different layers of binary-based dots that were inlaid using pulses of light. Not only could a laser-based reader scan and pick up information using this format, but the dots can also be seen using a simple microscope.”
To find data by simply gazing into a crystal is definitely archive nirvana.
via technorati
Ice Vision
:: NASA’s new Earth-bound rover :: GROVER :: began testing on the Greenland ice sheet this week. It uses ground-penetrating radar to look below the crust of Greenland’s ice sheets. According to NASA:
GROVER, which stands for both Greenland Rover and Goddard Remotely Operated Vehicle for Exploration and Research, is an autonomous, solar-operated robot that carries a ground-penetrating radar to examine the layers of Greenland’s ice sheet. Its findings will help scientists understand how the massive ice sheet gains and loses ice.
Image credit: Lora Koenig / NASA Goddard
ALSO, while we’re on the theme of :: penetrating ice :: the image below via our friends at Lost at eMinor is of trapped methane deposits in a frozen ice sheet in Abraham Lake, Alberta, Canada. According to photographer Emmanuel Coupe:
“This image was taken in winter time in a arid area of the Canadian Rockies. Temperatures where below -30 degrees Celsius yet because there was no snow fall the surface of the lake was uncovered allowing me to see and capture the bubbles (gas release from lake bed) that were trapped in the frozen waters.”
Photo and caption by Emmanuel Coupe
via distant-traveller, NASA and lostatEminor
George Orwell’s Perfect Cuppa
In 1946 George Orwell wrote a very important document - “A Nice Cup of Tea,” from his highly original George Orwell: As I Please, 1943-1945: The Collected Essays, Journalism & Letters, Vol 3.
Point No. 10:“One should pour tea into the cup first. This is one of the most controversial points of all; indeed in every family in Britain there are probably two schools of thought on the subject. The milk-first school can bring forward some fairly strong arguments, but I maintain that my own argument is unanswerable. This is that, by putting the tea in first and stirring as one pours, one can exactly regulate the amount of milk whereas one is liable to put in too much milk if one does it the other way round”
Now, I am a coffee man, partial to the occasional late night flirtation with a Quietly Chamomile but essentially I’ve never taken to the fairer brew. But one has to admire the man’s precision and directness in the detailed manner in which goes about the execution of the perfect cuppa. Proper like innit?
The full ten point plan for a perfect brew can be found over at that wonderful site of knowledge and wisdom, Brain Pickings.
Know Your Cypher
:: Julian Assange’s :: conversational text with fellow digital activists Jacob Appelbaum, Andy Müller-Maguhn, and Jérémie Zimmermann has been a slow burn on the best-tech-most-dangerous-book lists since its release last November as Adam Morris points out in his article over on Salon.com. It would be pretty hard to do the talk show circuit and press junkets from a balcony in London I would imagine. But this does not mean it’s message is not as valid as it is disturbing:
“Most of the time we are not even aware of how close to violence we are, because we all grant concessions to avoid it. Like sailors smelling the breeze, we rarely contemplate how our surface world is propped up from below by darkness.”
So, later tonight, when the kids are asleep and Shaun Micallef has finished another of his magical rants on ABC2 (- it’s always better the second time around), pour yourself a double whiskey, curl up in your scruffy bedtime best and settle in for a bit of dystopian realism via our favourite adopted Equadorian. A copy of the introduction has been reproduced in full over here and you can buy the eBook for a tenner over here. The book’s publishers also feature another variation on the Hitler/Downfall meme to promote the text which can be found here.
Adam Morris’s excellent expose on the original book Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet and the current “cybersecurity” malaise can be found here :: This will require more whiskey and perhaps a nicotine patch :: And also worthy of a peruse is a summary of the Cypherpunk movement from R. U. Sirius over at the Verge, which gives a human face to what is a very disturbing business :: Cue more whiskey and cigarettes.
UPDATE:: And if you really want to peer into the abyss, James Bamford’s article, The NSA Is Building the Country’s Biggest Spy Centre (Watch What You Say), over at wired.com just may be all the inspiration you need to get your quivering digits tapping “Tor Project” into your “do no evil” search engine.
:: Food for thought :: 1980 was not that long ago but in data storage terms it was a millennia. Based on the available data a typical 204K floppy disk in 1980 - for that super top secret defence project you were working on - would have set you back US$695. In today’s money, and let’s be practical here and measure this in units that we understand - the humble gigabyte - the going rate would be roughly $3.5 million per gigabyte of storage. Today 1GB of hard drive storage will set you back as little as 10 cents (see: Oracle Report from 2012) or as much as 20 cents (see Officeworks if you are a stickler for retail pricing).
via retronaut
