"So the response by comrade Calder-Williams to our stasis and their deterritoriality is to embrace a cranky, broken and dilapidated version of the Walking City, one which is more based on Howl's Moving Castle or Mad Max than Archigram's proto-Monty Python surrealist Disurbanism, a sort of pragmatic apocalypticism where the leftovers of advanced technologies are used in a debased form, montaged together via 'bits and pieces, rags and bones' into new constructions rather than created ex nihilo, or in harmony with nature via the pieties of sustainability."
"The 60's go kaputt. Then the long 70's, in all their gritty urgency and Satanic deformations of hippie non-thought, Moro's body in the trunk of the Renault, Bretton Woods undoes the filaments of currency as certainty and shape. In England, 1969, The Bed-Sitting Room and Monty Python think the end of it all as little more than the relentless repurposing of the same. Ten years later, Mad Max heads toward the Outback."
"Every other modern narrative – communism, socialism, even those that were destructive, such as neoliberalism and fascism – laid claim to a version of the kingdom of God, a better world that would nurture a better human being. They were all narratives of redemption and salvation. All that we have now is apocalypse, and it is paralysing. How then can we build hope?" Interesting piece from Madeline Bunting at the Guardian.
So, they’ve installed a hermit in the Gothic tower of Manchester Museum. He’ll be up there for the next month or so, blogging, thinking, and … threatening to destroy historical artefacts?
Over the last few months I have been exploring the museum stores and collecting my own little cabinet of curiosities. Each day over the next forty days I will choose an object from my collection and offer it up in a spirit of sacrifice. The object will be announced through a variety of media, including this blog.
I will then destroy it.
This destruction will inevitably take place unless someone cares for the object. Anyone who cares may show that they do in whatever way they choose. Recognized experts and potentially interested parties will be specifically invited to contribute their views. Manchester Museum curators and staff are also welcome to share their expertise, but all responses will compete in a transparent public forum.
Approaching the act of curation from an entirely different direction, this is a bold move on the part of Manchester Museum. Still, I reckon that by turning readers into potential stakeholders, and not shying away from risk, it’s something with the potential to engage the public in a way that’s new & exciting. It has the potential to raise all kinds of interesting questions about value, memory, and storytelling – so full kudos to Nick Merriman, the Museum’s director.
Biswas will be blogging here, so keep one eye on the site and – likely to be just as interesting – your other on the comments and reactions. It should be interesting to see what he’s chosen, artifact-wise.
"He says he heard a guy [missed the name] that “future” is an old paradigm. Bruce agrees with him. A mythos of the future, the belief in the future, just won’t be the same. We’re moving into a-temporality. Steam punk + metaphysics. Gibson is working on a book called “Zero History.” But Bruce isn’t ready to talk about this yet. Instead, he wants to talk about what it’ll feel like to live through the next ten years. It won’t be progress or conservativism. We get “transition to nowhere.” No big boom bubbles. Bad weather. Global emergent change."
In other words, a more palatable brand of seasteading from the Sundance generation – far more likely to win round the sympathies of venture altruists, social entrepreneurs, and the general public. There’s a full presentation (opens pdf), with some useful stuff that resonates with quantum governance, stigmergy, open source infrastructure, aquaculture, and all that Superstruct-y goodness. A welcome departure from these guys, and a potent booster shot for those looking to top-up their optimism. Highly recommended.
I’ve restructured one of my undergraduate dissertations as a hypertext, mixed in some video footage and CC-licensed images, and thrown it up as its own site.
“Containing the Uncontainable: Guantánamo Bay and the Limitless Threat” – it’s about terrorism, geography, theology, aesthetics and the apocalypse. It might be a bit dense, and I admit to be a bit overkeen on subheadings, but there’s definitely some good stuff in there … if you have the patience.
“The future” is and always was a map of a fake territory. It is entertainment. However, without any map at all we become paralyzed, so even a fake map can provide initial direction, even if it is rarely ultimately the right direction. Thus “futures” survive. Willy Lee rockets boldly charted out intergalactic federation before a nation came together and reached upwards. Cyberjockeys first jacked across a new world’s neon constellations, created new myths to sail by, tentative models to take to the money people. The future promised Star Wars, I-Robots, and Cybertopia – we got decaying red stars, automation, and Google.
But now we are seduced by ever sexier futures and dwindling soundbite-sized “now”, all whilst history is regooded — the signified is stripped from signifiers, packed into a brochure and McDonaldized. We become blind to history and its non-linearity. Thus our pattern seeking mind fabricates theories, draws whatever lines it can on the last two data points: this quarter’s report, this season’s pants, this election cycle’s buzz issue, the last 140 characters, today’s housing price index.
“Taking our grandmother’s old black and white telly to the council recycling point or picking up ours or someone else’s kids from school, for instance, doesn’t technically count as a bona fide economic activity even though a body like the US Census Bureau has clear classification codes for similar market-based activities: “NAICS 484210 [Trucking used household, office, or institutional furniture and equipment]” and “NAICS 624410624410 [Babysitting services, child day care]”. The point is that historically the impact of these social behaviours has been … the “dark matter of our economic production universe” – we know it’s all around us but we can’t observe it directly. Now however, giving time and sharing expertise and other resources online leaves a trail of clicks, so we’re starting to see some direct proof for the first time. “
“I visited Cuba a few years ago and was surprised at how much it reminded me of Ireland. Everyone was smart, skilled, and seemed hungry for opportunities to improve their lives—perhaps even more so than the Irish had been back in the ’80s, because they’d spent decades under Fidel Castro’s human-rights-crushing thumb. Now that President Obama is talking about opening up trade, Cuba experts predict that the country could explode with creativity and entrepreneurial innovation. “There’s tremendous potential,” says Gustav Ranis, an economic-development expert at Yale.”
“The goal of Kundra’s new Web site, Data.gov, is to create a place where all the information is easy to find, sort, download, and manipulate. He wants to put as much data out there as possible, then sit back and let the private sector come up with great ways to use it. He envisions a future in which well-designed spreadsheets, charts, and graphs are embedded in applications for phones, Facebook, and blogs. In DC, someone combined several of the data sets released by local government—maps, liquor license info, crime statistics—into an app called Stumble Safely, which shows users the safest way to walk home when drunk. He doesn’t know what people will build with all the federal data, but he’s confident it will be cool.”
“The country would have been divided into 12 regions, each governed by cabinet ministers with wide powers, aided by senior military officers, chief constables and judges and based in bunkers. Other senior figures would have retreated to a central government shelter under the Cotswolds.”
These videos (from Ivo Gormley & Matan Rochlitz) make me pretty ruddy cheerful. There’s a certain vagus nerve-tickling, ludotopian current to this whole thing. And I like that. A lot.
Easily the smartest piece of industrial design I’ve seen from post-Dyson/iPod era. The folding mechanism reminds me of those tiny plastic forks you get in excessively-packaged supermarket salads…
“We conducted a study of the Arabic language blogosphere using link analysis, term frequency analysis, and human coding of individual blogs. We identified a base network of approximately 35,000 active blogs, created a network map of the 6,000 most connected blogs, and with a team of Arabic speakers hand coded 4,000 blogs. The goal for the study was to produce a baseline assessment of the networked public sphere in the Arab Middle East, and its relationship to a range of emergent issues, including politics, media, religion, culture, and international affairs.”
“Look out, here come the pagans. It’s late May in central London and a man dressed as a tree, a witch in a velvet robe and a woman pretending to be a raven with a long black beak are dancing through the streets of Holborn, with several hundred others, moving to the rhythm of a dozen loud drums. They could wake the god of thunder with their noise but it’s OK, the people at the back with the broadswords and shields are followers of Thor. This is a parade to celebrate pagan pride, and it would be wise not to get in the way.”
“The marriage of Phil Spector’s wall of sound and Curtis’s wall of images is so perfect, so strange and striking, it jangled around my head for hours afterward. And I only saw it in a tiny window on an Apple Mac, in a corner of Curtis’s tape-strewn “lair” at BBC Television Centre. God knows what it’ll be like on a big screen as part of a live-action, funhouse-style experience. It’ll probably kill people.”
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