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6/27/03: A contemporary look at Victorian Visions of the year 2000 - a narrated collection of c.1899 cards predicting the technologies of the year 2000 - presciently brings out the inherant goofiness in how the industrial world has actually turned out - one still given over to many a Victorian-derived spectacle for sure. [via traveller's.] Also through the utopian vein, Changing of the Avant-garde is a quite fascinating Flash documentation of an earlier MoMA show of architectural drawings on the "radical projects" that mark design's many Modern/ Postmodern rifts. Rem Koolhaas's City of the Captive Globe from the 1970's is a particularly refreshing rediscovery of an aesthetic of congestion, a radical assertion easily refined into the more comfortable terms of New Urbanism and we're all the better for having it around. posted by jeremy @ 10:50 PM :Metrosexuals come out [NYTlogin:betacorpo pw:betacorpo]. Today, some dear-but-mistaken congradulations from an acquaintence (with whom I only communicate in my dear-but-mistaken Portuguese) on the Supreme Court's recent landmark ruling becomes yet another one of my many "Metrosexual Anecdotes". [via gaper's.] posted by jeremy @ 9:57 PM :Cartes-de-Visite photos from 19th-Century Australia. posted by jeremy @ 9:16 PM :The Smoking Gun's Mugshot Gallery seems oddly theatrical. posted by jeremy @ 8:58 PM :A brief history of Tokyo love hotels with this bit amusing bit of automation - There are still a few hotels where a grey, liver-spotted hand reaches out through the curtains to take your money when you enter, but most hotels have gone high-tech and have automated the payment system.? After you choose your room at the display board in the lobby (just push the button of the room you want) you?ll be given a paper card with the room number on it.? When you?re ready to leave, you put this card in the slot of the control panel near the door and push the ???? (total) button.? Your room charges will be automatically added up and you put your money into another slot in the panel.? At hotels using this system, you are often locked into your room until you pay. posted by jeremy @ 8:42 PM :Videos of death-defying Shaolin Kung Fu masters explained by physicists.[via dangerousMeta.]posted by jeremy @ 8:03 PM :A softer world - buries a sharp wit deep inside these obtuse found photos.
posted by jeremy @ 7:04 PM 6/24/03:Bicho do mato Apparently, Chicago's rat population consists solely of the Norway Rat [slithy popups] and the best way for cities to deal with them is to cut off their food supply until they eat each other. I spent the last late Sunday night hours with a couple of friends sipping summer ales on the back porch of my apartment that extends out into an overgrown backyard. I'm almost up to three years of having lived in this place, and I've before only seen the occasional furry black oval scurry past a snow-covered street or cross the alleys late at night. That night we were out there, the weeds and bushes and trees growing throughout the 1/4 acre out back were all rustling and snapping, three or four dozen little shadows scattering about the pink lights from the alley, nails scratching their way up garbage cans and wooden fences, and every minute or so a scream from one little beast attacking the other. The last few days have been the first of the 80-degree weather. The old building next door, with the old abandoned storefront, is coming down. A dozen others up the street are in some stage of being converted into those giant pink townhouses that are always built seven or eight feet taller than the older adjacent buildings, not to add a floor, nor design more space, and certainly against the aesthetic harmony of the rows of buildings along the block. Filmmaker Jim Felter, who spent two years producing the documentary Rats on Washington DC's rat problems, describes rats as not themselves the problem, but "a symptom of the real problem, which is our culture's excessive wastefulness. Rats are one of the major predicaments that result from our consumer-driven, waste-intensive society." posted by jeremy @ 1:57 PM :Geologic time and an instantaneous shift in Western History -
[via neworldDisorder.] posted by jeremy @ 1:50 PM :Apparently the .com variation of Dennis Kucinich's name has been registered out from under him. The resulting web site Kucinich.com [via floatingBlogs.] becomes a highly hysterical tactic to prove that this Democratic presidential nominee might be that. Apparently, this website is advertised through a rather underhanded spam circulation. How will this more predatory stage in Internet evolution play out in the next election? posted by jeremy @ 1:15 PM :Destino - on an incomplete 1946 collaboration between Walt Disney and Salvador Dali. [via dublog.] posted by jeremy @ 12:25 PM :Salon's Andrew Leonard on spam, porn, and file-trade watching toward darker times -
posted by jeremy @ 11:52 AM 6/19/03:Acho que eu fiquei louco...
- so you should check 'em and entertain yourself over there 'til I get my head back together. posted by jeremy @ 12:54 AM 6/14/03:An antidote to my earlier disgust on Hummer bikes - The gorgeously ornamented touring cycles by Vanilla are like clean, sexy spinning in cahootz with Kenneth Anger.  So fine! If only many many more industrial things American could have this sort of celebratory (or at least playfully fetishistic) sensibility. posted by jeremy @ 12:49 AM :Although I find Superfuturecity to be a rather incomplete contraption, these digicam pages on Tokyo manhole covers and the pain of airplanes are offhandedly clever. posted by jeremy @ 12:35 AM 6/13/03:Subtextures Language Removal Services studies the phenomenon of erasing words from recorded speech and leaving the natural vocal sounds - the umms, ahhs, grunts, sighs, breaths, etc. - that are not considered part of language intact. The claim, according to their FAQ is that language removal creates a static characterisation of a person's speech, uncontrived by language, and presumably more natural and more identifiable. Apparently LRS lie somewhere between proprietary science and a joke on the faith invested in science (or doubt derived from words and mediation), at least that's what I make of it all from the similarly ambiguous NPR story[cmd+F "Language Removal Service"] from which I first heard of this. Certainly that's what I gather from LRS's shoddily made web site. However, I am overwhelmed by the aesthetic response that these recordings induce. Their page of real audio samples, with recordings of speech from the disparate likes of Henry Rollins, Susan Sontag, Jorge Louis Borges, or Sylvester Stallone equally sound strangley animal-like and oftentimes quite erotic. 
They've also apparently collaborated on various media projects. One Hand Clapping, a show at Brooklyn's Smackmellon Studios, used LRS's work alongside that of John Cage, William Anastasi, and Paul Pfeiffer in an exploration of authorship, meaning, and the connotative spaces between the texts of recorded images. They also collaborated with Pfeiffer on The long count, wherein the artists painstakingly (and un-seamlessly) erase the videotaped figures of Muhammed Ali, George Foreman, and Joe Frazier leaving oddly supernatural ropes curving and snapping back from the weight of imaginary bodies and a background of heads watching the uncanny emptiness. Paul Pfeiffer describes this and other projects further in this interview[.pdf]. Aside from these conceptual implications, I'm most drawn to these sounds as music. The samples of LRS's Static Opera (available completely as a CD), wherein the librettos of early 20th-century operas undergo the same erasure, create the illusive effect of high spectacular culture removed to expose a seemingly more menacing and erotic subtext. If you're patient enough to wait through the RA file, the opera sample played at the end of the aforementioned NPR broadcast creates the same effect in a more complex and beautiful arrangement. I'm reminded of the music of Christian Fennesz, especially the album Endless Summer, who makes beautiful digitised reworkings of familiar pop songs by distilling them to a rich layer of static but somehow keeping the attraction of melody barely discernable but intact. posted by jeremy @ 11:05 PM :I just wanted one of these for my weblog. It's more like something for the 2003 scrap book.
The requisite context (not that you need any by now). Ghost in the Machine has a pretty good smartass comment. posted by jeremy @ 9:08 PM 6/12/03:Santiago by Nuno Godolphim. 
posted by jeremy @ 1:13 AM :Mid-century images documenting a rapidly industrialising Brazil by little-known advertising photographer Hand Gunter Flieg plus a biography in English. Also, a timeline of Brazilian photography (em portugu?s).
posted by jeremy @ 1:01 AM :Headlines for the heartstrings - Hard times hit ranks of US millionaires: survey
You can't make this shit up. posted by jeremy @ 12:17 AM :Fisher West - a site name? a person's name? I'm not sure, but this is one of the most clever web-design portfolios I've ever seen and a quite weightless use of javascripts for images. The Zen game can bring complete mindlessness in minutes. posted by jeremy @ 12:01 AM 6/10/03:Fuck Corporate Groceries - is some impressively useful webloggia on how to go about avoiding the typically irresponsible Kraft Foods fare for seeking out tastier and more local culinary attractions. Very Chicago, but good for everyone. posted by jeremy @ 8:51 PM :
posted by jeremy @ 1:50 PM :Moral design anecdote #2 - An introduction to Disney's truly haf-baked
It looks like the first place for Worst Design Idea of 2003 is firmly held. It'll take a whole lotta corporate arrogance to pull that distinction out from under Disney's fat ass. posted by jeremy @ 1:37 PM :London as mapped by War Chalkers. posted by jeremy @ 1:09 PM :really small talk - (introduced to me via Matt Tobey's healthily growing blog) is a collection of emphatically miniscule short stories (anecdotes? koans?) about cities and some smart web-reading. posted by jeremy @ 1:05 PM :Taste Tribes - is a not-too-special little essay on the web and cult followings, but I enjoy a few appeals to tastes and moral evaluation that dot the text:
[via boingBoing.] posted by jeremy @ 12:42 PM 6/9/03:How to Get Good and Drunk - a nostalgically collegey tour of Iowa City. [via idletype.]posted by jeremy @ 12:42 PM 6/8/03:Wattstax - a film from 1972's "Black Woodstock," featuring Isaac Hayes and Richard Pryor among others, has been restored will be found in a theatre near you this summer if your location is fortunate enough. [via scrubbles.]
Also, for summer viewing, I can highly recommend John Malcovich's Dancer Upstairs for a tense and disjointed couple hours (and some beautiful fictional time spent in rural Peru). So can this reviewer. posted by jeremy @ 9:31 PM 6/7/03:
But his writings that have been rejected for as long as I've been alive are really worth a good skim. [via rebecca'sPocket.] posted by jeremy @ 10:57 PM :Here comes the new Get Your War On. Pass it on. posted by jeremy @ 10:16 PM :On limits as links - a web-history of Venezuelan architect Carlos Raul Villanueva's history of the University of Caracas' Covered Plaza and its conscious integration of art, architecture, and the complimentary sensibilities of Latin American Modernism. posted by jeremy @ 10:08 PM :Modeling the Cities' History [.pdf] - on 3-d imaging and the recreation of place and history in the Latin American city. posted by jeremy @ 9:55 PM :A fotolog (of sorts) on the progress of Oscar Niemeyer's pavilion for the Serpentine Gallery is a quite exhaustive but mesmerising account of a truly fascinating place coming to life. posted by jeremy @ 9:49 PM :A personalised mini-retrospective of Apple's chief designer Jonathan Ive as curated by London's Design Museum -
(Note: you may want to click through to this story from the museum's homepage to preserve the frame layout - wouldn't want to ruin the design after all.) posted by jeremy @ 9:00 PM :We need moral design!! Now more than ever!!
posted by jeremy @ 8:22 PM 6/6/03:The Propaganda Remix Project -
posted by jeremy @ 10:43 PM :A posting on the incredible Sao Paulo fotolog Fotogarafa on poverty, economic development, the city, and the banal beige box in quck transitions.
posted by jeremy @ 9:51 PM :Alcatraz by Yukinori Yanagi consists of quite stunning drawings made by following the movements of an ant with a red crayon confined within a sheet of paper the size of any cell in the Alcatraz prison. I wonder when the artist knew when to stop - a human sense that the work was resolved? Or did Yanagi just wait until the ant died? [via purselipsquarejaw.] Another series are ant farms with sand as the flags of various nations, the abstracted patterns of political boundaries succumb to the agenda of a nonhuman set of patterns, boundaries and constructions and we wonder if a similar meaning can then be ascribed to the latter or is it just entropy? There's some apparent references to Jasper Johns too. posted by jeremy @ 9:42 PM :International Word List - Microsoft translates any command terms from its software from English to any of the other languages that its software is published in. Interestingly, they bother to include the word "Internet" which is, except for one "internet" and "Internett", expectedly universally unvaried. The word "wizard," in the cases that I could decipher, usually becomes the decidedly less magical "assistant". [via enigmaticMermaid.] posted by jeremy @ 9:22 PM :Images from the Chobimela Festival of photography from the developing Asian Muslim world as various sites of exclusion. The introductory statement is an interesting read too.
posted by jeremy @ 8:58 PM :Subway is a quite estranged collection of street photos from NYC's various undergrounds and a nice use of unfiltered flourescent light [via solipstic.]posted by jeremy @ 10:56 AM :Digital music based on pi. posted by jeremy @ 10:48 AM :A veritable goldmine of MP3 links. posted by jeremy @ 10:45 AM 6/5/03:The Plug - one of those web chapbooks of sorts, if difficult to describe but picture-heavy and wonderful. posted by jeremy @ 1:47 AM 6/4/03:Chicago's venerable Hothouse is open again, though more than $60,000 in debt from last month's licensing fiasco. A Sun-Times article has the happy, albeit unsexy, ending. posted by jeremy @ 8:21 PM :
posted by jeremy @ 8:18 PM :A contemporary urban Kibbutz. posted by jeremy @ 8:13 PM :Photographs and other fictions is an overwhelmingly blurry sea of unhinged texts and images, far too many to understand conventionally, and really quite mind-numbing to quickly flip through on a fast Internet connection. I'm reminded of Myst somehow. [via consumptive.] posted by jeremy @ 8:12 PM 6/2/03:A photo of the Damien Hirst painting - soon to be the first work of earthling art on another planet - used by the Beagle 2 to calibrate its cameras. The accompanying Blur track - a B-side from 1999 - is also quite cool. posted by jeremy @ 10:10 PM :A history of the FCC's Fairness Doctrine. [via dangerousMeta.]posted by jeremy @ 9:44 PM 6/1/03:They Rule - a quite mesmerising Flash map of the interlocking boards of directors for the top 100 US companies. Quite an incestuous lot, those rulers. posted by jeremy @ 7:45 PM :Documenta 11: the return of the subject -
posted by jeremy @ 7:30 PM :African artists at Documenta 11. posted by jeremy @ 7:25 PM :Imag(in)ing Globalization (Or: How can something be made comprehensible, when there are contradictory images of it?) -
posted by jeremy @ 7:22 PM :Monument - a continuing web documentary by Margaret Crane and Jon Winet -
Also by Crane and Winet - Democracy: the last campaign - is a similar study of the last US presidential election that elected no one. Their own documentation site outlines many other fascinating projects marrying the unnecessarily disparate realms of web- and public-art. posted by jeremy @ 7:09 PM :posted by jeremy @ 6:52 PM :Still in the middle of converting this site to a newer, easier layout, Update - 6.2.03 - Figured it out. In 45 seconds. Amazing what a fresh head can accomplish and my head seems so rarely fresh these days. Netscapers - enjoy, and I'm proud to continue assisting you in Microsoft avoidance. posted by jeremy @ 11:14 AM |
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