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Anti-piracy firm defends net hunt [BBC]

2010-04-15T01:59:00.001-07:00

“Anti-piracy firm DigiProtect, which has teamed up with UK law firm ACS:Law to send thousands of letters to alleged net pirates, has defended its actions.

It follows widespread condemnation of their methods, which involves mass-mailing alleged file-sharers asking them to pay a fine or face court.”

Full article: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8619407.stm

Posted via email from Can't Cope, Won't Cope

Gaming curfew for South Koreans [BBC Technology]

2010-04-13T05:54:00.001-07:00

From:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8617372.stm

“

The South Korean government is introducing policies aimed at curbing the amount of time children spend playing online games.

The first involves barring online gaming access to young people of school age between 12pm and 8am.

The other policy suggests slowing down people's internet connections after they have been logged on to certain games for a long period of time.

The Culture Ministry is calling on games providers to implement the plans.

It is asking the companies to monitor the national identity numbers of their players, which includes the age of the individual.

Parents can also choose to be notified if their identity number is used online.

"The policy provides a way for parents to supervise their children's game playing," Lee Young-ah from the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism told Reuters.

The Korea Herald reports that Barameui Nara, Maple Story and Mabinogi, three popular virtual worlds, will introduce the blackout later this year.

Meanwhile role playing games "Dungeon and Fighter" and "Dragon Nest" will pilot the connection slowing scheme.

A total of 19 role playing games will eventually be included - a huge proportion of the online gaming market in the country.

South Korea has sophisticated high speed broadband connections and online gaming is enormously popular.

But there has been growing concern over the amount of time its citizens spend in virtual worlds and playing online games.

A couple whose baby daughter starved while they spent up to 12 hours a day in internet cafes raising a virtual child online have made headlines around the world.

They were charged with negligent homicide and are due to be sentenced on 16 April.

“

Posted via email from Can't Cope, Won't Cope

William Gibson - Q&A [Zero History]

2010-04-13T02:01:00.001-07:00

FROM: http://www.williamgibsonbooks.com/blog/2010_04_01_archive.asp#2870745173546130026

Sunday, April 11, 2010

I THINK WE'VE HEARD THE CLICK
posted 8:17 PM

Feels to me like a full cycle of Q&A. Very enjoyable, for me, but I'll take Anabel's thanks as the closer, now. You're all welcome, and thank you for turning up.

QUESTIONS...
posted 8:02 AM

From Cederic:
Q Lets trivialise.
A You go first!

Q You obsess in your books about the desired objects of days past, contemporarily still desirable with the added patina of rarity.
- What's your favourite old world treasure?
A I'm more a wunderkammer guy than a big masterpiece guy. I'm with Manny Farber's termites, that way. Sir John Soane's house is probably my favorite London museum.

Q - Which watch do you wear?
A Today, an 80s Vostok, a Soviet watch. It has a certain pleasant melancholy about it.

Q - Do you seek current objects of desire: iPhone or Android?
A Not so much. I've never been an early adaptor. It's getting to the point, though, where I actually need to get something along iPhone lines. But that would be upgrading from a Nokia flip (chosen because it had very good reception, four years ago).

Q - On more philosophical and complicated themes. You are an artist, a creator, but more: you are through your writing an influencer, a shaper of technology, of society itself. Does that scare you?
A I don't actually buy that, the mighty thunderer and shaper of technology thing. I think I'm more of an interpreter of technologies, an amateur anthropologist. I'm a sort of Victorian weekend naturalist of technology, who somehow found a way to make a living doing that (and a bunch of other things at the same time).

QUESTIONS...
posted 7:37 AM

Q How much steeping do you do in your locations while writing? Hotels, cities, transportation options?
A Where I happen to have gone tends to produce the locations. For Pattern Recognition. I went back to Tokyo to upgrade my 80s/90s version. Hadn't been to Moscow at all. Filtered that through writer friends who had (Eileen Gunn, Jack Womack). I do virtual steeping, though. Google Earth Street View is a spooky thing, that way.

Q Do you visualize some locations from first-hand experience or do you take notes to refresh your memory while re/experiencing them again?
A I have no way of knowing what'll reemerge from the hopper as a novel-unit, so no reason to take notes. Everything goes into the hopper. Relatively few things come out of it.

Q Does this research get expensive for you? Is there a way for you to be compensated for this type of research?
A I spend almost nothing on research. A Wired article took me to Tokyo, when I was writing Pattern Recognition. I used to buy lots of magazines. Magazines are novelty-aggregators. But the Web's taken that function over, and is free.

Q Do you find that "going there" actually helps you write?
A Having been *somewhere* helps me to write. Having a hopper full of "place" is a good thing, but that's a lifetime accumulation. And there's a certain amount of composting that goes on, in the hopper. It's not journalism, not reportage.

QUESTIONS...
posted 7:25 AM

From Bravus:
Q In general, do you think the barriers (filters?) to publication for new authors of fiction are working well? (Are they letting the good stuff through, or do you think there are lots of people who have surmounted the barrier of writing and written good stuff but fail to surmount the publishing barriers?)
A I'm not postioned to know. Not sure who would be. Someone who has some overview of what's happening?

Q And, related, how do you see technology helping and harming with this? Charles Stross has written some interesting blog posts on the economics of a writing career in the days of Amazon, for example, that were quite doomy...
A I read that Stross. The thing to remember is that a look at the actual economics of the thing, that way, would always have been doomy for the unpublished. Most of whom have no idea. Not that I don't think Stross is accurate. I do, but there's a way in which it's not a new scary story. New installment of the old scary story.

Saturday, April 10, 2010

QUESTIONS...
posted 10:40 PM

Q What question would Lithos ask you, if he were one of your characters?

A "How is this possible?" And I would explain the Internet, etc.

QUESTIONS...
posted 2:27 PM

From Bictaker:
Q I'm picking up on a thread that seems to pervade several of your previous responses, in so much as your writing gift comes at a heavy price. It's almost a suffering ...something you can't and wouldn't want to live without, yet a beast that requires a great deal of time and effort to harness? A living hell for the duration of the work, no?

A Yikes! I must've sounded awfully whiny. Nothing quite as dramatic as that. Every job has its costs, some of which aren't so evident to people who haven't done it. But my intention was more to convey, to people who might want to write fiction, that the process they arrive at may not quite line up with our cultural paradigm of what writing fiction is, and that the blisters may form in places other than expected. When I started trying to write fiction, I read writers-on-writing collections, and very little of that, in retrospect, sounded much like what I've wound up having to do to make it happen.

When Bruce Sterling and I were writing The Difference Engine, I'd moan sometimes about the labor required (as much fun as that was, and often it was lots of fun, but I'm basically lazy). He always had the same response: "Yeah, but it beats loading concrete blocks." Which is so obviously true, and has since become a mantra of mine.

I don't always like writing, but I very much like having written.

QUESTIONS...
posted 9:06 AM

From Anabel:
Q There's a highly successful writer who lived in my town, who ran a writers workshop where he said he used real people for some of his characters. Have you used real people to springboard some characters in your work? Was it dicey to do so?

A I'd assume we (writers) all must do that some extent, but for me that all goes through some process of unconscious randomization. When my characters arrive, I don't know who they are, let alone who might have contributed DNA. There are exceptions, but usually only with characters who are more broadly parodic of particular attitudes.

I had no idea who Cayce was, why she felt that way on waking, whose flat it was, why London. For months. I was inhabiting a very partial construct, waiting to see what attached itself. Waiting to find a center of gravity.

Friday, April 09, 2010

QUESTIONS...
posted 10:49 PM

From Bictaker

Q How much quicker do you think you would complete Zero History in a world without Twitter?

A Not faster, just differently. Twitter, or the Internet at large, feels to me like an automation of what I have to do, anyway, in order to write: Stare out window. Read a magazine. Gaze at shoe. Answer a letter. Think about something new (or newly). *Access random novelty.*

The writing worth keeping happens within a matrix of mysterious but crucially related activities. I might order myself to write for X number of hours per day (though in fact I never do) but the writing worth keeping can't be ordered to happen at all, let alone for X number of hours per day. It has to be teased out. Fed.

Q Do publishers place pressure on authors for X number of hours output per day, or are there just agreed, albeit flexible, deadlines?
A We do it from our homes, and we refuse to let them in, no matter how many times they knock. There's a contract, and a deadline for delivery of the completed manuscript. That's actually a really scary deal: a contract, and a deadline, and nobody there in the morning to tell you to get to work. Or to start gazing at your shoe.

Q I guess there's less pressure on established writers, whereas newbies are pushed harder? Time management: do you place yourself under a strict regime?

A The arrangement forces you to manage your own time. In the old days, in Hollywood, screenwriters in studio employ were contractually obligated to turn in a specific number of pages per day. There is nothing like that in the world of professional fiction-writing, and if there were, we wouldn't be having this conversation, because I'd never have been published.

I have to force myself to turn up every day, in case the writing also decides to. Often, it doesn't choose to. There is more of that at the start of a book than later, mercifully. The book builds its own momentum, though each one has a different momentum. That momentum is what calls the shots, imposes the regimen.

The part of me that's writing this, now, is utterly incapable of writing a novel. The part of me that just wrote a novel is profoundly unavailable, right now, and will remain so until the next time I have to go out and walk for miles, whistling for it, convinced its finally run away for good and all.

People don't ordinarily meet the part of me that writes novels, and when they do, they must assume I'm not not doing very well. Which as a human being, right then, I'm not. In direct proportion to how well I might be doing, right then, as a novelist.

Thursday, April 08, 2010

QUESTIONS...
posted 10:49 PM

From Sentinel400:
Q Have you ever wanted to wear a uniform?

A When was I last out of one? The extent to which we are are all of us usually in uniform brings to mind Eno's definition of culture: everything we do that we don't really need to. Pajama bottoms beneath a raincoat? Out of uniform. Jeans with one leg cut off? Out of uniform. Contracultural apparel disturbs us. Countercultures are intensely cultural. Bohemias have dress codes as rigid as those of merchant banks. We all read uniforms, constantly, whether we're aware of it or not.

My favorite science fiction film wardrobe is worn by David Bowie's alien, in The Man Who Fell To Earth. He turns up for his first terrestrial business meeting wearing a brand new $1.99 Chinese flannel workshirt, buttoned at the neck, its printed plaid fabric about half an inch thick, under a shiny, sleazy, striped business suit. The sense of the character's inability to read or articulate our cultural codes is perfect, and heartbreaking.

QUESTIONS...
posted 7:35 PM

From Martin:
Q Do you think any influence from "The Wire" has leaked into your (this) writing? Would you necessarily aware of it, if it had?

A I first watched The Wire when I was writing Spook Country, because my friend Steve Brown told me that one of the seasons had the best stuff about shipping containers he'd seen anywhere, in any medium. But what I really got from that was a sense of the physicality of the containers: that the walls are actually quite thin, things like that.

But that's material. "Influence" is something else. Influence is more like weather, when you've been writing for a while. It blows in from somewhere. You can't say exactly where weather *is*, but you can say that it's present.

QUESTIONS...
posted 7:09 PM

From Colin:
Q Seething, termite-like revising seems well suited to word processors, but how did it work out on that famous typewriter?

A Really, really *slowly*. Thick scabs of correction fluid. Then I discovered those rolls of self-adhesive white paper tape, that restaurants used to use to correct (this is amazing in itself, to me) the *typewritten* (or maybe mimeographed) parts of their menus. So I'd stick that over a whole sentence or three, a whole para, then type over it. But then the termites would seethe again, and I'd have to paint the white fluid over the *tape*, which didn't really work that well... The pages of the Neuromancer manuscript were *3D*, topographical...

Then Bruce Sterling's father gave him an Apple II. I guess he'd moved up to the first Mac. So there's Bruce on the phone from Austin: "This is *serious*, man. This thing *automates* the process." So I went down to Eaton's and bought a IIC and a dot-matrix printer, marked way down because the new Mac was the thing. So I never got the Selectric that had been the pro writer's awesomest tool when I'd started trying to write. I saw one of those for $29.95 in a charity shop, last year.

Wednesday, April 07, 2010

QUESTIONS...
posted 7:39 PM

A I have no way of knowing, really. What your question reminds me of, though, is my having asked a couple of my literature profs at UBC, in the 70s, whether they thought there were important works of fiction that we didn't yet know of. This was greeted with a sort of amazed disgust. Of course there weren't. (Neither they nor I had ever heard of Cormac McCarthy, then, and he'd been published for over a decade.)

Q And, related, how do you see technology helping and harming with this? Charles Stross has written some interesting blog posts on the economics of a writing career in the days of Amazon, for example, that were quite doomy...
A The economics for the majority of writers, in my lifetime, have never been good at all. I suspect I imagined that the science fiction writers I read in the 60s were all doing rather well. Most of them, actually, were just scraping by, and moonlighting at other things. That was why, I'd guess, many of them seemed to write more often than was good for their writing.

QUESTIONS...
posted 4:38 PM

From Twilite Minotaur:
Q You mentioned spending a year on that one sentence. I notice myself getting tar babied into a sort of perfectionist love-hate with my own sentences (and lyrics), and then find myself paying mental alimony to a work throughout the day, swapping and rearranging bits, more like a jigsaw puzzle engineer than an 'artist' with nouns and verbs fountaining eternal from some Creativity Cortex. Paul Valery's aphorism, that,"an artist never really finishes his work, he merely abandons it," comes to mind. Was there some point or process for you of learning the art of abandonment, to switch off the inner micromanager, at an appropriate time so as to allow sufficient rumination to be spent on a work, but without becoming lost in it?

A If an innumerate like myself can be allowed to say this, there's a feeling of equation, at the end. There's a *click*. When you hear the click, immediately down tools and exit the structure. Don't go back in until your mind's quit overclocking and you can afford some perspective. Chance's are, that *was* the click.

Q Also, if you had to live in a city other than Vancouver, what would it be and why?
A Berlin. For all the ways it disproves our ideas of psychogeography and haunting.

QUESTIONS...
posted 1:22 PM

From Dawntreader :
Q Why do you seem obsessed with brand name apparel et al in Pattern Recognition and Spook Country?
A You ain't seen nothing, yet! Actually the new one may explain that, a bit. Or just further convince some people that I'm obsessed. It's one of the ways in which I feel I understand how the world works, and there aren't really that many of those. It's not about clothes, though, or branding; it's about code, subtext. I was really delighted, for instance, to learn who made George Bush's raincoats. A company in Little Rock (now extinct, alas) but they were made of Ventile, a British cotton so tightly woven that you can make fire hoses (and RAF ocean survival suits) out of it. Which exists because Churchill demanded it, because the Germans had all the flax production sewn up. No flax, no fire hoses for the Blitz. The cultural complexities that put that particular material on Bush's back delight me deeply; it's a kind of secret history (and not least because most people would find it fantastically boring, I imagine).

QUESTIONS...
posted 1:09 PM

From: theminx
Q. I am always inordinately pleased when I find out that someone whose work I admire is also a fan of someone else I admire. Some artists I like (such as Douglas Coupland and Kim Gordon) are also William Gibson fans/appreciators. Whose appreciation of your work tickles or humbles you the most?
A. Enthusiastic celebrity readers make me bashful. I actually have a hard time believing them, if that makes any sense. "You *do*? Golly!" Works better for me with random strangers who I'd imagine have any number of better things to do than read me.

posted 10:52 AM

From Bictaker:
Q How long did it take you before you finally gained confidence to put pen to paper [i.e. attempt to write fiction] and what, if any, was your original inspiration to commit yourself?

A There was never any pen. It's all been typed. I didn't begin to experiment with writing fiction until 1976 or so (I'm not sure, really) and I was extremely secretive about commitment. Secretive about the whole thing, really. I don't know why I started doing it, or why my commitment to it, when it came, as deeply private as it was, startled me with its depth. The whole thing was deeper than I have access to. And remains so.

The first first fiction I ever wrote was this sentence: "Seated in the darkened screening room, Hollingsworth came to understand the targeted numerals of the Academy leader as hypnagogic sigils preceding the dreamstate of film." Except that it wasn't "Hollingsworth"; something more, er, Ballardian! This is a perfect clinical example of the new writer having failed to even begin to digest an influence, and I could never making it go any further, though I did know that the next image was of a fountain, in the courtyard of an academic research building, into which people had been tossing expensive Swiss watches rather than coins.

I think I worked on that sentence for a year or more. Long enough to never have forgotten it. I think I may have eventually decided that I should regard it as complete in itself.

QUESTIONS...
posted 8:12 AM

From Martin:
Q What aspect of ZH are you most eager to talk about (that hasn't been mentioned yet) ?
A Actually I'm not that eager to talk about it. There's a gap, between completion and issuance of ARCs, during which I don't have to, and then I will have to, daily, for months. That's a function of the industry's needs, not mine. It feels slightly unseemly to me, to talk about my own work at any length.

Tuesday, April 06, 2010

QUESTIONS...
posted 7:27 PM

From Digitalprimate:
Q What would you suggest as listening while reading Zero History?
A Not owls. Not the gentle lowing of cattle at dusk. Not dried corn rattling into a galvanized bucket.

QUESTIONS...
posted 11:39 AM

From Buell:
Q More Bigend; is Hubertus your writer-self's alter ego?
A He seems to me like a sort of clay-footed demigod, the manifestation of something in our species that's unique to us (here, anyway, as far as we know) in ways both very good and very bad.

Q I'm under the impression that to take up the excruciating task of writing a novel requires Bigend-like megalomania.
A All sorts of things can warrant the taking up of the task, and do, but relatively few of the novels taken up, species-wide, are completed. A signed contract is a huge help on either end. And I don't mean that it's about money. Rather that there's a structure imposed, a commitment made, a timeline established.

There isn't anything that I think I know that would, in itself, warrant the writing of a novel.

...AND QUESTIONS
posted 9:53 AM

From Fuldog:
Q Creator's block. If ever: how long, when/why it happened; or how was it avoided, palliated?
A "Creator's block" sounds like something afflicting a divinity, but writer's block is my default setting. Its opposite is miraculous. The process of learning to write fiction, for me, was one of learning to almost continually be doing it *through* the block, in spite of the block, the block becoming the accustomed place from which to work. Our traditional cultural models of creativity tend to involve the wrong sort of heroism, for me. "It sprang whole and perfect from my brow" as opposed to "I saw it mispelled, in mauve Krylon, on the side of a dumpster, and it haunted me". I was much encouraged, when I began to write, by Manny Farber's idea of "termite art".

Q During the journey from the Sprawl to the Bridge to Bigend's, ever thought about changing profession, something radical?
A Never seriously. Probably because doing this, for whatever reason, has to be more an avocation than a career. I like designers, of various things. More than "fine artists", generally.

Monday, April 05, 2010

...AND QUESTIONS
posted 6:47 PM

From Bictaker:
Q If you had a chance to meet the author of your favorite book, who would it be and what would you ask them?
A Jorge Luis Borges. "How is this possible?"

Though I don't have a favorite book by Borges, or even a favorite book. It's unlikely that meeting a writer of fiction will get me any closer to the writer's work, in my experience. The opposite effect is sometimes noted. Writers of fiction, as I understand them, are writers because they can get closer to you *as marks on paper* than they can any other way. They cannot sit and tell you. If they could tell you, then why would they write? They cannot explain. They do not know, that way. They know transiently, at best, in the act of marking paper.

Sunday, April 04, 2010

...AND QUESTIONS
posted 7:53 PM

From Mean Old Man:
Q Essays. You're really, really good at those. I read a few of yours a while ago, and was lastingly impressed; Tokyo, watches, one about U2... How do those happen? Does Editor X in Gumbyville slap his forehead and cry, "Navel lint! William Gibson! It's a perfect fit! It'll fill an Entire! Page!! Miss Pertbottom, get New York on the line! What? I don't care if he's in Canada! GET NEW YORK ON THE LINE!", or is it more of an old school sub-rosa web ring kind of thing?

A Thank you. It was my first literary form. It was probably your first too. It can happen a number of ways. Ones that involve really expensive free plane tickets (Singapore, Tokyo, say). Ones that involve being asked to consider things I'm peculiarly interested in at the time (the eBay watch one). Ones where I feel honored to have been asked (the centenary of Orwell's birth) though in some cases I've declined out of feeling unworthy. (I declined to write an obituary for Wm. S. Burroughs, but mainly because he was still alive at the time, and believed in magic.) It's not an activity I actively seek out, much, and if asked (and I'm not asked, that often) I more often decline.

Q And who do you consider to be superior essayists, living or dead, worth reading?
A Orwell comes to mind, of course, but those are classic formal essays. The various parts of something like Iain Sinclair's Lights Out For The Territory *behave* in some ways like essays, and are brilliant, but do various un-essaylike things as well.

Saturday, April 03, 2010

...AND QUESTIONS
posted 3:52 PM

From Fashionpolioce:
Q Having written three trilogies, and approaching the age where some people choose to retire, do you think you'll keep writing into a ripe old age?
A There's evidence that some people are actually better at writing novels, over fifty. And it doesn't feel like a job, exactly. More like an ongoing experiment of some kind.

Q Or have you thought about doing something entirely different - like learning to sew?
A Or knit! Etsy beckons...

Friday, April 02, 2010

...AND QUESTIONS
posted 11:59 PM

From Anabel :
Q How has being a father affected you? In the beginning and over the years?
A In the beginning, it allowed me to write. My wife worked, teaching ESL at UBC, and I was househusband, daytime single parent, and novelist. Not easy, but a surprisingly good fit in many ways.

Q Can you speak about the delights of getting to know your kids as they mature, without alienating your kids in public?
A I wouldn't want to. As parent, it would feel insufficiently respectful, and as writer, potentially cheesy.

From Colin:
Q So, about that terrifying process again. You have four or five people reading your daily output. Do you plow through the draft from beginning to end, or do these poor (and/or extremely lucky) souls have to read things out of order or the same page six times as you revise it?
A I show them the chapters as I write them, and I write them sequentially. If I don't get it right on the first try, I redo it and send it again. As I go along I revise the whole thing continually, piecemeal, but I don't update them on that. Finally I send them the manuscript. So they read it initially as a serial, every few days. I don't really do drafts, more a constant termite-like seething. I actually enjoy that aspect of the process. I feel like they're badly written but handsomely revised. Revision is largely stress-free. And they are, initially, in my opinion, not that well written. And while I know that they don't have to be, at that point, it still pains me.

Q Do you give them the first first draft of the pages, or the first draft after you've decided you're either not embarrassed or not going to worry about being embarrassed?
A I don't give them anything initially until I have what feels like a beginning. With Zero History, I think that was the first three chapters, which are longish, dense. That way, I feel like they know where we are. There's some kind of benchmark. Then we go on from there. Until recently, I could only have one outside first reader and my wife (and daughter, when she grew into it). Over the past decade or so, I've loosened up, found a greater degree of transparency, and I find that reduces the stress in some ways. For the past few months, writing daily, I found myself wondering what that would look like on a brain scan. I suspect there's some specific neurological activity, one that I can't necessarily produce at will. It's possible to get into a groove, though, and just do it, though at definite cost to everything else in one's life.

SPLITCOIL REMINDS ME...
posted 7:11 PM

Re an earlier question, I have in fact considered writing a Western. Protagonist's job is to see a shipment of high-tone Vancouver-refined opium from here to the finest divans of Manhattan. I don't know whether that ever happened, but it certainly could have. Digging in Strathcona back yards (particularly where outside toilets were located) still turns up the tiny, distinctive, branded, made-in-China bottles the local product was issued in. The last I saw for sale (the bottles) were in a fancy antique shop on South Granville, for about $100 each. Like mold-blown perfume bottles, a thin greenish glass. The late Victorian equivalent of plastic crack vials, I suppose, but prettier.

...AND QUESTIONS
posted 6:19 PM

From TwiliteMinotaur :
Q You have spoken previously about the ghostly cloud of hypertext in which your manuscripts are now shrouded, and the way that blogging morsels of your latest writing has helped to alleviate some of the solitude of the writing process.
A I sure have! And I've still got all of that going on, although until recently it's been mainly on Twitter. A platform Margaret Atwood and I find extremely agreeable (make of that what you will).
Q Are there any additional neological emergences to your works and/or writing process that you've noticed during Zero History?
A I am hoping that the phrase "the ugly t-shirt" (or simply "ugly t-shirt") will soon find its place in the jargon of security technology.

...AND QUESTIONS
posted 9:46 AM

from Gromit :
Q Why 'GreatDismal'?
A I had no idea what Twitter was, when a friend joined. GD happened to be in line of sight, so I used it for what I thought would be a ten-minute experience. I did live near the Great Dismal Swamp when I was five or six.

From Wanderer :
Q Why did you choose to make Bigend Belgian?
A His full name was a found object. A Belgian one. And Belgians have a certain reputation, deservedly or not, for (1) globalism, (2) startling outbreaks of interesting perversity.
Q And would he be Flemmish, Wallonian or from Brussels?
A No idea.
Q Also, is it intentional that neither his nor his mother's name is typically Belgian, though they sound like they could?
A No, but it seems to fit.

Fom LillyLyle :
Q I just read this article about a scientist by the name of Milgrim: http://tinyurl.com/yhpg59u Is this the origin of the character Milgrim's name?
A No. "Milgrim" is an old surname in the part of Virginia I grew up in. (So is "Wintermute", though exponentially less common.)

From Trogdor :
A You write from 10AM til whenever. Is research a separate activity?
Q I don't regard research as a separate activity. From anything. Everything is research. Relatively little great stuff turns up for me as a result of deliberately looking. Life is crowd-sourcing. In a good way.
A The reason I ask is that research tends to wander off into the weeds so easily, especially on the internets.
Q But they hide the good stuff *in the weeds*!

Thursday, April 01, 2010

WE GET QUESTIONS
posted 10:40 PM

From Boogerhead :
Q Is there an actual person that inspired the Finn?
A No.

From ][mez][ :
Q Why novels?
A Make a living at home, writing fiction!

From digitalprimate :
Q What's the process like from a physical standpoint?
A Sedentary.
Q Where do you write? When? For how long?
A Most recently, in the library (which is really the dining room but who needs one?). 10AM til whenever, pretty much daily when it's happening.
Q What do you eat or drink while writing?
A Whatever's available.
Q Do you write in Word? With pen and paper?
A Word.
Q Do you read or avoid reading certain things while you write?
A I avoid reading most new fiction, while writing.

From the Hydra :
Q Why Ativan?
A Wanted my addict character to have no trace of literary drug romanticism. Which is difficult, but benzos proved perfect.

From Vesper :
Q Which literary world would you like to live in? (Doesn't have to be of your making)
A Not a fantasy I've ever had, actually.

Q What would you say if someone picked up some of the characters from Sprawl or Bridge trilogies and wrote a book(s) with them? (Not-for-profit ones, let's say some decent fan-fic e-books)
A Nothing. Mainly because I can't imagine being induced to read it. I don't even reread my own work, ordinarily.

Q A book that you wish you had written but someone else did?
A I don't understand the impulse. If someone else writes a book, I can't imagine writing it. My literary admiration never takes that form.

From Splitcoil :
Q What project have you considered seriously that your readers would probably find most surprising?
A A space opera, but in the style of Paul Scott's novel The Chinese Love Pa

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"Time to take the internet seriously" - David Gelernter [EDGE]

2010-04-13T01:51:00.001-07:00

from: http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/gelernter10/gelernter10_index.html
via http://superfluousblog.wordpress.com

TIME TO START TAKING THE INTERNET SERIOUSLY
By David Gelernter

In short: it's time to think about the Internet instead of just letting it happen.

INTRODUCTION: OUR ALGORITHMIC CULTURE
By John Brockman

Edge was in Munich in January for DLD 2010 and an Edge/DLD event entitled "Informavore" — a discussion featuring Frank Schirrmacher, Editor of the Feuilleton and Co-Publisher of Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Andrian Kreye, Feuilleton Editor of Sueddeutsche Zeitung, Munich; and Yale computer science visionary David Gelernter, who, in his 1991 book Mirror Worlds presented what's now called "cloud computing."

The intent of the panel was to discuss — for the benefit of a German audience — the import of the recent Frank Schirrmacher interview on Edge entitled "The Age of the Informavore." David Gelernter, who predicted the Web, and who first presented the idea of "the cloud", was the scientist on the panel along with Schirrmacher and Kreye, Feuilleton editors of the two leading German national newspapers, both distinguished intellectuals.

As a result of the panel, Schirrmacher has commissioned Gelernter to write a regular column for FAZ, which was inaugurated with this essay, published by FAZ in a German translation on March 1st ("Der Mann, der das 'World Wide Web' erst möglich gemacht hat.")

Those of us involved in communicating ideas need to re-think the Internet. Here at Edge, we are not immune to such considerations. We have to ask if we're kidding ourselves by publishing 10,000+ word pieces to be read by people who are limiting themselves to 3" ideas, i.e. the width of the screen of their iPhones and Blackberries.

Many of the people that desperately need to know, don't even know that they don't know. Book publishers, confronted by the innovation of technology companies, are in a state of panic. Instead of embracing the new digital reading devices as an exciting opportunity, the default response is to disadvantage authors. Television and cable networks are dumbfounded by the move of younger people to watch TV on their computers or cell-phones. Newspapers and magazine publishers continue to see their advertising model crumble and have no response other than buyouts.

Take a look at the photos from the recent Edge annual dinner and you will find the people who are re-writing global culture, and also changing your business, and, your head. What do Evan Williams (Twitter), Larry Page (Google), Tim Berners-Lee (World Wide Web Consortium), Sergey Brin (Google), Bill Joy (Sun), Salar Kamangar (Google), Keith Coleman (Google Gmail), Marissa Mayer (Google), Lori Park (Google), W. Daniel Hillis (Applied Minds), Nathan Myhrvold (Intellectual Ventures), Dave Morin (formerly Facebook), Michael Tchao (Apple iPad), Tony Fadell (Apple/iPod), Jeff Skoll (formerly eBay), Chad Hurley (YouTube), Bill Gates (Microsoft), Jeff Bezos (Amazon) have in common? All are software engineers or scientists.

So what's the point? It's a culture. Call it the algorithmic culture. To get it, you need to be part of it, you need to come out of it. Otherwise, you spend the rest of your life dancing to the tune of other people's code. Just look at Europe where the idea of competition in the Internet space appears to focus on litigation, legislation, regulation, and criminalization.

Gelernter writes:

The Internet is no topic like cellphones or videogame platforms or artificial intelligence; it's a topic like education. It's that big. Therefore beware: to become a teacher, master some topic you can teach; don't go to Education School and master nothing. To work on the Internet, master some part of the Internet: engineering, software, computer science, communication theory; economics or business; literature or design. Don't go to Internet School and master nothing. There are brilliant, admirable people at Internet institutes. But if these institutes have the same effect on the Internet that education schools have had on education, they will be a disaster.

It is just about 10 years since Edge and FAZ co-published Gelernter's June, 2000 manifesto, "A Second Coming", which was widely read and debated. I expect nothing less for this powerful and provocative piece by one of the leading visionaries of the cybersphere. I welcome comments and look forward to a rich Reality Club discussion.

— JB

DAVID GELERNTER is a professor of computer science at Yale and chief scientist at Mirror Worlds Technologies (New Haven). His research centers on information management, parallel programming, and artificial intelligence. The "tuple spaces" introduced in Nicholas Carriero and Gelernter's Linda system (1983) are the basis of many computer communication systems worldwide. He is the author of Mirror Worlds, and Drawing a Life: Surviving the Unabomber.

TIME TO START TAKING THE INTERNET SERIOUSLY

1. No moment in technology history has ever been more exciting or dangerous than now. The Internet is like a new computer running a flashy, exciting demo. We have been entranced by this demo for fifteen years. But now it is time to get to work, and make the Internet do what we want it to.

2. One symptom of current problems is the fundamental puzzle of the Internet. (Algebra and calculus have fundamental theorems; the Internet has a fundamental puzzle.) If this is the information age, what are we so well-informed about? What do our children know that our parents didn't? (Yes they know how to work their computers, but that's easy compared to — say — driving a car.) I'll return to this puzzle.

3. Here is a simpler puzzle, with an obvious solution. Wherever computers exist, nearly everyone who writes uses a word processor. The word processor is one of history's most successful inventions. Most people call it not just useful but indispensable. Granted that the word processor is indeed indispensable, what good has it done? We say we can't do without it; but if we had to give it up, what difference would it make? Have word processors improved the quality of modern writing? What has the indispensable word processor accomplished?

4. It has increased not the quality but the quantity of our writing — "our" meaning society's as a whole. The Internet for its part has increased not the quality but the quantity of the information we see. Increasing quantity is easier than improving quality. Instead of letting the Internet solve the easy problems, it's time we got it to solve the important ones.

5. Consider Web search, for example. Modern search engines combine the functions of libraries and business directories on a global scale, in a flash: a lightning bolt of brilliant engineering. These search engines are indispensable — just like word processors. But they solve an easy problem. It has always been harder to find the right person than the right fact. Human experience and expertise are the most valuable resources on the Internet — if we could find them. Using a search engine to find (or be found by) the right person is a harder, more subtle problem than ordinary Internet search. Small pieces of the problem have been attacked; in the future we will solve this hard problem in general, instead of being satisfied with windfalls and the lowest-hanging fruit on the technology tree.

6. We know that the Internet creates "information overload," a problem with two parts: increasing number of information sources and increasing information flow per source. The first part is harder: it's more difficult to understand five people speaking simultaneously than one person talking fast — especially if you can tell the one person to stop temporarily, or go back and repeat. Integrating multiple information sources is crucial to solving information overload. Blogs and other anthology-sites integrate information from many sources. But we won't be able to solve the overload problem until each Internet user can choose for himself what sources to integrate, and can add to this mix the most important source of all: his own personal information — his email and other messages, reminders and documents of all sorts. To accomplish this, we merely need to turn the whole Cybersphere on its side, so that time instead of space is the main axis.

7. In the last paragraph I wrote "each Internet user"; but users of any computing system ought to have a simple, uniform operating system and interface. Users of the Internet still don't.

8. Practical business: who will win the tug of war between private machines and the Cloud? Will you store your personal information on your own personal machines, or on nameless servers far away in the Cloud, or both? Answer: in the Cloud. The Cloud (or the Internet Operating System, IOS — "Cloud 1.0") will take charge of your personal machines. It will move the information you need at any given moment onto your own cellphone, laptop, pad, pod — but will always keep charge of the master copy. When you make changes to any document, the changes will be reflected immediately in the Cloud. Many parts of this service are available already.

9. Because your information will live in the Cloud and only make quick visits to your personal machines, all your machines will share the same information automatically; a new machine will be useful the instant you switch it on; a lost or stolen machine won't matter — the information it contains will evaporate instantly. The Cloud will take care that your information is safely encrypted, distributed and secure.

10. Practical business: small computers have been the center of attention lately, and this has been the decade of the cellphone. Small devices will continue to thrive, but one of the most important new developments in equipment will be at the other end of the size spectrum. In offices and at home, people will increasingly abandon conventional desktop and laptop machines for large screen computers. You will sit perhaps seven feet away from the screen, in a comfortable chair, with the keyboard and controls in your lap. Work will be easier and eyestrain (which is important) will decrease. Large screen computers will change the shape of office buildings and create their own new architecture. Office workers will spend much of their time in large-screen computer modules that are smaller than most private offices today, but more comfortable. A building designed around large-screen computers might have modules (for example) stacked in many levels around a central court; the column whose walls consist of stacked modules might spiral helically as it rises….

11. The Internet will never create a new economy based on voluntary instead of paid work — but it can help create the best economy in history, where new markets (a free market in education, for example) change the world. Good news! — the Net will destroy the university as we know it (except for a few unusually prestigious or beautiful campuses). The net will never become a mind, but can help us change our ways of thinking and change, for the better, the spirit of the age. This moment is also dangerous: virtual universities are good but virtual nations, for example, are not. Virtual nations — whose members can live anywhere, united by the Internet — threaten to shatter mankind like glass into razor-sharp fragments that draw blood. We know what virtual nations can be like: Al Qaeda is one of the first.

12. In short: it's time to think about the Internet instead of just letting it happen.

13. The traditional web site is static, but the Internet specializes in flowing, changing information. The "velocity of information" is important — not just the facts but their rate and direction of flow. Today's typical website is like a stained glass window, many small panels leaded together. There is no good way to change stained glass, and no one expects it to change. So it's not surprising that the Internet is now being overtaken by a different kind of cyberstructure.

14. The structure called a cyberstream or lifestream is better suited to the Internet than a conventional website because it shows information-in-motion, a rushing flow of fresh information instead of a stagnant pool.

15. Every month, more and more information surges through the Cybersphere in lifestreams — some called blogs, "feeds," "activity streams," "event streams," Twitter streams. All these streams are specialized examples of the cyberstructure we called a lifestream in the mid-1990s: a stream made of all sorts of digital documents, arranged by time of creation or arrival, changing in realtime; a stream you can focus and thus turn into a different stream; a stream with a past, present and future. The future flows through the present into the past at the speed of time.

16. Your own information — all your communications, documents, photos, videos — including "cross network" information — phone calls, voice messages, text messages — will be stored in a lifestream in the Cloud.

17. There is no clear way to blend two standard websites together, but it's obvious how to blend two streams. You simply shuffle them together like two decks of cards, maintaining time-order — putting the earlier document first. Blending is important because we must be able to add and subtract in the Cybersphere. We add streams together by blending them. Because it's easy to blend any group of streams, it's easy to integrate stream-structured sites so we can treat the group as a unit, not as many separate points of activity; and integration is important to solving the information overload problem. We subtract streams by searching or focusing. Searching a stream for "snow" means that I subtract every stream-element that doesn't deal with snow. Subtracting the "not snow" stream from the mainstream yields a "snow" stream. Blending streams and searching them are the addition and subtraction of the new Cybersphere.

18. Nearly all flowing, changing information on the Internet will move through streams. You will be able to gather and blend together all the streams that interest you. Streams of world news or news about your friends, streams that describe prices or auctions or new findings in any field, or traffic, weather, markets — they will all be gathered and blended into one stream. Then your own personal lifestream will be added. The result is your mainstream: different from all others; a fast-moving river of all the digital information you care about.

19. You can turn a knob and slow down your mainstream: less-important stream-elements will flow past invisibly and won't distract you, but will remain in the stream and appear when you search for them. You can rewind your lifestream and review the past. If an important-looking document or message sails past and you have no time to deal with it now, you can copy the document or message into the future (copy it to "this evening at 10," say); when the future arrives, the document appears again. You can turn a different knob to make your fast-flowing stream spread out into several slower streams, if you have space enough on your screen to watch them all. And you can gather those separate streams back together whenever you like.

20. Sometimes you will want to listen to your stream instead of watching it (perhaps while you're driving, or sitting through a boring meeting or lecture). Software will read text aloud, and eventually will describe pictures too. When you watch your high-definition TV, you might let the stream trickle down one side of the screen, so you can stay in touch with your life.

21. It's simple for the software that runs your Lifestream to learn about your habits; simple to figure out which emails (for example), or social updates, or news stories, you are likely to find important and interesting. It will therefore be easy for software to highlight the stream elements you're apt to find important, and let the others rush by quickly without drawing your attention.

22. Lifestreams will make it even easier than it is today for software to learn the details of your life and predict your future actions. The potential damage to privacy is too large and important a problem to discuss here. Briefly, the question is whether the crushing blows to privacy from many sources over the last few decades will make us crumple and surrender, or fight harder to protect what remains.

23. The Internet's future is not Web 2.0 or 200.0 but the post-Web, where time instead of space is the organizing principle — instead of many stained-glass windows, instead of information laid out in space, like vegetables at a market — the Net will be many streams of information flowing through time. The Cybersphere as a whole equals every stream in the Internet blended together: the whole world telling its own story. (But the world's own story is full of private information — and so, unfortunately, no human being is allowed to hear it.)

24. Ten years ago I wrote about the growing importance of lifestreams. Last year, the technology journalist Erik Schonfeld asked in a news story whether a certain large company "can take the central communication model of social networks — the lifestream — and pour it back into its IM clients." (The story was headlined "Bebo Zeroes In On Lifestreaming For The Masses.") "Lifestreaming" is a word that is now used generically, and streams are all over the net. Ten years ago I described the computer of the future as a "scooped-out hole in the beach where information from the Cybersphere wells up like seawater." Today the spread of wireless coverage and the growing power of mobile devices means that information does indeed well up almost anywhere you switch on your laptop or cellphone; and "anywhere" will be true before long.

25. From which we learn that (a) making correct predictions about the technology future is easy, and (b) writers should remember to put their predictions in suitably poetic language, so it's easy to say they were right.

25. If we think of time as orthogonal to space, a stream-based, time-based Cybersphere is the traditional Internet flipped on its side in digital space-time. The traditional web-shaped Internet consists (in effect) of many flat panels chaotically connected. Instead of flat sites, where information is arranged in space, we want deep sites that are slices of time. When we look at such a site onscreen, it's natural to imagine the past extending into (or beyond) the screen, and the future extending forward in front of the screen; the future flows towards the screen, into the screen and then deeper into the space beyond the screen.

26. The Internet is no topic like cellphones or videogame platforms or artificial intelligence; it's a topic like education. It's that big. Therefore beware: to become a teacher, master some topic you can teach; don't go to Education School and master nothing. To work on the Internet, master some part of the Internet: engineering, software, computer science, communication theory; economics or business; literature or design. Don't go to Internet School and master nothing. There are brilliant, admirable people at Internet institutes. But if these institutes have the same effect on the Internet that education schools have had on education, they will be a disaster.

27. Returning to our fundamental riddle: if this is the information age, what do our children know that our parents didn't? The answer is "now." They know about now.

28. Internet culture is a culture of nowness. The Internet tells you what your friends are doing and the world news now, the state of the shops and markets and weather now, public opinion, trends and fashions now. The Internet connects each of us to countless sites right now — to many different places at one moment in time.

29. Nowness is one of the most important cultural phenomena of the modern age: the western world's attention shifted gradually from the deep but narrow domain of one family or village and its history to the (broader but shallower) domains of the larger community, the nation, the world. The cult of celebrity, the importance of opinion polls, the decline in the teaching and learning of history, the uniformity of opinions and attitudes in academia and other educated elites — they are all part of one phenomenon. Nowness ignores all other moments but this. In the ultimate Internet culture, flooded in nowness like a piazza flooded in sea water, drenched in a tropical downpour of nowness, everyone talks alike, dresses alike, thinks alike.

30. As I wrote at the start of this piece, no moment in technology history has ever been more exciting or dangerous than "now." As we learn more about now, we know less about then. The Internet increases the supply of information hugely, but the capacity of the human mind not at all. (Some scientists talk about artificially increasing the power of minds and memories — but then they are no longer talking about human beings. They are discussing some new species we know nothing about. And in this field, we would be fools to doubt our own ignorance.) The effect of nowness resembles the effect of light pollution in large cities, which makes it impossible to see the stars. A flood of information about the present shuts out the past.

31. But — the Internet could be the most powerful device ever invented for understanding the past, and the texture of time. Once we understand the inherent bias in an instrument, we can correct it. The Internet has a large bias in favor of now. Using lifestreams (which arrange information in time instead of space), historians can assemble, argue about and gradually refine timelines of historical fact. Such timelines are not history, but they are the raw material of history. They will be bitterly debated and disputed — but it will be easy to compare two different versions (and the evidence that supports them) side-by-side. Images, videos and text will accumulate around such streams. Eventually they will become shared cultural monuments in the Cybersphere.

32. Before long, all personal, familial and institutional histories will take visible form in streams. A lifestream is tangible time: as life flashes past on waterskis across time's ocean, a lifestream is the wake left in its trail. Dew crystallizes out of the air along cool surfaces; streams crystallize out of the Cybersphere along veins of time. As streams begin to trickle and then rush through the spring thaw in the Cybersphere, our obsession with "nowness" will recede, the dykes will be repaired and we will clean up the damaged piazza of modern civilization.

33. Anyone who has ever looked through a telescope at the moon close-up has seen it drift out of sight as the earth slowly spins. In the future, the Cybersphere will drift too: if you have investigated one topic long enough for your attention to grow slack and your mind to wander, the Net will respond by letting itself drift slowly into new topics, new domain: not ones with obvious connections to the topic you've been studying; new topics that have deep emotional connections to the previous ones, connections that will no doubt make sense only to you.

34. The Internet today is, after all, a machine for reinforcing our prejudices. The wider the selection of information, the more finicky we can be about choosing just what we like and ignoring the rest. On the Net we have the satisfaction of reading only opinions we already agree with, only facts (or alleged facts) we already know. You might read ten stories about ten different topics in a traditional newspaper; on the net, many people spend that same amount of time reading ten stories about the same topic. But again, once we understand the inherent bias in an instrument, we can correct it. One of the hardest, most fascinating problems of this cyber-century is how to add "drift" to the net, so that your view sometimes wanders (as your mind wanders when you're tired) into places you hadn't planned to go. Touching the machine brings the original topic back. We need help overcoming rationality sometimes, and allowing our thoughts to wander and metamorphose as they do in sleep.

35. Pushing the multi-mega-ton jumbo jet of human thought-style backwards a few inches, back in the direction of dream logic, might be the Internet's greatest accomplishment. The best is yet to be.

— David Gelernter

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Pierre Huyghe - Third Memory

2010-04-12T05:44:00.001-07:00

The Third Memory

from: http://www.egs.edu/

"Pierre Huyghe, French artist and filmmaker speaking about reality and virtuality, narrative, projection and memory in a free and open video lecture for the students and faculty at European Graduate School Media and Communication studies department program in Saas-Fee, Switzerland 2008. Pierre Huyghe.

...His two-channel video The Third Memory (1999), first exhibited in a museum context at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris and The Renaissance Society in Chicago, takes as its starting point Sidney Lumet's 1975 film Dog Day Afternoon, starring Al Pacino in the role of the bank robber John Wojtowicz. Huyghe's video reconstructs the set of Lumet's film, but he allows Wojtowicz himself, now a few dozen years older and out of jail, to tell the story of the robbery. Huyghe juxtaposes images from the reconstruction with footage from Dog Day Afternoon, demonstrating that Wojtowicz's memory has been irrevocably altered by the film about his life."

Pierre Huyghe. Narrative, Projection and Memory. 2008. 1/7:

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San Francisco Detours Into Reality Tourism [NY Times]

2010-04-12T05:01:00.001-07:00

From: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/12/us/12tenderloin.html

SAN FRANCISCO — Visitors know all too well this pretty city’s sights, what with the Golden Gate Bridge, Fisherman’s Wharf and the clang-clang-clangy cable cars.

But now San Francisco’s civic boosters have decided they want to add a highly unlikely stop to the tourist itinerary: the Uptown Tenderloin, the ragged, druggy and determinedly dingy domain of the city’s most down and out.

And what is the appeal?

“We offer a kind of grittiness you can’t find much anymore,” said Randy Shaw, a longtime San Francisco housing advocate and a driving force behind the idea of Tenderloin tourism. “And what is grittier than the Tenderloin?”

Indeed, after years of neglect and bitter battles over its gentrification, the Tenderloin remains one of the most stubborn challenges in San Francisco, a city that prides itself on its looks, its way of life and its bold solutions to social ills, whether they involve offering universal health care (the city was the first to do so) or banning plastic bags (ditto).

So it is that armed with a recent listing on the National Register of Historic Places, community and city leaders are readying the Tenderloin for its big moment, complete with plans for a new museum, an arts district and walking tours of “the world’s largest collection of historic single-room occupancy hotels.” And unlike, say, the Tenement Museum in New York, which offers tours of a long-unused Lower East Side apartment building, a trip to the Tenderloin could go a step further.

“We can bring people into an SRO and show them where people are living now,” Mr. Shaw said, referring to the single-room occupancy dwellings, or residential hotels, in the area. “And that’s a real plus.”

Mr. Shaw’s plan has the backing of Mayor Gavin Newsom, who announced a city grant last month to help promote “a positive identity for the Tenderloin” and to draw tourism to the area, in part by posting hundreds of plaques on buildings throughout the neighborhood “to create great visual interest for those walking down the community’s streets.”

And oh, what streets those are. Wedged between tourist-friendly Union Square and its liberal-friendly City Hall, the Tenderloin is one of the mostly densely populated areas west of the Mississippi, officials say, with some 30,000 people in 60 square blocks, almost all of which have at least one residential hotel. The district’s drug trade is so widespread, and so wide open, that the police recently asked for special powers to disperse crowds on certain streets. Deranged residents are a constant presence, and after dark the neighborhood can seem downright sinister, with drunken people collapsed on streets and others furtively smoking pipes in doorways.

All of which, Tenderloin fans contend, is as much a part of San Francisco as flashier, decidedly less seedy attractions like Chinatown or Coit Tower.

“I think a lot of San Franciscans appreciate the Tenderloin,” said Don S. Falk, the executive director of the Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Corporation, a nonprofit group that has renovated and operates 15 residential hotels in the Tenderloin. “It’s part of their identity.”

Encouraging adventure-seeking San Franciscans to visit may be easier than selling the Tenderloin to tourists, city tourism officials say. Laurie Armstrong, a spokeswoman for the San Francisco Convention and Visitors Bureau, called the recent efforts “a step in the right direction,” but added that it was a “very, very long road” to make the neighborhood appealing.

“At this point in time, there aren’t many reasons for visitors to go there,” Ms. Armstrong said. “We don’t really point people away from there, but our job is to point people to things that they can do. And there’s so many things to do in San Francisco.”

But Mr. Shaw begs to differ, saying the area is chockablock with historical nuggets, like the Hotel Drake, where Frank Capra lived as a starving young director in the early 1920s, or the Cadillac Hotel, built a year after the great 1906 earthquake and fire and where Muhammad Ali later trained. Jerry Garcia also lived at the Cadillac, and he and the Grateful Dead recorded several albums in the area at what is now Hyde Street Studios, as did other Bay Area bands like Creedence Clearwater Revival and Jefferson Airplane.

“And when Miles Davis came to town,” Mr. Shaw said, “he played in the Tenderloin.”

Mr. Shaw, who plans to open a $3 million museum in the Cadillac, believes that baby boomer music fans — and particularly baby boomer Deadheads — will be a core demographic for the Tenderloin, as well as those interested in the neighborhood’s “rich vice history,” which includes gambling dens, speakeasies and pornographic-movie houses.

“Most of which are gone,” the museum’s brochure notes, almost sadly.

Experts agree that the neighborhood has historical value, in part because its entrenched poverty and the city’s own prohibitive zoning have prevented development.

“Money sometimes is the enemy of historic preservation,” said Jay Correia, a historian with the California Office of Historic Preservation, which recommended the Tenderloin to the national register. “The irony is because the Tenderloin was economically disadvantaged, there were no funds to modernize.”

And while battles over maintaining low-income housing derailed some past efforts to develop the neighborhood, even Mr. Falk, of the nonprofit housing development corporation, says a little new development would not be a bad thing.

“In 1981, gentrification was the most important issue; in 2010, quality of life is the most important issue,” Mr. Falk said. “People with disposable income help local businesses be successful, and those local businesses help support homeless people.”

In addition to tourism — visitors spent nearly $8 billion in San Francisco in 2009 — city officials are also trying more traditional approaches, including applying for a $250,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts for public art on the neighborhood’s western border and backing a proposed 250,000-square-foot retail project on its eastern flank.

Mr. Shaw hopes to break ground on his museum by next year and will start posting promotional placards — inviting visitors to “walk, dine, enjoy” the Uptown Tenderloin — this summer. And more plaques are to be mounted on more buildings soon.

Whether posters and plaques are enough to conquer poverty remains to be seen. Chris Patnode, a ruddy-faced self-described wanderer who is staying in a local SRO, said he liked the idea of Tenderloin tourism and seemed to be willing to welcome outsiders. Just as long, of course, as they know when to come knocking.

“In daylight, it’d be O.K.,” said Mr. Patnode, 48. “But people aren’t going to want to come down here at night. I don’t even want to be here at night. And I’m staying here.”

Boosters of the Uptown Tenderloin plan tours of one of the many residential hotels, like the Alexander Residence, where Anthony Hack recently relaxed in the lobby.

A street in the Uptown Tenderloin district.

The Uptown Tenderloin is not a regular guidebook highlight.

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Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s “World on a Wire.” [NY Times]

2010-04-11T15:13:00.001-07:00

IT is perhaps inevitable that we are still catching up with Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who worked practically at the speed of thought and who died of a drug overdose in 1982 at 37, leaving behind more than 40 films. “World on a Wire,” an obscure two-part television movie he made in 1973, is a textbook example of a film that was ahead of its time. Head-trip cinema about virtual-reality immersions, it’s an analog-age “Avatar,” a movie that anticipates “Blade Runner”in its meditation on artificial and human intelligence and “The Matrix” in its conception of reality as a computer-generated illusion.

Since its broadcast on German television in October 1973, “World on a Wire” has gone largely unseen. Digitally restored by the Fassbinder Foundation under the supervision of its original cinematographer, Michael Ballhaus, a spiffed-up version of the three-and-a-half-hour film had its premiere in February at the Berlin Film Festival. Before that — according to Juliane Lorenz, Fassbinder’s longtime editor and the president of the Fassbinder Foundation — it had been shown on the big screen only a handful of times, at retrospectives in the ’90s. The film is set to receive its first ever theatrical run at the Museum of Modern Art in New York from April 14 through 19.

Adapted from “Simulacron-3,” a 1964 novel by Daniel F. Galouye, “World on a Wire” revolves around a cybernetics corporation that has created a miniature world populated with “identity units” unaware that they are being controlled from above. Toggling between dimensions, a researcher (Klaus Lowitsch) learns that what he has always known as the real world may itself be a simulation. This is the brand of existential horror that Philip K. Dick perfected (notably in “Time Out of Joint”) but that took off cinematically only in the late ’90s, in a subgenre that the writer Joshua Clover, in his book on “The Matrix,” terms “edge of the construct.” (Among the other movies in this cluster are“The Truman Show” and “The Thirteenth Floor,” another adaptation of “Simulacron-3,” for which Mr. Ballhaus was an executive producer.)

“We knew almost nothing about computers,” said Fritz Muller-Scherz, who wrote “World on a Wire” with Fassbinder. “But Rainer and I were fascinated by the question, If there are other artificial worlds, how can a real world even exist?”

The notion of Fassbinder tackling science fiction might seem strange given the extent to which his films are embedded in social and historical realities. More than any other figure of the New German Cinema, he insisted on showing what his countrymen failed to see or refused to remember, whether in a forbidden-love melodrama like “Ali: Fear Eats the Soul” (1974) or in his women’s pictures set during Germany’s postwar economic miracle, like “The Marriage of Maria Braun” (1979). But from the start Fassbinder was also taken with the subversive potential of genre filmmaking. “Love Is Colder Than Death” (1969) and “The American Soldier” (1970) are both gangster-movie riffs. “Whity” (1971), about a black slave in 19th-century America, is a pointedly revisionist western.

Science fiction is a ready-made sandbox for a filmmaker who never stopped wondering what it means to be human. “His main themes were all present: power, dependence, exploitation, manipulation,” Mr. Muller-Scherz said. The difference in “World on a Wire” is that the mind games play out not within an interpersonal context but on a cosmic scale.

Replete with chases and explosions, “World on a Wire” was conceived as cerebral entertainment. “We wanted to make a suspenseful film,” Mr. Muller-Scherz said, “but also one that would convey the seriousness of these scary ideas.” He added that he and Fassbinder had responded strongly to “the idea that we were remote-controlled in many ways.” The back cover copy on the original Bantam paperback hypes “Simulacron-3” as “a shattering picture of our world in the very near future, when Madison Avenue and the public opinion pollsters take over!” While the story predicts the rise of behavioral modeling as a capitalist tool, Fassbinder, born mere weeks after the German surrender in World War II, probably also had in mind the not-so-distant history of fascist social control.

While some interiors were filmed in Germany, Fassbinder found his dystopian urban landscapes in Paris. As Jean-Luc Godard had done with “Alphaville” (1965), Fassbinder used the city’s new architecture — underground shopping malls, hulking concrete high-rises — to suggest an ominous future world.

With a budget of 900,000 Deutschmarks (more than $300,000 at the time) and a 44-day shoot, “World on a Wire” was a large production by Fassbinder’s standards, although it was hardly the only project demanding his attention. He would shoot three more films in 1973 (including “Ali: Fear Eats the Soul”). The script was knocked out over six weekends in Paris, Mr. Muller-Scherz recalled, at a “crummy little bistro” where he and Fassbinder would take breaks from writing with rounds of pinball. During the week, they were in Bochum, Germany, splitting their time between a stage production with the director Peter Zadek and the set of “The Tenderness of Wolves,” a vampire movie directed by Ulli Lommel and written by Kurt Raab, both veterans of the Fassbinder company.

“World on a Wire” marks an evolutionary leap in the partnership between Fassbinder and Mr. Ballhaus, who shot 15 Fassbinder films before going on to a Hollywood career withMartin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola. While the Fassbinder films of the early ’70s have an almost theatrical flatness, the layered compositions and sinuous camera moves of “World on a Wire” anticipate hyperstylized later collaborations like “Chinese Roulette”(1976).

Mr. Ballhaus worked with Mr. Raab — who has a small role in “World on a Wire” and (as on most early Fassbinder films) handled the art direction — to outfit the chicly furnished locations with mirrors and glass objects. “They were important for a story where you never know what’s real or what’s a reflection,” Mr. Ballhaus said. Fassbinder’s love of mirrors as décor and alienation devices, inherited from his idol Douglas Sirk, reaches a dizzying peak in “World on a Wire.” Almost every shot features at least one mirror image; faces and bodies are reflected in tabletops, refracted through lamps, caught between infinity mirrors.

The constantly panning and tracking camera, which must often capture an actor’s reflection while avoiding its own, suggests painstaking preparation, but Fassbinder worked as he always did. He stayed away from the locations until the last possible moment, according to Mr. Ballhaus. The most byzantine maneuvers were devised on the spot. “I always had my own ideas,” Mr. Ballhaus said, “but he would usually think about it and come up with a better idea.”

By all accounts it was an untroubled shoot. Productivity was never an issue with Fassbinder, but the confusion between on- and off-camera drama could be. “It was a catastrophe when he let his private life get an upper hand,” said Mr. Lommel, who plays a snooping journalist in “World on a Wire.” “But I never saw him as disciplined as on this movie.”

Which isn’t to say it was all work all the time. The entourage spent most nights at a club called Alcazar, Fassbinder’s favorite Paris haunt, which is featured in a few scenes. Mr. Lowitsch (who died in 2002) pulled off an intense, often physical role despite being, as Mr. Lommel put it, “never not drunk.”

“It was his way of dealing with the pressure,” said Mr. Lommel, who was assigned to be Mr. Lowitsch’s chaperone and drinking buddy. Mr. Lommel said that he soon grew tired of the nightly benders — they often went straight from the bars to the set — but was instructed by Fassbinder to persist for the sake of the film.

Fassbinder did not rank “World on a Wire” among the Top 10 of his own movies (he was a compulsive list maker), but it seemed to be of some significance to him. In his notes for one of his most personal films, “In a Year of 13 Moons” (1978), a response to an ex-lover’s suicide, Fassbinder describes a scene (which never made it into the movie) in which the protagonist is reduced to tears while reading a novel about parallel realities called “Worlds on Wires.” Mr. Lommel said that the last time they spoke, in 1981, Fassbinder mentioned his hope that “World on a Wire” would one day be released as a movie.

The recent Berlin premiere of the restoration, presided over by Ms. Lorenz, was attended by Mr. Ballhaus, Mr. Muller-Scherz and many of the surviving cast members, including Gunter Lamprecht, Ingrid Caven and Mr. Lommel. The evening felt both like a reunion and a truce, with the various factions of Fassbinder associates that have recently feuded over his legacy setting aside their differences to honor a major rediscovery.

If anyone could get the old clan back together it would, of course, be the puppet master himself, still controlling his world on a wire. “You could say the film was a parallel to the Fassbinder universe,” Mr. Muller-Scherz said. “We were all collaborators who were emotionally dependent on each other.”

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Geography of the Body - Willard Maas - 1943

2010-04-11T10:03:00.001-07:00

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Chris Marker - Second Life Interview

2010-04-11T03:20:00.001-07:00

from:

http://www.criterion.com/current/posts/1143-chris-markers-second-life

Chris Marker's Second Life

t doesn’t really come as a surprise that Chris Marker is a devoted inhabitant of the virtual world Second Life. After all, one could call the playful French filmmaker and multimedia artist’s kitty—and alter ego—Guillaume-en-Egypt a trailblazing avatar (when asked for pictures of himself, he offers images of the cat instead). Now Marker, who rarely interacts with the public, will give a live guided tour of his Second Life archipelago, Ouvroir, and museum, in a special event at theHarvard Film Archive this Saturday, May 16. Of course, Marker will appear only in the form of his Second Life avatar, who will meet and converse with moderating avatars Haden Guest, the director of the archives, and Naomi Yang, of Exact Change Press (publishers of Marker’s important CD-ROM Immemory). At the end of the tour, he will also take questions from an audience avatar. The interaction will be screened live at the archive’s theater, and the event also includes projections of other Marker video and film pieces.

You can get a taste of what’s in store with these clips from Ouvroir (parts one, two, and three) and the spectacular, spectral museum. And to understand (a little!) better what Marker’s motivations were in getting involved with Second Life, read this interview with him, which appeared in the April 22–28, 2008, issue of the French weekly Les inrockuptibles, here for the first time in English. At eighty-seven, the editors wrote in the introduction to the piece, Marker “agreed to the rare interview on the condition it be conducted on Second Life, a screen rendezvous, complete with pseudonyms and avatars, for a political and poetic discussion.” There, Marker calls himself Sergei Murasaki, and the interviewers—Julien Gester and Serge Kaganski—Iggy Atlas. The latter add: “Through the intermediary of keyboards and screens, our conversation required unusual agility. The pace might make some replies seem a little short, but the process also shed light on the quasi-instantaneous crystallizations of an infinitely nimble and mischievous mind.” Translated by Dorna Khazeni.

Iggy Atlas: Why is this conversation on SL [Second Life] rather than in RL [real life]?
Sergei Murasaki: I hope it’ll go faster.
IA: How did you come to have an exhibition on SL?
SM: Curiosity at first. Then it becomes addictive.
IA: How so?
SM: Have you read Adolfo Bioy Casares’s The Invention of Morel?
IA: No, neither of us have read it. Shame on us?
SM: Well, it’s nothing to be proud of. In any event, it’s exactly the world of that masterpiece that I came to find in SL.
IA: Can you describe it for us?
SM: A dream state. The sense of porousness between the real and the virtual.
IA: Actually, what has your experience been in this virtual world?
SM: An example: when Serge told me there’d be two of you, my REFLEX was, “We’ll need a third chair.” Which in reality would be stupid, but isn’t here.
IA: This island, the objects that are here, the Museum . . . Are you their creator and owner?
SM: No, I’ve never been the owner of anything. Some Viennese friends took care of putting it all together. They’re pretty neat folks.
IA: How much time do you spend on SL?
SM: Not an enormous amount, because I still have LOTS of work in RL. But if I could . . .
IA: If you could?
SM: I would retire here for good. Like Brando in Tahiti. There’d be fewer worries in terms of maintenance.
IA: How do you perceive the way in which this virtual space and its users have invented a life, an economy, a virtual commerce of things and monies?
SM: The whole commerce aspect of it I find just as boring as I do in real life. Besides, I don’t understand it at all. But then again, I don’t understand the economy of the real world to begin with . . .
IA: How does SL fit into the context of your artistic preoccupations?
SM: I don’t believe I’ve ever had “artistic preoccupations.” I’m a cobbler. This is supercobbling.
IA: What you’ve managed to cobble to date, when it was made, seems to have prophesized today’s technologies, almost as if it was conjuring them, don’t you think?
SM: You really ought to lighten up your vocabulary. “Artistic,” “prophesize.” None of this is like me in the least. I think I’ll stick to cobbling, with all that’s inherently honorable in artisanal undertakings.
IA: Doesn’t SL, and don’t all these new ways of communicating, let you indulge your proclivity for secrecy and mystery?
SM: It would seem if you’re not on TV all the time, then you have a proclivity for mystery. Let’s just leave it at that. Though I did like that a critic, who wrote about the Zurich exhibition, said I was “born to be an avatar.”
IA: Precisely. The choice of a pseudonym, your absence from the media, make so much sense in this enterprise, and the adopting of a new virtual avatar.
SM: Are there any real avatars?
IA: Masks?
SM: Ah, that’s something else altogether. Max Jacob used to tell the story of two Masks who made a rendezvous, having never seen each other, naturally. And when they removed their masks, surprise: “It was neither one nor the other.”
IA: Is an avatar or a pseudonym a mask for you? A way of creating a partition between your cobbling and what the rest of the world calls “a work,” “of art” . . . ?
SM: I’m much more pragmatic than that. I chose a pseudonym, Chris Marker, that is easy to pronounce in most languages because I intended to travel. You need search no further than that.
IA: But since then, you’ve created a character that’s universally considered to be an artist.
SM: I never much worried about how I was considered.
IA: The delocalized exhibition on SL is entitled “A Farewell to the Movies.” How should this farewell be interpreted?
SM: Please . . . It’s “A Farewell TO Movies.” An homage to Hemingway. A way of saying farewell to cinema, undoubtedly, but without exaggerating. The constitutional right to contradict oneself was inscribed in the charter Baudelaire drew up.
IA: From a farewell to arms to a farewell to films . . . Should we consider that film is an arm?
SM: Of course not. That’s simply a euphonic correspondance. You must never attribute so much intentionality to me.
IA: So . . . does cinema belong to the past?
SM: One can play with that idea. Godard does it very well. But he is a filmmaker.
IA: Have you never considered yourself a filmmaker?
SM: Ne-ver.
IA: What label would you prefer, then? Multimedia cobbler?
SM: Cobbler, definitely. Multimedia . . . well, that belongs to contemporary jargon.
IA: Will new technologies in some way modify your relationship to images, to sounds, and what you do with them?
SM: Of course. To be able to make a whole film, The Case of the Grinning Cat [2004], with my own ten fingers, without any external support or intervention . . . and to then go sell the DVDs I’d burned myself at the Saint-Blaise market . . . I confess, I felt triumphant. From producer to consumer, directly. No surplus value. Marx’s dream come true.
IA: Speaking of which, the exhibition mixes portraits of artists, images from older and more recent demonstrations, photos of political personalities. How would you define the relationship between your cobbling and what is commonly called ideology?
SM: I’m afraid what is commonly called ideology no longer has any relationship at all with its original defintion. To begin with, it was a ruse of war. Today, it’s merely a substitute for a war that doesn’t exist. But we could go on about this at length . . .
IA: Hasn’t your work always had a political dimension?
SM: It has been said to. Myself, to put it in a nutshell, I’ve always said that politics, which is the art of compromise—and thank goodness for that—in no way interests me. What does interest me is history. I would add: “Politics interests me to the extent it cuts a slice into history.” But I hate repeating myself.
IA: In films such as 2084, your work outlined a hypothetical future. Today, there’s talk of the end of ideologies, you’re saying farewell to films, Godard talks about the death of cinema, the real is no longer all there is . . . What has been eclipsed for you, even as other things have been born?
SM: Malraux had a wonderful formula, which curiously no one has taken up: “The thing that is born where values die, and that does not replace them.” The difficulty of these times is that before bringing in new ideas, we’d have to destroy all the simulacra that the century and its favorite instrument, television, have generated to replace everything that has disappeared. This is why I’m passionate about the new information grid, the Internet, blogs, etc. Inevitably, there’s some slag, but a new culture will be born of it.
IA: And what is the culture you see born of it?
SM: Our grandchildren will decide. All one can say is that “something” exists. And for now, that’s something. To say more would be fortune-telling, or politics.
IA: You were saying that SL recaptured the spirit of The Invention of Morel for you. What part of your films does SL recapture for you?
SM: The presence of Guillaume the cat, anyhow. Did you notice how he’s made himself entirely at home over here?
IA: Haven’t you played a part in that?
SM: That’s a common error. It’s difficult to explain it to anyone who hasn’t been a cat in a past life, as is my case. Guillaume’s personality imposed itself on my Viennese accomplices without my ever having to ask. You can ask them yourself. Cats, you know, have certain powers.

IA: The real occupies a preponderant place in some of your films, from Sans Soleil [1982] toGrin Without a Cat [1977]. When you’re here, don’t you miss it?
SM: I wouldn’t have described Sans Soleil as a film that was particularly subjugated to the real. But if you say so . . .
IA: We didn’t say “subjugated” . . .
SM: When the real is truly present, it has a tendency to subjugate everything else . . .
IA: What in the RL preoccupies you today?
SM: If you mean “truly today,” I find the adventures of the Olympic torch fascinating. The skit in San Francisco was the most magnificent piece of slapstick I’ve seen in a long, long time.
IA: And more generally?
SM: Well, when one hears that a fellow, John Paulson, made three billion dollars on the stock market, and that four hours away by plane, in Haiti, there are food riots, it yanks you back to harsh reality.
IA: How do you get your information these days?
SM: International press publications online, CNN and Al Jazeera in English, and my favorite channel, the Russian RTR Planeta. And I have my informants here and there. There’s also the twentieth arrondissement’s blackbird, who gives me updates on all the neighborhood gossip at five every morning.
IA: What is it that keeps you so interested in the world’s movements? So acutely alert to it all?
SM: Curiosity. That’s all. I’ve never felt much of anything else.
IA: What kind of film viewer are you today?
SM: Alas, alas, alas . . .
IA: Alas?
SM: I’d always professed that cinema was to be seen only in a movie theater, that television was to be used as a memory aid only. Shamefully, I have perjured myself, simply because I no longer have the time.
IA: What films do you watch?
SM: It’s pretty anarchic. I really like great American television series. You mentioned politics. Has there been anything as good as The West Wing?
IA: How about The Wire?
SM: I was going to mention it next. But there I’d say sociology rather than politics. Only, they should have English subtitles.
IA: What, apart from politics and sociology, fascinates you in the proliferation of these series today?
SM: First their actual cinematic quality. It’s where all the innovation and invention is taking place. On every level: the story, the editing, the casting, the sound . . . They’re ahead of Hollywood.
IA: It seems you share this passion for American TV series with one of your friends, Alain Resnais. Is it something you two have discussed?
SM: I suppose it goes back to our passion for comic strips.
IA: Do you continue to follow the work of your old acquaintances, such as Alain Resnais, Agnès Varda, Jean-Luc Godard . . .
SM: Of course. Agnès is in the process of recording an interview with Guillaume . . . See what I told you?
IA: How would you present your life’s work, the sum of your cobbling, to a young person who didn’t know Chris Marker?
SM: I’d tell them to read The Invention of Morel.

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Boss Of It All – Lars von Trier - Streaming & Legal [indiemoviesonline]

2010-04-10T15:31:00.001-07:00

Streaming & legal - The Boss Of It All, directed by Lars von Trier.

http://www.indiemoviesonline.com/watch-movies/the-boss-of-it-all

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Richard Billingham - Fishtank [00:46:40 1998]

2010-04-10T14:09:00.001-07:00

"It's not my intention to shock, to offend, sensationalise, be political or whatever; only to make work that is as spiritually meaningful as I can make it—whatever the medium."

—Richard Billingham

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Vittorio Gassman - I Mostri - La strada è di tutti [Youtube]

2010-04-10T03:40:00.001-07:00

via http://www.newshelton.com/wet/dry/

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The Periodic Table of Imaginary Elements [Gizmodo]

2010-04-09T04:46:00.001-07:00

From: http://gizmodo.com/5513208/periodic-table-of-imaginary-sci+fi-elements

“All the life-sapping elements dreamed up by TV shows, movies, authors and game studios are here—including Kryptonite, Element X and Vibranium. Classified by media, energy potential and origin, naturally. [RussellWalks via Urlesque via Neatorama via Kotaku]”

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Virtual Reality Meets Reality, At French Conference [NY Times]

2010-04-09T04:01:00.001-07:00

From: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/04/08/virtual-reality-meets-reality-at-french-conference/?partner=rss&emc=rss

“

Alain Jocard/Getty Images A man explores the “holocubtile”, a 3D multitouch device, during the 12th edition of the Laval Virtual.

If you really want to see into the future, you might have to go to this year’s International Conference on Virtual Reality in Laval, France. The conference, in its 12th year, is dedicated solely to virtual technologies and virtual reality.

On display this year are a number of new bizarre robots that can be controlled virtually; you can see some examples of them, as well as of other gadgetry, in the promotional video from the conference, below. There are also several augmented reality tools, meant for advertising and teaching, and some futuristic surreal experiences that remind me of scenes from Star Trek’s holodeck.

Some of the virtual reality demos are very pie-in-the-sky and probably won’t see the real world for some years to come; others are just a few years away.

One gadget that particularly stands out is the “holocubtile,” a 3-D multitouch device, designed and developed by the French touch company Immersion. The cube, above, is a complete multitouch box that allows people to manipulate a projected 3-D object by sliding their hands across different sides of the cube. Users can pan and zoom, enlarge and twist, all by touching the five sides of the device.

Although a big draw for a device like this would be in-store marketing, it could also be extremely useful in schools, allowing students to navigate far-away places and objects in a fun and interactive way.

Here’s the video:

”

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South Park Episode - You Have 0 Friends ((tag, south park, facebook, technology, social, media))

2010-04-09T03:48:00.001-07:00

From: http://thecelebritycafe.com/feature/south-park-recap-you-have-zero-friends-04-08-2010

“Last night's episode of South Park slams the usage of Facebook.

Mufsin Mahbub

Last night’s South Park episode "You Have Zero Friends" slammed the social networking site Facebook with funny parodies and comical situations with the characters' Facebook usage.

While Cartman and Kyle were happy Facebook fans, adding friends and playing Farmsville, Stan didn't want to use the site by any means. Everyone pressured him to use it, including his depressed father (“So...we’re not friends?”)

“Dude, f— Facebook, seriously,” said Stan with a certain calmness.

But his buddies set up a page for him anyway, and Stan starts having trouble. He had to friend his buddies and even his family, including his dad and grandmother (His father goes “Stan, poke your grandma!”). Stan wanted nothing to do with the site, but when he tries to delete his account, he finds himself zapped into a virtual Facebook world where he had to play Yahtzee with his own big profile in a nice but weird moment.

The episode exploited Facebook as it truly is, a site where having a lot of friends is just a way to improve a person’s status. The episode targeted the older audience that uses Facebook as well as lonely kids. So, think twice before updating your status after watching this episode.”

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Visual tricks can make downloads seem quicker [New Scientist]

2010-04-09T03:31:00.001-07:00

</object>

“Twiddling our thumbs while waiting for files to download is one of the great frustrations of our high-speed, technologically interconnected world. Computer scientists are unlikely to eliminate the waiting any time soon – but they've done the next best thing.

Chris Harrison at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, and colleagues have shown that animated pop-up download progress bars which use visual illusions make the process seem around 10 per cent faster than it really is.

Apple already uses a a basic visual trick of this kind in its Mac OS X operating system, but Harrison's research suggests such techniques could be used to greater effect.

Previous research suggests that rhythmic stimuli can seem to create time-warping effects (PDF) and that the way we perceive motion depends on its context (PDF). With this in mind, Harrison's group generated a series of animated progress bars: some pulsated between pale and dark blue at varying speeds, and others had pale blue ripples moving either left or right, also at different rates, as the bar crept forward (see video).

They then showed different pairs of either pulsing or rippling animations to 20 volunteers, with each mocked-up download lasting exactly 5 seconds. Many participants said that progress bars which pulsated increasingly quickly made the download time seem shorter than those that pulsated increasingly slowly.

A significant number also said downloads were faster when ripples in the progress bars moved to the left rather than to the right.

Apple beater

Apple uses left-moving ripples that travel at a constant velocity for progress bars in Mac OS X. However, many of the volunteers in Harrison's study said that this type of animation appeared slower than one in which the left-moving ripples slowed down as the download neared completion.

In a second part of the study the researchers sought to quantify the time-bending effect of the visual illusions by asking the volunteers to compare a progress bar with slowing ripples with a bar that neither pulsated nor rippled. During these tests the time it took the rippling progress bar to complete the mock download was gradually lengthened, while the download time for the standard bar was left the same, until the volunteers felt that both had completed the operation in the same length of time.

They found that, on average, a 5.61-second rippling progress bar appeared to take the same amount of time as a 5-second standard bar, and a 16.75-second-long rippling bar seemed to take as long as a 15-second-long standard bar – illusory speeding-up effects of 10.9 per cent and 10.4 per cent respectively.

A watched bar

That could matter to computer users, says Harrison. "A good number of progress bars are between 5 and 15 seconds," he says. "For longer operations, you might go on to other tasks and not look at the progress bar."

"It is not uncommon for [such] illusions to have a measured magnitude of around 10 per cent," says George Mather, a psychologist at the University of Sussex, UK.

Harrison and colleagues will present their work at the Association for Computing Machinery 2010 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in Atlanta, Georgia, next week.”

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Smoking Robot Has 2-Pack an Hour Habit [Wired]

2010-04-09T02:32:00.001-07:00

CDC’s Smoking Robot Has 2-Pack an Hour Habit

A pack-a-day habit is nothing. This robot inhales two packs an hour. The Cerulean model SM450 is typically sold to tobacco companies for product testing (price: low six figures), but the one below is used for research at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. Its row of Teflon “mouths” can suck down 20 lit cigarettes simultaneously. Glass-fiber pads on the faux lips trap particulates (tar, lead, mercury, and highly carcinogenic nitrosamines), while gases like carbon monoxide and benzene are collected in separate compartments. Since 2007, the device has helped in several key findings. For instance, the CDC now knows that domestic cigarettes tend to have higher levels of nitrosamines; brands popular overseas have more of the dreaded polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. Pick your poison!

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Avatar Eye Movements Scrutinised for Lies [New Scientist] [Second Life] ((tag: second, life, lies, t

2010-04-08T08:07:00.001-07:00

from: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20627555.600-avatars-cant-hide-your-lyi...

"ARE you being lied to online? Spotting when someone is telling the truth could soon become easier, thanks to avatars that can mimic our real-world eye movements.

Most virtual worlds, such as Second Life, are populated by avatars with static or pre-programmed gazes. One way to make interactions feel more realistic is to reproduce a person's eye movement on their avatar, say William Steptoe of University College London and colleagues. Now they have found this makes it easier to spot whether an avatar is telling the truth.

The researchers asked 11 volunteers personal questions, such as to name their favourite book, and told them to lie in some of their answers. During the interviews, the volunteers wore eye-tracking glasses that recorded their blink rate, direction and length of gaze, and pupil dilation.

A second group of 27 people then watched a selection of clips of avatars as they delivered the first group's answers. Some avatars had eye movements that mirrored those of the original volunteers, while others had no eye movement at all. The volunteers were asked whether they believed the avatars were being truthful or lying.

On average, the participants were able to identify 88 per cent of truths correctly when the avatars had eye movement, but only 70 per cent without. Spotting lies was harder, but eye movement helped: 48 per cent accuracy compared with 39 per cent without. Steptoe will present the results at the 2010 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in Atlanta, Georgia, next week.

It is unclear exactly how the eye movements help. The eye-tracking glasses did show that people tended to hold the gaze of the interviewer for longer when telling the truth than when lying. "Perhaps they were overcompensating," says Steptoe. What's more, their pupils dilated more when lying - something previous studies have linked with the greater cognitive load required for deception. "This is one of a small handful of cues that you can't control," says Steptoe.

Enhancing expressive features such as eye movement could eventually make avatar-mediated communication feel more trustworthy than online video, because only relevant visual cues need to be displayed, says Steptoe. "This means you can emphasise certain behaviours."

The technology could help in business meetings held in virtual environments, or to enhance communication between people with social phobias, where face-to-face interaction can seem daunting, says Steptoe.

Ralph Schroeder of the University of Oxford says the work is "a big step forward" in virtual communication. This work is "unique in showing that if you give an avatar eyes that blink and move, people will treat them in a highly real way", he says."

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Bank's Headquarters Are So Big That You Need Robot Guides [Gizmodo]

2010-04-08T05:53:00.001-07:00

"Turns out that there's a financial center in Madrid, Spain which is so damn big and confusing to navigate that you'll desperately need these multilingual robots to guide you around. Here's how it works—in-action video and all:

You stroll up to where the mechanical swarm is waiting, tip-tap your way through a menu on a robot's touchscreen to select your preferred language, pick a destination, and off you go.

The robots are about knee-high and zip back and forth through the Santander Group's financial complex in Madrid. They're clever enough to avoid running into people, other robots, or any of the LED panel covered columns around the complex while promptly getting you to your destination."

from: http://gizmodo.com/5512140/banks-headquarters-are-so-big-that-you-need-robot-guides

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Simon Cowell converting to Islam [New Statesman]

2010-04-07T06:00:00.001-07:00

“Cowell may or may not convert but all Muslims need to confront the ban too many countries place on apostasy.

Simon Cowell. Photograph: Getty Images

Is Simon Cowell about to convert to Islam? The family of his fiancée, Mezhgan Hussainy, apparently wants the billionaire music mogul to become a Muslim if the couple are to marry. "They're very westernised, but no one in their family has ever married a non-Muslim - and they're not willing for their youngest daughter to become the first," a "source" is reported to have said of Hussainy's Afghan-born parents.

So will Simon become Suleiman? "Don't convert to Islam, Simon. Don't do it," says the right-wing US pundit Debbie Schlussel on her blog. For once, I can't help but agree. What do Muslims gain from the conversion of Cowell? New tunes? It frustrates me how my co-religionists get so excited at the prospect of people converting to Islam, especially celebrities. Last year, I was inundated with emails claiming Michael Jackson had been on the verge of a deathbed conversion to Islam. Heaven forbid.

“Islam is the fastest-growing religion on earth," Muslim friends say with glee. Indeed, but I don't know how adding to the world's Muslim population helps reduce the theological, political, cultural and socio-economic problems blighting its communities. I sympathise with the senior Indian Muslim cleric who revealed to me his (private) advice to Hindus considering converting: "Don't bother. Not until we Muslims get our house in order.”

Full article: http://www.newstatesman.com/religion/2010/04/islam-muslim-freedom-convert

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Alfred Hitchcock BBC Interview (1964) - On Content & Technique "...reality is something none of us can stand."

2010-04-07T05:46:00.001-07:00

On Content, Technique, Horror, Sentimental Films, "A Good Cry", "The Satisfaction of Temporary Pain" & "...reality is something none of us can stand."

BBC Television interview with Alfred Hitchcock first shown on "Monitor" (1964).

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North Korean Red Star operating system details emerge [BBC]

2010-04-06T06:38:00.001-07:00

From: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8604912.stm

'North Korean software' revealed

Details of a home-grown computer operating system developed by North Korea have emerged.

It is the first time details of the software, known as Red Start and thought to have been developed in 2002, have been scrutinised or made public.

A Russian blogger who studies in North Korea said Red Star is now available for purchase in the Korean capital.

The Russian blogger, identified only as Mikhail, said Red Star could be bought in Pyongyang for around $5.

Analysis run on the operating system by the Science and Technology Policy Institute in neighbouring South Korea said it has features aimed at monitoring user activity.

It was designed "to control [North Korea's] own information security", the report said.

"Due to few applicable programmes available, Red Star will not even by easily distributed in North Korea," it added.

Web content in Korea is already heavily censored and very few North Koreans own a computer or have internet access.

Pigeon mail

The report also said that North Korea has launched a cyber-war unit that targets sites in South Korea and the US.

In July last year South Korea experienced a wave of cyber-attacks which attempted to paralyse a number of websites. US websites including the Pentagon and the White House were also targeted.

Reports suggested that the attacks might have originated in North Korea.

The operating system represents the determination of North Korea to advance its own computer technology, based on its "Juche" self-reliance philosophy.

The Red Star operating system uses a popular Korean folk song as its start-up music and numbers years using a calendar which starts counting from the birth of state founder Kim Il-sung.

It is Linux-based but is heavily influenced by Microsoft with versions of the software giant's Office programmes.

It runs only in the Korean language and takes 15 minutes to install.

It has games, an e-mail system known as Pigeon and an internet browser believed to be a copy of Mozilla's Firefox - which has the North Korean government website as a home page.

The US government has banned the uploading and downloading of open source code to residents of a handful of countries on its sanctions list, which includes North Korea.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/technology/8604912.stm

Published: 2010/04/06 12:26:50 GMT

See and download the full gallery on posterous

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Marcel Proust & The Metro [The Guardian]

2010-04-05T16:37:00.001-07:00

From: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/apr/03/parisians-adventure-history-graham-robb

"Some of those Pompeians, as the fire of heaven rained down on them, descended into the corridors of the Métro, knowing that they would not be alone there; and the darkness that irradiates everything like a new element abolishes the first phase of pleasure and offers direct access to a domain of caresses that is normally attained only after a certain length of time.(Proust)

He had promised himself that, one night or day, he would witness those "secret rites" for himself."

"In 1906, at the age of 35, when his literary baggage was extremely light, he was already acquainted with the law of modern life according to which one's immediate surroundings remain a mystery while distant places seen in guidebooks and paintings are as familiar as old friends whose material presence is no longer required to maintain the friendship. The Métropolitain, whose rumble was perceptible to the spiders on the ceiling, might as well have been a fantasy of HG Wells. This, combined with an inability to leave his apartment, explains why, when very few Parisians had never taken the Métro, and when more kilometres were travelled every day in Paris than on the entire rail network, Marcel Proust had yet to descend to the Métropolitain. He had never, as far as we know, even written the word; nor had any of his friends ever mentioned it. In August, he had tried to reach the Père-Lachaise cemetery in order to attend his uncle's funeral, but had spent two hours wheezing in the Saint-Lazare railway station, galvanising his asthmatic lungs with coffee before returning to his apartment."

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Google Offer Hotline for "Suicide" Search [U.S.]

2010-04-05T16:07:00.001-07:00

via @HuffPostComedy
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/05/technology/05google.html

‘Suicide’ Query Prompts Google to Offer Hotline
As with any omniscient being, you can ask Google anything. You just don’t know what the answer is going to be.

That changed slightly last week when the Google search engine started automatically giving a suggestion of where to call after receiving a search seemingly focused on suicide.

Among the searches that result in an icon of a red phone and the toll-free number for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline are “ways to commit suicide” and “suicidal thoughts.” The information takes precedence over the linked results and is different and more prominent than an advertisement. Guidance on suicide prevention was suggested internally and was put in place on Wednesday.

This is only the second time Google has added such guidance on troubling search terms, Dr. Roni Zeiger, chief health strategist for Google, said in an interview. A few months ago, the search engine began providing a phone number for the national poison control hotline after searches like “poison emergency.”

He said the idea came from a Google user.
“A mother wrote in a suggestion to us — her daughter had swallowed something that she thought was dangerous, and she had a hard time finding poison control,” Dr. Zeiger said. “Now when you search for poison control or similar queries, we make it straightforward to find the number for poison control.”

“That got us thinking,” he said.
No search engine is a mind reader, of course, and many searches like “I want to end my life” do not elicit the suicide warning.
And there is the wrinkle that Google prides itself on giving users the exact information they are looking for. Functions like Google Suggest, which employ an algorithm to anticipate what a user is looking for based on the first words typed in the search box, can act as an unwitting guide. Under Google Suggest, for example, once you start typing in “ways to kill ...,” the function completes the sentence as “your self without pain.”

“We looked at many of the possible queries that could reflect interest in the topic,” Dr. Zeiger said about Google’s efforts. “We are starting relatively conservatively.”

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Click On - Radio4 [ListenAgain] - Prisoners & Technology, Voice synthesis & The Future of the Internet

2010-04-05T13:35:00.001-07:00

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00rt7rr
"Last broadcast today, 16:30 on BBC Radio 4.

SYNOPSIS
Simon Cox explores the different ways the digital world is changing how we live our lives. This week:
Don't do the Crime if you must be online - Is technology allowing criminals to continue their activities beyond their cell walls? Illicit mobile phone use by inmates has grown to the extent that authorities have promised to install jamming devices in all UK prisons. Meanwhile there's been a crack down on prisoners using social networking sites like Facebook. Balanced against this is the knowledge that allowing prisoners to keep social and family contacts prevents reoffending. So how has technology changed what it means to doing your time?

Lost in translation - we compare the various technologies aiming to translate foreign languages. Which is best; online tools, the latest app for your smart phone or the trusty phrasebook?
The future of the internet and how to stop it! Simon talks to Harvard Law School's Professor Jonathan Zittrain about why he believes the latest gadgets might be the undoing of the internet.
Voice synthesis - Ever wondered where the voices come from while you're hanging on the phone to a automated call handling service? Reporter Peter McManus visits one of the UK's leading designers of Synthetic voices - Edinburgh University spin out company Cereproc."

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Alfred Hitchcock Interview - On the Superfluousness of Actors, Tension, Relief & Humour

2010-04-05T12:50:00.001-07:00

If someone could tell me the name of the the Russian film-maker / film mentioned at the beginning of this clip, I would be very grateful.

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Pamela Anderson Landscaped

2010-04-04T16:42:00.001-07:00

Video: Pamela Anderson & Tommy Lee sex tape edited & landscaped.
Audio: "Nepalese Singing Bowl.wav" from FreeSound project. http://www.freesound.org/samplesViewS...
Thanks to FreeSound user Benboncan for uploading the recording.

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Honey Dolls oral sex head [Youtube]

2010-04-03T15:47:00.001-07:00

via: http://iscreamyouscream.wordpress.com/

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Mystery of Floating Feet

2010-04-03T08:53:00.001-07:00

A news story which I remembered from a while back, doesn't seem to be any updates.

Foot mystery baffles Mounties
BBC News
When two unrelated human feet washed up on the beaches of two small islands north of Vancouver in six days last August, a police spokesman said the odds of it happening were a million to one. This week the number of feet found rose to five.

What's going on? Police in British Columbia are confounded, saying they have never seen a case like it.
The feet have all been recovered along the shorelines of the Strait of Georgia, which lies to the south and west of Vancouver.

They were all encased in trainers, and most are right feet. Police say they have found no evidence of the feet being severed and that it is not clear whether a crime has been committed.
DNA has been collected from some of them, but police say that there has been no match to anyone on their missing persons database.

The unusual nature of the case has prompted much amateur speculation about murder mysteries, links to organised crime or to the 2004 Asian tsunami.
Local origin
“ The fact that they are being found repeatedly along the same stretch means they have to have come from roughly the same source ”
Dr Simon Boxall
Experts initially speculated that the feet could have drifted more than 1,500 miles.
However, as the number has risen, estimates of the distance travelled have fallen.
Curtis Ebbesmeyer, a Seattle-based oceanographer who specialises in how things float on the ocean's currents has dismissed any connection with the Asian tsunami, on the grounds that the distance is just too vast.

He has suggested that the feet could be a result of a possible accident along the Fraser River, which washed down and spread out along the Strait of Georgia.
Dr Simon Boxall, an oceanographer from the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton in the UK, agrees that the feet are unlikely to have travelled far.

Why feet?
"The fact that they are being found repeatedly along the same stretch means they have to have come from roughly the same source, and that source is likely to be local," he told the BBC News website.

He added that because of the way objects are dispersed by ocean currents, the odds are very low of five feet that originated hundreds of miles away ending up in one relatively small area.
If, for example, they had travelled from as far away as Hawaii, there would have to have been thousands in the first place for so many to turn up in one area, he said.
In his view, it's a coincidence that most of the feet are right feet, as there is no reason why right and left feet should float in different ways.

And why is it that just feet have been found?
Mr Ebbesmeyer was quoted in the Vancouver Sun as saying that when bodies decompose, they break into 10 pieces, two arms, two legs, two feet, two hands, the head and the torso.

Experts say that it's the running shoes that explain why only the feet are turning up.
They would have helped keep the decomposing feet intact, and protect them from fish. The soles would also have helped them float, allowing them to be swept away from the rest of the body.

Plane crash
“ This might take a long time. This is not CSI ”
Delta Police Constable Sharlene Brooks
Police have said it is possible the feet come from the passengers aboard a small plane which crashed into the water in the region several years ago - their bodies were never recovered.
The Coroners Service of British Columbia has investigated this idea but to date, it has failed to match DNA samples collected from members of the crash victims' families with DNA obtained from some of the mystery feet.

Dr Joseph Finley, a physical scientist and retired special agent with the FBI, told Canada's National Post newspaper that depending on the race of the victims, the feet might belong to stowaways who hid on commercial ships heading for Alaska.

Dr Boxall acknowledges that forensic scientists working to recover DNA profiles from feet could have an extremely difficult task on their hands.
Even if the remains are identified, scientists may not be able to determine how and when the victims died.

"Seawater can be horrendous," he says. "It can corrode very quickly or, bizarrely, it can preserve things quite well - it depends on how much biological activity there is at the time."
Dr Gail Anderson, a specialist in decomposition at the Simon Fraser University was quoted in the New Scientist as saying that we "know next to nothing about what happens to bodies under water" but she added that feet normally come apart from legs.

Flesh immersed in water turns into adipocere tissue, she says, a soap-like substance, that no microbes or scavengers such as crabs will eat.
It is likely the case will remain a mystery for some time. As one investigator put it this week, this is not CSI - a reference to popular fictional TV show in which challenging forensic cases are solved in no time.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/world/americas/7463305.stm
Published: 2008/06/19 13:37:35 GMT

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Mark Kermode's Anti-3D Glasses

2010-04-01T06:39:00.001-07:00

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Mike Nelson is chosen to fill the British pavilion at the 2011 Venice Biennale [New Statesman]

2010-04-01T05:34:00.001-07:00

From: http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/cultural-capital/2010/03/british-pavilion-nelson-work

A room of his own

A Psychic Vacuum by Mike Nelson, New York, 2007

It's almost 10 years since the British artist Mike Nelson was first nominated for the Turner Prize (Martin Creed won in 2001 with his Sewell-baiting Work No. 227, the lights going on and off). In 2007, he was again pipped to the post, that year by Mark Wallinger. Earlier in 2001 at the Venice Biennale, I had experienced Nelson's mysterious labyrinthine work for the first time in a disused brewery on the Giudecca entitled The Deliverance and The Patience.

I say experienced because this was literally the case -- opening a small, unremarkable wooden door you were plunged into a series of eery, interconnected rooms, initially unsure whether this was a "found" space, co-opted by the artist, or in fact the work itself. As you progressed through a maze of ever stranger windowless room-sets it became clear that the art was indeed all around you: the enveloping walls making you the unwitting characters within your own ephemeral performance piece.

Here, as in Nelson's subsequent pieces at Tate Britain and elsewhere, there was a sense of recent absence from these rooms, as if their inhabitants had just vacated the space, Marie Celeste-like -- whether it was a dingy sweatshop, a naval-themed bar or a shabby travel agents. Throughout his work, there's always a sense of menace, the feeling that something unpleasant may have happened here, or that someone may have escaped from danger. But there's also something familiar, as if we are intruding on our own half-remembered dreams -- walking down endless corridors, through multiple doors, getting brief snapshots of other lives.

Since first encountering Nelson (and seeing other installations by him), I've found echoes of his work in various, disparate, places: from the obvious similarities of art installations such as Christoph Buchel's vast and disturbing 2007 work, Simply Botiful, in the now demolished Coppermill off Brick Lane, and Polish artist Robert Kusmirowsk's 2009 site-specific deserted World War II Bunker in the Barbican Curve; to the bizarre physical theatre of Shunt in the dank railway arches beneath London Bridge.

Even watching films from the schlocky slasher franchise Saw, its characters stumbling helplessly from derelict room to room caught in a sick killer's game made me wonder if the set designers had ever had a brush with Mike Nelson; while conversely it is now hard for me to think back to the Nelson experience without bringing to mind photos of the real-life horror of Josef Fritzl's keller or Jaycee Dugard's makeshift backyard prison.

Now, neatly, a decade on Nelson has been chosen to represent Britain at next year's Venice Biennale, putting him among such recent luminaries as Mark Wallinger, Chris Ofili, Tracey Emin and last year's Steve McQueen, and giving him a much wider audience. He'll have free rein in the late 19th-century pavilion, formerly a restaurant but converted by the architect E A Rickards in 1909 to showcase British art (organised by the British Council since its formation in 1937).

It's potentially the perfect space for Nelson's site-specific work: already a structure with a mixed past and a distinctive classical Italianate style; already resonant with the ghosts of decades of British contemporary art, the footsteps of thousands of past viewers -- a blank canvas with a history, perhaps. What can we expect? No details yet, but if Nelson creates something as intriguing and and physically expansive as he did back in 2001, this will be the pavilion reconfigured as never before. If you go to the Biennale, I hope you're as equally impressed as I was by his corridors of power.

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Chris Marker - Junkopia [UbuWeb]

2010-03-31T05:36:00.001-07:00

http://www.ubu.com/film/marker_junkopia.html

“Chris Marker, John Chapman & Frank Simeone (1981, 6 min)
One day, at the stroke of evening, on Emeryville beach in San Francisco, where unidentified artists, leave, without anyone knowing, sculptures manufactured with items that have washed ashore from the sea.
This includes a short introduction by arte, approx. 1:12 secs long, with the film being around 6 minutes itself....there are 2 intertitles in the film itself, giving the latitudanal and longitudanal co-ordinates of the beach. No subtitles required.”

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mflow

2010-03-26T02:32:00.001-07:00

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/social-media/7513904/Music-matters-especially-online.html

“Daniel Ek says that the new version of Spotify, which is due for release some time in the next few months, will make sharing much more integral to the experience. Next month a new service, mflow, will be launched that puts sharing at the heart of the service.

Without its community element mflow is just like the iTunes music store. You can search for tracks, listen to 30-second snippets and then pay to download them. However, the service has a Twitter-like element that allows you to follow people and for them to follow you back. You can "flow" music to your followers, which allows them to hear the entire song – not just the 30-second snippet. If they buy it you get 20 per cent of the price, which you can use to buy more music.

Once you begin following a few people on mflow your in-box soon fills up with shared tracks, each accompanied by a short message – of 140 characters, like Twitter – from the person who shared it. Pretty soon you have your own personal radio station, programmed by your friends. It’s the first internet music service I’ve come across that has no real offline equivalent. The key will be getting enough people on board to make it work.

Legal online music services are now clearly better than their illicit competitors. However, many in the industry are concerned that streaming services cannot attract the numbers of listeners required to replace lost revenue from retail. Most people would agree that 'music matters’. The industry is about to find out just how much.

Reader offer

:: The Telegraph has 1,000 invites for mFlow. Go to www.mflow.com and enter the invite code SHANER99 to download the player.”

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Flash Mobs Take Violent Turn in Philadelphia [NY Times]

2010-03-25T05:43:00.001-07:00

From: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/25/us/25mobs.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&src=ig

“PHILADELPHIA — It started innocently enough seven years ago as an act of performance art where people linked through social-networking Web sites and text messaging suddenly gathered on the streets for impromptu pillow fights in New York, group disco routines in London, and even a huge snowball fight in Washington.

But these so-called flash mobs have taken a more aggressive and raucous turn here as hundreds of teenagers have been converging downtown for a ritual that is part bullying, part running of the bulls: sprinting down the block, the teenagers sometimes pause to brawl with one another, assault pedestrians or vandalize property.”

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'The Last Advertising Agency on Earth' [Saatchi & Saatchi]

2010-03-25T03:51:00.001-07:00

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Post-Apocalyptic Future: Container Trucks Recycled Into Mobile Homes [Gizmodo]

2010-03-24T03:59:00.001-07:00

LINK: http://gizmodo.com/5500765/your-post+apocalyptic-future-container-trucks-recycled-into-mobile-homes

Designer Aristide Antonas says, these keg apartments:

"...can be detached from their cars and can form more stable units for a certain period. A big circular window can be introduced in the vehicle's cylinder towards the car's side with the use of an enforced circular frame. This will give the form of a window open to the driver's section or to any chosen view if the keg stops in a particular way. The circular window can also serve as a projection screen surface if a special tissue is unfolded."

See and download the full gallery on posterous

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Celebrity's "soul is exhausted"

2010-03-24T02:56:00.001-07:00

I have no idea who Julia Allison is, and nor can I access the Gawker page [http://gawker.com/5500735/julia-allison-quits-the-internet] beyond what I can see from iGoogle due to work internet security, but I gather she is an internet celebrity/meme/persona/personality/something. But I like her statement.

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"Pongdrian" (b3ta)

2010-03-22T07:55:00.001-07:00

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DO PEOPLE HECKLE? [Adam Curtis]

2010-03-19T02:22:00.001-07:00

Full blog post & video here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/2010/02/do_people_heckle.html

“In 1966 one of the most brilliant American New Wave movie directors - Joseph Strick - made a documentary for the BBC. It was about heckling in the British general election of that year. It is great piece of verite film-making.”

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Four Lions Trailer

2010-03-18T14:50:00.001-07:00

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March 17, 1953: The Black Box Is Born [Wired]

2010-03-17T05:15:00.001-07:00

From Wired: http://www.wired.com/thisdayintech/2010/03/0317warren-invents-airplane-black-box/

“1953: After several high-profile crashes of de Havilland Comet airliners go unsolved, Australian researcher David Warren invents a device to record cockpit noise and instruments during flight.

During the first half of aviation’s history, crashes rarely came with any answers. Even if an eyewitness saw an airplane crash, little was known of the cause or what pilots might have been aware of before the crash.

In the early 1950s, the world’s first jet-powered airliner, the de Havilland Comet, crashed several times. Warren, a researcher at the Aeronautical Research Laboratories in Melbourne, Australia, believed if the pilot’s voices could be recorded, as well as instrument readings, the information could help determine the cause of a crash — and help prevent them. His device was called a “Flight Memory Unit.”

By 1957, the first prototypes of the device were produced. Early versions could record up to four hours of voice and instrument data on a steel foil. Warren believed the device would be popular and help solve the mysteries behind aviation crashes, but the device was initially rejected by the Australian aviation community for privacy issues.

Eventually, British officials accepted the idea of a flight data recorder and Warren began producing FDRs in crash- and fire-proof containers and selling them to airlines around the world. After a 1960 crash in Queensland, where the cause could not be determined, the Australian government required all commercial airplanes carry a recorder. The country became the first to require the use of the devices.

Early recorders logged basic flight conditions such as heading, altitude, airspeed, vertical accelerations and time. Today’s FDRs can record many more parameters including throttle and flight-control positions. Analyzing so many parameters allows investigators to recreate most of the pilot-controlled activity in the moments leading up to a crash. In recent years, digital reproductions of flights using FDR data have been valuable in recreating accidents and analyzing both the problems leading to the crash and the pilots’ response.

Modern FDRs, aka “black boxes,” are actually bright orange. They must withstand several tests, including fire and piercing, and the ability to withstand the pressure of being submerged to 20,000 feet below the ocean. Perhaps most impressive is their ability to withstand a 3,400-g crash-impact test. To aid in recovery, a locator-beacon signal is emitted for up to 30 days.

While early designs recorded the information onto a steel foil, modern FDRs use solid-state memory that can be downloaded almost instantly. This data can also be checked during routine maintenance inspections to monitor the performance of aircraft.

Future improvements to flight recorders include the possibility of transmitting flight data in real time to ground stations, which would eliminate the need to physically find the flight data recorder. Interest in this kind of in-flight transmission of data gained momentum after Air France flight 447 disappeared over the Atlantic in 2009 and a flight data recorder could not be found.

Source: Various

Photo: Officials transfer the TWA Flight 800 flight data recorder from saltwater into freshwater on July 25, 1996, at the Coast Guard station in East Moriches, New York.
Associated Press/US Coast Guard”

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Phishing attacks on the rise [New Statesman]

2010-03-15T05:38:00.001-07:00

Full article: http://www.newstatesman.com/technology/2010/03/phishing-rise-spammers

“Spammers used the earthquake in Chile to spread malware, just as they had done with the Haitian earthquake a month earlier. Symantec also noted that there had been a rise in the number of spam emails using recalls by car manufacturers such as Toyota and Honda as bait.”

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Double Take - Trailers & The Making of

2010-03-14T11:49:00.001-07:00

Trailer 1:
Trailer 2:

Trailer 3:
Trailer 4:

Trailer 5:
The Making of Double Take with Johan Grimonprez and Tom McCarthy:

(OCTOBER 15TH, 2009 - DOMZAAL, VOORUIT)

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Chris Petit - Content

2010-03-14T06:38:00.001-07:00

from Channel4:
"Thirty years ago, Chris Petit directed Radio On, now considered a road movie cult classic which caught the zeitgeist of the Britain of the time.

Now showing in the True Stories strand, Content is described by Petit as, "an ambient 21st century road movie", a meditative essay inspired by the almost trancelike state the act of driving can bring.
With the narrative provided by Hanns Zischler, the film is variously about memories of other journeys from Texas through to Poland, the impact of modern technology and the rise of the huge impersonal factory sheds which now line roads throughout the world."

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Chief exorcist says Devil is in Vatican

2010-03-14T03:01:00.001-07:00

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/vaticancityandholysee/7416458/Chief-exorcist-says-Devil-is-in-Vatican.html
Father Gabriele Amorth said people who are possessed by Satan vomit shards of glass and pieces of iron.

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London in the Raw

2010-03-13T13:24:00.001-08:00

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Russian Hackers [BBC World Service Podcast]

2010-03-13T01:28:00.001-08:00

Podcast here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p006j7qf

"Russian hackers are gaining a worrying reputation as skilled proponents of cybercrime and cyberwarfare.
Sarah Rainsford travels to Moscow to meet a 20 year old who claims to have penetrated Russian, Georgian and US government computers. S
he investigates why Russian hackers are becoming so proficient, meets students learning the arts of cyber defence and attack and asks the Russian cyberpolice what they are doing to rein in the criminals."

Behind the scenes:

</object>

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"Gloomy Octopus" and HD TV

2010-03-12T06:36:00.001-08:00

</object>

“Gloomy octopuses (Octopus tetricus) reacted to films shown on liquid crystal high definition television (HDTV) as if they were seeing the real thing, according to a new study by Renata Pronk at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, and colleagues. "They lunge forwards to attack crabs and back off from other octopuses, much as they do in the wild," says Hanlon

…Previous attempts to get octopuses to respond to videos failed, probably because they used CRT, which displays footage at a rate of 24 frames per second – too slowly for their sophisticated eyes. "The images that they see on CRT screens are incomplete and probably incoherent," says Hanlon”

From new Scientist, Full article:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18640-gloomy-octopus-is-moody-octopus.html?DCMP=OTC-rss&nsref=online-news

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Bluetooth kidnap drama

2010-03-11T09:01:00.001-08:00

From: http://www.brandrepublic.com/DigitalPMBulletin/news/989819/Kidnapped-girl-targets-tonights-commuters-Bluetooth-drama/?DCMP=EMC-Media-PM-Bulletin

'Kidnapped' girl targets tonight's commuters in Bluetooth drama

LONDON - The world's first ever Bluetooth delivered drama is launching tonight at London Euston Station.

At 5.30 pm, each Bluetooth active mobile phone in the Euston area will receive an audio file that contains a message from Sylvia, a 19 year old Slovakian girl who explains that she has been kidnapped, trafficked and is now awaiting transportation to "somewhere else".

She asks the recipient to meet her at a specific spot in the station, where she is being guarded by her captor Serge.
Once the recipient goes to that spot, Sylvia will then interact with them as part of a real-life drama.The drama has created by television and music video director Charlie Salem, who previously launched mobile soap opera.Developed by Bluetooth Proximity Marketing specialists Merlin Systems Corp, the drama aims to show consumers the effectiveness of Bluetooth marketing techniques.

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Yukio Mishima - On Boredom & Death [English Subtitles]

2010-03-11T05:46:00.001-08:00

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Mobile that allows bosses to snoop on staff developed

2010-03-11T02:26:00.001-08:00

Researchers have produced a mobile phone that could be a boon for prying bosses wanting to keep tabs on the movements of their staff.

Japanese phone giant KDDI Corporation has developed technology that tracks even the tiniest movement of the user and beams the information back to HQ. It works by analysing the movement of accelerometers, found in many handsets.

Activities such as walking, climbing stairs or even cleaning can be identified, the researchers say. The company plans to sell the service to clients such as managers, foremen and employment agencies.

"Technically, I think this is an incredibly important innovation," says Philip Sugai, director of the mobile consumer lab at the International University of Japan. "For example, when applied to the issue of telemedicine, or other situations in which remotely monitoring or accessing an individual's personal movements is vital to that service. "But there will surely be negative consequences when applied to employee tracking or salesforce optimisation."

Complex behaviour

Until now, mobile phone motion sensors were capable of detecting only repetitive movements such as walking or running. The KDDI system, is able to detect more complex behaviour by using analytical software - held on a server back at base - to match patterns of common movements.

For example, the KDDI mobile phone strapped to a cleaning worker's waist can tell the difference between actions performed such as scrubbing, sweeping, walking an even emptying a rubbish bin. The aim of the new system, according to KDDI, is to enable employees to work more efficiently and managers to easily evaluate their employees' performance while away from the office.

Full article: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8559683.stm

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Yukio Mishima Interviewed In English

2010-03-10T12:09:00.001-08:00

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.xxx domain names [from BBC Technology]

2010-03-09T04:58:00.001-08:00

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8556364.stm

“.xxx internet domain name plan resurrected

A plan to create an internet domain specifically for adult websites will be resurrected three years after it was rejected by internet regulators.

The net's governing body Icann will reconsider the .xxx scheme on 12 March. Icann had previously given the domain the go ahead in 2005, but reversed the decision two years later amidst protests from US conservative groups. An independent review recently concluded that decision was unfair and that the plan should be reconsidered. Icann (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) has now confirmed to BBC News that its board will discuss the plan at its meeting in Nairobi, Kenya and could decide to back the proposals. "If the contract is signed, we could be selling names by the end of the year," said Stuart Lawley, chairman of ICM Registry, which put forward the plans for .xxx and would sell the domain names.

'Landmark decision'

The idea for a .xxx domain was first proposed in 2001 and was approved by Icann four years later. The scheme is intended to create a silo for pornography on the internet. "Those that do want to see it can; those that don't can filter it out," explained Mr Lawley. However, the scheme is voluntary and adult sites will still be able to use other domains such as .com. In 2007, Icann overturned its original decision to allow .xxx domains to be sold amidst a firestorm of protest from conservative groups, predominately in the US, which opposed the plan on moral grounds. Recently an arbitration panel of retired judges at the International Centre for Dispute Resolution ruled that the plan should be revisited after analysing evidence about the alleged interference. "Our claim was that Icann came up with a lot of different excuses," said Mr Lawley.

The board concluded that Icann's decision to reject the .xxx plan was "not consistent with the application of neutral, objective and fair documented policy" and should be revisited. Mr Lawley described it as a "landmark" ruling. The non-binding decision will now be discussed by Icann on 12 March and a decision will be made whether to reconsider its approach to .xxx. A spokesperson for Icann said there was "no indication what action the ICANN board will take". However, it is unlikely to overturn the decision immediately without consulting other members of Icann and the internet community.

The news comes as the sex.com domain, often described as one of the most valuable internet domain names, comes up for auction. The web address is due to be sold in New York on 18 March with a starting price of $1m (£670,000).”

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Zizek and The Id Machine + Google Voice Recognition Beta

2010-03-06T14:54:00.001-08:00

Instructions for video:
Press the red "cc" button to the right of the time line.
Press play.

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Waterbed Landscaped [Porn Landscaped] [Porn Negative Space]

2010-03-06T03:46:00.001-08:00

Video: Edited clip of "Waterbed Amateur Fuck" via Fleshbot
Text: Copy and paste from Myfreecams chatroom hosted by "KimYi"
Audio: "Waves On Pebble Beach.wav" field recording uploaded by Benboncan found on the Creative Commons Freesound project website

Link to Audio: http://www.freesound.org/samplesViewSingle.php?id=88575

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Japanese Ringtone Promises to Clear Your Sinuses

2010-03-04T09:01:00.001-08:00

From Gizmodo:

A company called Japan Ringing Tone Laboratory has created the "Hana Sukkiri Melody" ringtone, which claims to be able to clear out your sinuses whenever anybody calls you. Ah-whaaaa?

The company claims that "the ringtone will make a nose has resonant frequency with pollens adherent inside your nasal cavity, so eventually pollens fall down." Oh, is that how things work? If so, why don't people just play the tone over and over again into their nose to clear things up rather than relegate it to ringtone status, where they're presumably expected to let the phone ring a few times while they hold it up to their nose before answering.

Luckily, JRTL has some much more sensible-sounding ringtones in the pipeline, including "sleep-promoting ringtone," "ringtone makes your date," "crow scarer ringtone," "ringtone makes your skin beautiful," and more. And I don't know about you guys, but I've been waiting years for a ringtone to get these danged crows away from me. Finally! [Asiajin via Twitter]

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Slavoj Zizek - Why Avatar is Racist

2010-03-04T05:50:00.001-08:00

From the New Statesman

http://www.newstatesman.com/film/2010/03/avatar-reality-love-couple-sex

Return of the natives

Slavoj Zizek

Beneath the idealism and political correctness of Avatar, in the spotlight at the Oscars on Sunday, lie brutal racist undertones.

James Cameron's Avatar tells the story of a disabled ex-marine, sent from earth to infiltrate a race of blue-skinned aboriginal people on a distant planet and persuade them to let his employer mine their homeland for natural resources. Through a complex biological manipulation, the hero's mind gains control of his "avatar", in the body of a young aborigine.

These aborigines are deeply spiritual and live in harmony with nature (they can plug a cable that sticks out of their body into horses and trees to communicate with them). Predictably, the marine falls in love with a beautiful aboriginal princess and joins the aborigines in battle, helping them to throw out the human invaders and saving their planet. At the film's end, the hero transposes his soul from his damaged human body to his aboriginal avatar, thus becoming one of them.

Given the 3-D hyperreality of the film, with its combination of real actors and animated digital corrections, Avatar should be compared to films such as Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988) or The Matrix (1999). In each, the hero is caught between our ordinary reality and an imagined universe - of cartoons in Roger Rabbit, of digital reality in The Matrix, or of the digitally enhanced everyday reality of the planet in Avatar. What one should thus bear in mind is that, although Avatar's narrative is supposed to take place in one and the same "real" reality, we are dealing - at the level of the underlying symbolic economy - with two realities: the ordinary world of imperialist colonialism on the one hand, and a fantasy world, populated by aborigines who live in an incestuous link with nature, on the other. (The latter should not be confused with the miserable reality of actual exploited peoples.) The end of the film should be read as the hero fully migrating from reality into the fantasy world - as if, in The Matrix, Neo were to decide to immerse himself again fully in the matrix.

This does not mean, however, that we should reject Avatar on behalf of a more "authentic" acceptance of the real world. If we subtract fantasy from reality, then reality itself loses its consistency and disintegrates. To choose between "either accepting reality or choosing fantasy" is wrong: if we really want to change or escape our social reality, the first thing to do is change our fantasies that make us fit this reality. Because the hero of Avatar doesn't do this, his subjective position is what Jacques Lacan, with regard to de Sade, called le dupe de son fantasme.

This is why it is interesting to imagine a sequel to Avatar in which, after a couple of years (or, rather, months) of bliss, the hero starts to feel a weird discontent and to miss the corrupted human universe. The source of this discontent is not only that every reality, no matter how perfect it is, sooner or later disappoints us. Such a perfect fantasy disappoints us precisely because of its perfection: what this perfection signals is that it holds no place for us, the subjects who imagine it.

The utopia imagined in Avatar follows the Hollywood formula for producing a couple - the long tradition of a resigned white hero who has to go among the savages to find a proper sexual partner (just recall Dances With Wolves). In a typical Hollywood product, everything, from the fate of the Knights of the Round Table to asteroids hitting the earth, is transposed into an Oedipal narrative. The ridiculous climax of this procedure of staging great historical events as the background to the formation of a couple is Warren Beatty's Reds (1981), in which Hollywood found a way to rehabilitate the October Revolution, arguably the most traumatic historical event of the 20th century. In Reds, the couple of John Reed and Louise Bryant are in deep emotional crisis; their love is reignited when Louise watches John deliver an impassioned revolutionary speech.

What follows is the couple's lovemaking, intersected with archetypal scenes from the revolution, some of which reverberate in an all too obvious way with the sex; say, when John penetrates Louise, the camera cuts to a street where a dark crowd of demonstrators envelops and stops a penetrating "phallic" tram - all this against the background of the singing of "The Internationale". When, at the orgasmic climax, Lenin himself appears, addressing a packed hall of delegates, he is more a wise teacher overseeing the couple's love-initiation than a cold revolutionary leader. Even the October Revolution is OK, according to Hollywood, if it serves the reconstitution of a couple.

In a similar way, is Cameron's previous blockbuster, Titanic, really about the catastrophe of the ship hitting the iceberg? One should be
attentive to the precise moment of the catastrophe: it takes place when the young lovers (Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet), immediately after consummating their relationship, return to the ship's deck. Even more crucial is that, on deck, Winslet tells her lover that when the ship reaches New York the next morning, she will leave with him, preferring a life of poverty with her true love to a false, corrupted life among the rich.

At this moment the ship hits the iceberg, in order to prevent what would undoubtedly have been the true catastrophe, namely the couple's life in New York. One can safely guess that soon the misery of everyday life would have destroyed their love. The catastrophe thus occurs in order to save their love, to sustain the illusion that, if it had not happened, they would have lived "happily ever after". A further clue is provided by DiCaprio's final moments. He is freezing in the cold water, dying, while Winslet is safely floating on a large piece of wood. Aware that she is losing him, she cries "I'll never let you go!" - and as she says this, she pushes him away with her hands.

Why? Because he has done his job. Beneath the story of a love affair, Titanic tells another story, that of a spoiled high-society girl with an identity crisis: she is confused, doesn't know what to do with herself, and DiCaprio, much more than just her love partner, is a kind of "vanishing mediator" whose function is to restore her sense of identity and purpose in life. His last words before he disappears into the freezing North Atlantic are not the words of a departing lover, but the message of a preacher, telling her to be honest and faithful to herself.

Cameron's superficial Hollywood Marxism (his crude privileging of the lower classes and caricatural depiction of the cruel egotism of the rich) should not deceive us. Beneath this sympathy for the poor lies a reactionary myth, first fully deployed by Rudyard Kipling's Captains Courageous. It concerns a young rich person in crisis who gets his (or her) vitality estored through brief intimate contact with the full-blooded life of the poor. What lurks behind the compassion for the poor is their vampiric exploitation.

But today, Hollywood increasingly seems to have abandoned this formula. The film of Dan Brown's Angels and Demons must surely be the first case of a Hollywood adaptation of a popular novel in which there is sex between the hero and the heroine in the book, but not in its film version - in clear contrast to the old tradition of adding a sex scene to a film based on a novel in which there is none. There is nothing liberating about this absence of sex; we are rather dealing with yet more proof of the phenomenon described by Alain Badiou in his Éloge de l'amour - today, in our pragmatic-narcissistic era, the very notion of falling in love, of a passionate attachment to a sexual partner, is considered obsolete and dangerous.

Avatar's fidelity to the old formula of creating a couple, its full trust in fantasy, and its story of a white man marrying the aboriginal princess and becoming king, make it ideologically a rather conservative, old-fashioned film. Its technical brilliance serves to cover up this basic conservatism. It is easy to discover, beneath the politically correct themes (an honest white guy siding with ecologically sound aborigines against the "military-industrial complex" of the imperialist invaders), an array of brutal racist motifs: a paraplegic outcast from earth is good enough to get the hand of abeautiful local princess, and to help the natives win the decisive battle. The film teaches us that the only choice the aborigines have is to be saved by the human beings or to be destroyed by them. In other words, they can choose either to be the victim of imperialist reality, or to play their allotted role in the white man's fantasy.

At the same time as Avatar is making money all around the world (it generated $1bn after less than three weeks of release), something that strangely resembles its plot is taking place. The southern hills of the Indian state of Orissa, inhabited by the Dongria Kondh people, were sold to mining companies that plan to exploit their immense reserves of bauxite (the deposits are considered to be worth at least $4trn). In reaction to this project, a Maoist (Naxalite) armed rebellion exploded.

Arundhati Roy, in Outlook India magazine, writes that the Maoist guerrilla army

is made up almost entirely of desperately poor tribal people living in conditions of such chronic hunger that it verges on famine of the kind we only associate with sub-Saharan Africa. They are people who, even after 60 years of India's so-called independence, have not had access to education, health care or legal redress. They are people who have been mercilessly exploited for decades, consistently cheated by small businessmen and moneylenders, the women raped as a matter of right by police and forest department personnel. Their journey back to a semblance of dignity is due in large part to the Maoist cadres who have lived and worked and fought by their sides for decades. If the tribals have taken up arms, they have done so because a government which has given them nothing but violence and neglect now wants to snatch away the last thing they have - their land . . . They believe that if they do not fight for their land, they will be annihilated . . . their ragged, malnutritioned army, the bulk of whose soldiers have never seen a train or a bus or even a small town, are fighting only for survival.

The Indian prime minister characterised this rebellion as the "single largest internal security threat"; the big media, which present it as extremist resistance to progress, are full of stories about "red terrorism", replacing stories about "Islamist terrorism". No wonder the Indian state is responding with a big military operation against "Maoist strongholds" in the jungles of central India. And it is true that both sides are resorting to great violence in this brutal war, that the "people's justice" of the Maoists is harsh. However, no matter how unpalatable this violence is to our liberal taste, we have no right to condemn it. Why? Because their situation is precisely that of Hegel's rabble: the Naxalite rebels in India are starving tribal people, to whom the minimum of a dignified life is denied.

So where is Cameron's film here? Nowhere: in Orissa, there are no noble princesses waiting for white heroes to seduce them and help their people, just the Maoists organising the starving farmers. The film enables us to practise a typical ideological division: sympathising with the idealised aborigines while rejecting their actual struggle. The same people who enjoy the film and admire its aboriginal rebels would in all probability turn away in horror from the Naxalites, dismissing them as murderous terrorists. The true avatar is thus Avatar itself - the film substituting for reality.

Slavoj Žižek is a philosopher and critic
The Academy Awards ceremony is on 7 March

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Airport Smoking Room Flower

2010-03-03T12:53:00.001-08:00

Airport smoking room/cubicle smoke-extracting flower/fan - Forwards then backwards - To be played on a continuous loop in a cocktail/lounge bar.
Audio taken from "myfreecams.com" [NSFW]

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Escape Vehicle no.6 (chair in space), Simon Faithfull, 2004, 4min extract

2010-03-03T05:18:00.001-08:00

from YouTube description:

“Escape Vehicle no.6 presents the journey of a domestic chair from the earth to the edge of space. The film started as a live event in a disused aircraft testing site. The live audience first witnessed the launching of a weather balloon with a domestic chair dangling in beneath it. Once the apparatus had disappeared into the sky they then watched a live video relay from the weather balloon as it journeyed from the ground to the edge of space (30km up).
Now presented as a video work, the footage shows the chair first rush away from the fields and roads, ascend through clouds and finally (against the curvature of the earth and the blackness of space) begin to disintegrate. The chilling nature of the film is that the empty chair invites the audience to imagine taking a journey to an uninhabitable realm where it is impossible to breath, the temperature is minus 60 below and the sky now resembles the blackness of space.”

Via article from Art Monthly:

AD MEN
Anna Dezeuze on the appropriation of art by advertising
Another day, another example of an ad agency ripping off an artist; this time it is Simon Faithfull who has seen his work remade by the ad men. But what is it about conceptual art that makes it so appealing to advertisers?

'It is because their works are reducible to simple ideas, it has been suggested, that conceptual artists are so easy to "rip off" - indeed, by protecting "expression" rather than "ideas", copyright laws seem to privilege visual appearance over concept.'

(Article not available online)

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Hanif Kureishi: My era is over

2010-03-01T00:54:00.001-08:00

Over Kureishi's lifetime there's been a complete transformation not just in what's culturally permissible but in what's almost obligatory. “If you look at the period between the Fifties and Jordan, Britain moved from a period of inhibition to almost psychotic lack of inhibition, in a short time, yes.”

from The Evening Standard - 25.02.10
http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/lifestyle/article-23809960-hanif-kureishi-my-era-is-over.do

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Black Hole Simulator

2010-02-25T14:50:00.001-08:00

from New Scientist via Arthur Magazine [http://www.arthurmag.com/2010/02/10/new-black-hole-simulator/]
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Live Jasmine - Depressing Conversation #1 [Porn Negative Space]

2010-02-22T15:12:00.000-08:00

Text: A copy/paste from a Live Jasmine chat, mostly between YouWithMe the "host" and aks000.
Video: Peripheries of user YouWithMe's adult webcam show hosted by Live Jasmine.
Audio: Techno/trance-type song playing in background, recorded and molested.
Sofa: Abstract Expressionist Ikea

Porn Copyright Violation [Porn Negative Space]

2010-02-22T05:58:00.001-08:00

Television and fan playing hide and seek.
Text-to-Speech taken from advert posted on Freelancer.com requesting someone to monitor illegal uploads and filesharing of porn.
Video: Porn Negative Space of clip entitled "5062_Von_Halbschwester_entjungfert"

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Translation - Despair

2010-02-20T17:02:00.001-08:00

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Maya Deren - Meditation on Violence (1948)

2010-02-20T05:15:00.001-08:00

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Campbell's Neuro-Warhol Soup

2010-02-19T05:59:00.001-08:00

Food label designed by "neurological and bodily responses"

Mark Frauenfelder

From the Wall Street Journal via Good: Campbell's Soup redesigns a label using "neuromarketing" techniques.

Campbell's New Neuromarketing

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Crash: Homage to JG Ballard - Gagosian Gallery London

2010-02-19T05:46:00.001-08:00

Crash: Homage to JG Ballard

Author: Simon Sellars • Feb 12th, 2010 •

Ed Ruscha. Fountain of Crystal, 2009. Acrylic on canvas. 30 1/8 x 36 1/8 inches (76.5 x 91.8 cm).

CRASH: HOMAGE TO JG BALLARD

Press Release
Gagosian Gallery
6-24 Britannia St London WC1X 9JD
t. 020.7841.9960 f. 020.7841.9961

Gallery hours: Tue – Sat: 10:00am– 6:00pm

Thursday, 11 February – Thursday, 1 April 2010

Opening reception: Thursday, February 11th from 6 to 8pm

I have used the car not only as a sexual image, but as a total metaphor for man’s life in today’s society.

JG Ballard

Gagosian Gallery London will present “Crash,” a major group exhibition opening on 11 February 2010, which takes its title from the famous novel by JG Ballard.

Ballard’s novels stand among the most visionary, provocative literature of the twentieth century, with his ominous predictions regarding the fate of Western culture and his insights into the dark psychopathology of the human race. This exhibition is a response to the enormous impact and enduring cultural significance of his work, following his death in spring 2009. Highlighting Ballard’s great passion for the surreal and his engagement with the artists of his own generation, “Crash” includes examples of his specific inspirations as well as works by contemporary artists who have, in turn, been inspired by his vision.

Ballard’s first published short story “Prima Belladonna” appeared in 1956, the same year as the celebrated Independent Group’s exhibition “This is Tomorrow” at the Whitechapel Gallery, which marked the birth of Pop Art in Britain. It was here, and in the work of Surrealists such as Salvador Dali and Paul Delvaux, that Ballard found the seeds of what he called a “fiction for the present day”. With its dystopian depictions of the present and future, its bleak, man-made landscapes and the recounting of the psychological effects of technological, social and environmental developments on humans, his work has resonated strongly among other writers, filmmakers and visual artists. The exhibition “Crash” brings together works by artists tuned to the Ballardian universe, from his contemporaries such as Ed Ruscha, Richard Hamilton, Andy Warhol and Helmut Newton, to younger artists such as Tacita Dean, Jenny Saville, Glenn Brown and Mike Nelson.

The exhibition is organised in association with the Estate of JG Ballard.

List of artists: Richard Artschwager, Francis Bacon, JG Ballard, Hans Bellmer, Glenn Brown, Chris Burden, Jake & Dinos Chapman, John Currin, Salvador Dalí, Giorgio de Chirico, Tacita Dean, Jeremy Deller, Paul Delvaux, Cyprien Gaillard, Douglas Gordon, Loris Gréaud, Richard Hamilton, John Hilliard and Jemima Stehli, Roger Hiorns, Damien Hirst, Dan Holdsworth, Carsten Höller, Edward Hopper, Allen Jones, Mike Kelley, Jeff Koons, Roy Lichtenstein, Vera Lutter, Florian Maier-Aichen, Paul McCarthy, Adam McEwen, Dan Mitchell, Malcolm Morley, Mike Nelson, Helmut Newton, Cady Noland, Claes Oldenburg, Eduardo Paolozzi, Steven Parrino, Richard Prince, Robert Rauschenberg, Gerhard Richter, Ed Ruscha, Jenny Saville, George Shaw, Cindy Sherman, Piotr Uklański, Andy Warhol, Rachel Whiteread, Christopher Williams, Jane and Louise Wilson, Christopher Wool and Cerith Wyn Evans.

For further inquiries please contact the gallery at london@gagosian.com or at +44.207.841.9960.

More information here.

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Captcha Codes #2

2010-02-19T05:36:00.001-08:00

See and download the full gallery on posterous

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Captcha Codes

2010-02-18T14:54:00.001-08:00

See and download the full gallery on posterous

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Exploded Images of Everyday Objects

2010-02-18T02:26:00.001-08:00

via Boing Boing:

“Artist Adam Voorhes has created a series of exploded images of everyday objects, including an Etch-a-Sketch, a handgun, a frog, and a rotary phone (my favorite, pictured here. Man, that thing is a tank).”

Link: http://www.voorhes.com/load-exploded.html

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Martin Creed - Sick Film

2010-02-17T15:15:00.001-08:00

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A Thousand Windows

2010-02-17T14:49:00.001-08:00

Found these from a series called "A Thousand Windows" - Ben Hartschuh via a YouTube message.
A similar aesthetic I have been attempting with Porn Negative Space

http://www.benhartschuh.com
From the Artist's Statement section of website:
"I saw this one where a couple was just sleeping. The lights were on and they were sleeping.No sound though, you couldn’t hear him snore. One hundred and sixty-seven viewers,watching them sleep. Maybe if I wait long enough they’ll start having sex. A friend saw. “I couldn’t have this, I wouldn’t leave the house,” she said. A thousand windows and each have their own story. In another, a man in a garter belt and panty hose stood in front of his television. I couldn’t see what was playing, it was distorted in the darkness of the background. It’s the depths that get me. The distance, male and female, planes of focus. Separation. Another, the girl in the back undresses, coolly, and without much effort or excitement rubs her breasts. Fifteen more viewers. The man turns; maybe it’s his encouraging words or her impatience, only time will tell. Sixty more then, they’re in the triple digits now. Playing to hundreds of homes. They’re active participants, exhibitionists and voyeurs, feeding off each other. What makes us so curious about what goes on in others homes, yet so shocked to see it? Why do the lives of others seem much more interesting than our own? If a camera watched you who would look through from the other side? How would they view you? This work presents life seen only by those who choose to seek, or desire to be sought. Set up by the subjects themselves, cameras broadcast the alluring, the boring, the playful, the disturbing, the demure, and the insatiable. I’ve chosen to show you only pieces of the whole, moments frozen. If we can ponder the instant does it become more real? It is up to you to decide right or wrong, to be turned on or mortified, curious or condemning. They are playing for you."

See and download the full gallery on posterous

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Please Rob Me

2010-02-17T07:51:00.001-08:00

From Brand Republic: Quite scary - Why you REALLY shouldn't broadcast your location on social media sites

http://pleaserobme.com/

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Captcha Code - vampires serve

2010-02-17T06:38:00.001-08:00

Any why not indeed.

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SurveillanceSaver

2010-02-17T01:53:00.001-08:00

Link: http://code.google.com/p/surveillancesaver/

“SurveillanceSaver is a screensaver for OS X and Windows that shows live images of over 400 network surveillance cameras worldwide. A haunting live soap opera.”

Posted via email from Can't Cope, Won't Cope

We Live in Public [Trailer]

2010-02-16T13:13:00.001-08:00

Posted via email from Can't Cope, Won't Cope

Greyest Porn v.1.0.6

2010-01-31T02:18:00.000-08:00

[AVN Awards 2014]
"....And the category you've all been waiting for... 'Greyest Porn Production of the Year'....
[dramatic pause]
[crowd noise a mixture of whoops and tense anticipation]

...goes to 'Sasha Grey sips Earl Grey in a Car Park' a Porn Negative Space production"

[wake up in Grey Coats hospital with bergamot poisoning]
[wake up a second time for the sake of dream-within-a-dream convention]

[Pause... move on]

On awakening of a Sunday please watch the following Grey Porn video featuring a "fuck machine" arrogantly shimmering in metallic greyscale along with a more modest call centre cubicle grey panelling... and unfeaturing Sasha Grey.

The audio is a text-to-speech version of the Care & Usage Guide for Fleshlight as found on their website.

Original audio of the "fuck machine's" interrogation of Sasha Grey removed, for despite all its probing, [badoom tish] Sasha seemed solely to respond with either affirmation or expletive.

[badoom tish]

[forgive me]

Grey HTML Colour Code for 29th January 2010

2010-01-29T02:24:00.001-08:00
The grey for today is Grey23 [HTML #302217] Said to haunt the dreams of those who suffer near-fatal experiences in front of Microsoft Excel.

Default Profile Picture for 28th Januray 2010: Brand Republic

2010-01-28T05:22:00.000-08:00
Red jumper, collars out, peach-coloured face.

Emerging from a puddle of grey.

This default is often confused for little red riding hood by Brand Republic browsers too busy to read the webpage head-on, choosing instead to view the site through the peripheries of their vision. This default has opinions on brand news and is not afraid to step into the torrent of marketing bombardment - artistically represented by the grey streaks. Bonus points for use of grey. Minus points for use of red.

Deteriorated Porn & Grey HTML Colour Code

2010-01-28T05:18:00.000-08:00
Following from "The Making of... Porn Negative Space w/ Brandi Belle" I have decided to share some video evidence of incompetence. Dressed up in the stiff and uncomfortable Sunday best of such a grand title "Deteriorated Porn".

The HTML Colour Code for 27th January 2010 is #625D5D which I'm sure you are aware is Grey 43. "#625D5D" is to be dropped into ever day conversation, with greater frequency than is usual.

The Making of.... Porn Negative Space w/ Brandi Belle

2010-01-25T13:18:00.000-08:00
Not entirely certain if I will finish or "make" the intended Porn Negative Space of this "making of..."

I may have perhaps lost interest in the task and it probably works well enough as an unhelpful glimpse at the editing preview screen of a cropped Brandi Belle clip. A disinterested fiddle with the timeline cursor seems to work well with Brandi Belle, a porn star whose performance seems to be that of brattish indifference, a version of the familiar porn role of girl-next-door with stage directions to play the part almost inhuman, emotionless, sleep walking into gag positions. [bored] [dead] [mechanical]

I can't help but think the Brandi Belle act would work better if it didn't dip into the pleased-looking smirks and the implications [or this could just be my own interpretations] of some sort of win for a female porn star, in this respect I am uncertain as to how much it is self-aware and even playful. It may be more likely that it is just a porn product, operating as such catering to whichever tendrils grow strongest out of the paypal box. Perhaps there is no market for porn with actors acting [if need be] indifference, perhaps that market is catered for with the looks bordering on unwillingness in certain porn clips where the woman is presented as doing it [solely] for the money, financially desperate... and often deliberately ambiguous as to the veracity of the scenario and desire of the woman filmed - a blurred scene open to interpretation to whichever lens of desire/fantasy/fetish the viewer happens to be holding. Perhaps there is no market for indifferent porn in which all participants are indifferent.

I have perhaps-ed too much there.

And I am annoying enough to be amused by a "making of..." without the finished product.

[Said in "because, because, because" Wizard of Oz sing-song voice] Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps, perhaps... Perhaps it's the wonderful [pause] things [pause] it [pause] doesn't.

[Badoomtish]