Not Even Sure Why

"What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on..."

Sat, 26 May 2012 03:21:56 +0100

“What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.”

- CARL SAGAN (via Advice to Writers)

faradaycagefight: Michael Wolf’s photos of Hong Kong’s crowded...

Fri, 25 May 2012 20:35:15 +0100

faradaycagefight:

Michael Wolf’s photos of Hong Kong’s crowded apartment buildings look less like architectural photos and more like screencaps of cascading GPU glitches:

http://www.photomichaelwolf.com/hongkongarchitecture/

"The unreal is more powerful than the real. Because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it...."

Fri, 25 May 2012 17:08:54 +0100

“The unreal is more powerful than the real. Because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it. Because its only intangible ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. Stone crumbles. Wood rots. People, well, they die. But things as fragile as a thought, a dream, a legend, they can go on and on. If you can change the way people think. The way they see themselves. The way they see the world. You can change the way people live their lives. That’s the only lasting thing you can create.”

- Chuck Palahniuk (via kadrey)

fer1972: The Raven and The Black Cat, llustration/poster in...

Fri, 25 May 2012 13:40:16 +0100

fer1972:

The Raven and The Black Cat, llustration/poster in commemoration of Edgar Allan Poe Bicentennial by Tavo Montañez

"Even when it is not executed perfectly, theater can stir a range of feelings, from boundless elation..."

Fri, 25 May 2012 10:17:50 +0100

“Even when it is not executed perfectly, theater can stir a range of feelings, from boundless elation to existential despair. On rare occasions, it can even impart blinding pain, as an overly tight mask presses your glasses into your face, setting off sensitive nerve endings you did not know you possessed.

I learned this on Thursday night as I wandered the corridors of “Sleep No More,” the site-specific theater event presented in a labyrinthine Chelsea warehouse. Created by the British company Punchdrunk, “Sleep No More” lets masked attendees follow, with eyes, ears, hands and feet, an open-ended tale that mashes up “Macbeth” with elements of Hitchcock films like “Rebecca” and “Vertigo.”

At the invitation of Punchdrunk, I was taking part in an experiment to see, primarily, if this immersive experience could be technologically tweaked to yield a new narrative-within-the-master-narrative for select participants. (I imagine that the secondary, unstated goal of this field trial was to test my exceedingly minimal threshold for discomfort.)”

- I was also one of the very few other guinea pigs for this a few nights ago, but thought it was all secret and shit. Guess not. This article is a close parallel to my own experience of it, except that I grew up on experimental theatre and early experiments in geolocative entertainment, so my threshold for discomfort is really high.

Even so, having my glasses crushed into my eye sockets for two hours required maybe a greater payoff than was provided. But that’s why it’s an experiment. I think there’s plenty further for all this go, and they call them baby steps not because they’re small, but because they’re uncertain. This can find its form as surely as Punchdrunk has found its own native forms up till now. I’m looking forward to seeing where this goes.

‘Sleep No More,’ Enhanced by MIT Media Lab - NYTimes.com

(via slavin)

"Whereas the Beijing Olympics represented an embracing of China into the coven of Westernism, the..."

Fri, 25 May 2012 06:51:40 +0100

“Whereas the Beijing Olympics represented an embracing of China into the coven of Westernism, the London Olympics will show us just how venal unfettered capitalism can be, how its default modus operandi is paranoia, and rather than a celebration of human endeavour and athleticism, it demonstrates more that the power of branding requires such strict parameters of control that nothing can be left to chance. Brand Exclusion Zones are just one manifestation of the privatisation of public space that London is fast-tracking.”

- Kosmograd: Olympics Brand Exclusion Zone (via worsethandetroit)

Photo

Fri, 25 May 2012 03:26:37 +0100

"“The world would be happier if men had the same capacity to be silent as they have to speak.” -..."

Thu, 24 May 2012 20:35:38 +0100

“

“The world would be happier if men had the same capacity to be silent as they have to speak.”

- Spinoza (Dutch Philosopher)

”

- http://andoperez.com (via rikaorlanda)

DC Women Kicking Ass: Greg Rucka on writing women

Thu, 24 May 2012 16:56:03 +0100

DC Women Kicking Ass: Greg Rucka on writing women :

dcwomenkickingass:

On Tuesday I shared with you some of the thoughts Greg Rucka had about Hollywood, comics and women. Today he’s has an essay on io9 where he talks about writing female characters.

Here’s a sample:

Gender isn’t simply a biological trait; it’s a societal one. The female experience is different from that of the male, and if, as a male writer, you cannot accept that basic premise, then you will never, ever, be able to write women well. A man walking alone through Midtown Manhattan at three in the morning may have concerns for his safety, but I promise you, it’s a very different experience for a woman taking the same walk, and it’s different again for a man wearing a dress. Think about it. That’s a societal factor, and it’s a gendered one, and this is not and can not be subject to debate. If you’re looking to argue that sexism is a thing of the past, that the world is gender-blind, you’re not only wrong, you’re lying to yourself.

I recommend you go read the rest.

darklyeuphoric: niform: interactive installation by Samuel...

Thu, 24 May 2012 13:21:20 +0100

darklyeuphoric:

niform: interactive installation by Samuel Bianchini, 2007

niform is an interactive installation. In a large darkened room, the whole of one wall facing an audience of viewers is taken up with a panoramic image; at first, the image is unchanging, is unchanging and blurred in its entirety. The group, rendered uniform by the blurring, is rendered even more so by the uniform clothing of the twenty men who constitute the group: the picture is that of a cordon of policemen in anti-riot gear, life-size.

The viewers, as they move, change the focal point of the image: as they move towards the screen, and according to the disposition of their bodies, the section of the image in front of them becomes progressively more clearly focused. At a distance of fifty centimetres or less from the screen, a spectator is confronted with one of the representatives of the forces of law and order.

The image no longer has a single depth of field, but several: these are localised, spectator-specific and are different for each viewer. From an initially fuzzy image, each spectator progresses towards a focusing-in on the image, onto a single man, toward the individual man with whom s/he stands face to face.

darklyeuphoric: Terrible beauty. Think of it not as being...

Thu, 24 May 2012 10:42:07 +0100

darklyeuphoric:

Terrible beauty.

Think of it not as being destroyed, but a destroyer. Bound for Hell.

nevver:

The dream of the machines

curureiro: Militia2

Thu, 24 May 2012 08:01:05 +0100

curureiro:

Militia2

The Navy is training robots to play hide-and-seek

Thu, 24 May 2012 05:21:22 +0100

The Navy is training robots to play hide-and-seek:

bankshot:

This can’t possibly have scarier implications.

Photo

Thu, 24 May 2012 02:41:25 +0100

"For about 300 seconds, the computers took over. The stock, which had dropped four points in the five..."

Wed, 23 May 2012 21:19:08 +0100

“For about 300 seconds, the computers took over. The stock, which had dropped four points in the five minutes prior, froze in an incredibly narrow five-cent range while two sets of computers put in thousands upon thousands of bids against one another. On one side, the underwriters’ computers were offering to buy hundreds of millions of dollars worth of stock to keep it from dipping below the crucial $38 level; on the other, high frequency traders were making veerrryyy slightly higher bids at just above $38 — $38.01, $38.02 — which they would sell, literally seconds later.
For a few minutes, the most-watched stock in the world behaved like a malfunctioning computer program. The stock that convinced untold thousands of regular people with E-Trade accounts to get back into investing behaved according to rules that literally none of them understood, traded at volumes that none of them could conceive of and effectively followed contradictory orders from two sets of screaming robots. This is what future shock feels like.”

- How Facebook’s IPO Got Hijacked by Computers (via worsethandetroit)

whizbangpow: Gimenez

Wed, 23 May 2012 18:41:09 +0100

whizbangpow:

Gimenez

Agency advertises abstract shape with no product

Wed, 23 May 2012 15:56:01 +0100

cantcopewontcope:

The disappointing reality is that it’s it’s images from an ”out-of-home” specialist agency’s website about their re-branding from “IPM” to Rapport, oh well.

Link to Rapport

See the full gallery on Posterous

Posted via email from Can’t Cope, Won’t Cope | Comment »

sexpunk: Drigz Abrot

Wed, 23 May 2012 13:21:13 +0100

sexpunk:

Drigz Abrot

Photo

Wed, 23 May 2012 10:39:13 +0100

"We are all murderers and prostitutes - no matter to what culture, society, class, nation one..."

Wed, 23 May 2012 08:01:10 +0100

“We are all murderers and prostitutes - no matter to what culture, society, class, nation one belongs, no matter how normal, moral, or mature, one takes oneself to be.”

- R. D. Laing (via churchofindustry)