Warren Ellis's Blog, page 121
May 23, 2011
Riding The Rails
sent from [device: spacephone]
Posted via email from warrenellis's posterous
Bookmarks for 2011-05-23
"this series of six mixes traces my musical interests from 1981 to 1996. it came about after an invitation from british anthropologist georgina born to list some key pieces of music – a kind of musical genealogy."
(tags:mixes )
Film On Paper
If you like design, you will like Film On Paper.
After two years of preparation, I am very proud and excited (and a bit nervous) to finally reveal this personal project to the world. Film on Paper was created because I decided I wanted to photograph my collection of original film posters and share them with a wider audience. The site represents 17 years worth of collecting and features posters from all genres as well as several countries, multiple sizes and various formats.
At launch there are 1494 posters represented with their own individual pages and a total of 12,080 images attached to them…
Scratches the same itch for me as the archives of Polish film posters of years gone by. Guaranteed to surprise you within minutes. This was my first discovery:
BMW Lovos
Anne Forschner
sponsored by BMW Exterior Design Munich
Lovos (Lifestyle of Voluntary Simplicity) is based on a philosophical idea, which asks critical questions about the design, construction and use of road vehicles, as we know them today.
How many parts do we use to build the exterior of vehicle? How would a car look like, if it was build by just one (recurring) piece? The result of an experimental research is a vehicle that is made by 260 identical, exchangeable pieces which are fixed with a hinge on a substructure.
The individual pieces are movable, which allows the surface of the vehicle to be closed – like the scales of a fish – or opened to the environment. These pieces work like airbrakes and are also photovoltaic, following the movement of the sun when the vehicle is stationary.
In The Grimsvotn Cloud
Gunnar Valþórsson emails to say:
Noticed you posted a picture of our latest eruption here in Iceland. Here are some pictures of the people in the nearest town suffering the consequences. This is taken in broad daylight by the way.
May 22, 2011
Anke Merzbach
flickr
Anke Merzbach
The New Aesthetic
For a while now, I've been collecting images and things that seem to approach a new aesthetic of the future, which sounds more portentous than I mean. What I mean is that we've got frustrated with the NASA extropianism space-future, the failure of jetpacks, and we need to see the technologies we actually have with a new wonder. Consider this a mood-board for unknown products…
The rough, pixelated, low-resolution edges of the screen are becoming in the world.
I guess – like NASA imagery – it doesn't acquire that whiff-of-nostalgia-for-a-lost-future if you don't remember it from the first time round. For a while, anyway.
'Sensor-Vernacular' is a current placeholder/bucket I've been scrawling for a few things… an aesthetic born of the grain of seeing/computation. Of computer-vision, of 3d-printing; of optimised, algorithmic sensor sweeps and compression artefacts. Of LIDAR and laser-speckle. Of the gaze of another nature on ours. There's something in the kinect-hacked photography of NYC's subways that we've linked to here before, that smacks of the viewpoint of that other next nature, the robot-readable world.
It's the lossy-ness that reveals the grain of the material and process. A photocopy of a photocopy of a fax. But atoms. Like the 80?s fanzines, or old Wonder Stuff 7? single cover art. Or Vaughn Oliver, David Carson. It is – perhaps – at once a fascination with the raw possibility of a technology, and – a disinterest, in a way, of anything but the qualities of its output. Perhaps it happens when new technology becomes cheap and mundane enough to experiment with, and break – when it becomes semi-domesticated but still a little significantly-other…
And James' dedicated tumblr for exploring the idea. Both posts are worth reading in full: all kinds of really interesting stuff that I just scraped the surface of here.
What I will say is that, although there is no one future to be predicted or inferred — that the idea of the consensus future is resolutely 20th century and should be put to rest — it's really nice to see people looking for what's next again.
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