Bruce Sterling's Blog, page 654

Blubstep

*One doesn't often see erudite pop-music critic Simon Reynolds waxing hilariously sarcastic.

http://blissout.blogspot.com/2010/04/blubstep-looking-at-april-17-malcolm.html

"This is the meme of the season, isn't it? I've lost count of the number of times I've read Ikonika say in interviews that her ambition is to make people cry on the dancefloor. And when Blake ("the new crown prince of electronic soul" according to NME) says "dance music has more to offer emotionally than just euphoria", he's ...

Time Will Tell, But Epistemology Won't

*Deceased philosopher as twenty-first-century digital theory-object.

*This conference is not just about Richard Rorty the philosopher, but specifically about the electronic traces he left behind. "Memory, Ethics, and Literary Custodianship in the Era of Computational Media…." Maybe that's really about "pig in the era of sausage machine," but who knows — maybe the pig will outlast whole generations of sausage machine with comparative ease.

http://virtualpolitik.org/rorty/schedule.html

"Time...

Kalki Watch

*Normally I resent these crass tabloid intrusions on the private lives of celebrities, but really, this is just so adorable.

http://www.filmfare.com/articles/anurag-kashyap-and-kalki-koechlin-minus-emotional-atyachaar-761.html

How do you react to being termed an 'odd couple'?

Anurag: I used to think we were an odd couple until I discovered that she has a thing for older, potbellied men.

Kalki: Don't flatter yourself. I have no type.

Anurag: C'mon I know you get turned on every time you see my...

Dead Media Beat: The Geocities-izer

*Wow. That's really got the ol' magic.

http://wonder-tonic.com/geocitiesizer/

Showtime: Shanghai Graffiti Kids

*Pretty weak iPhone focus, but an awesome crunchy 8bit Shanghai soundtrack.

http://www.vimeo.com/8654291

NeochaEDGE /// Graffiti @ Shanghai's Moganshan Rd. from NeochaEDGE on Vimeo.

*From NeochaEDGE, meeting all your off-the-great-wall Chinese hipster needs.

(((Later: nice stuff here. Sure makes you wonder what a Sino-globalized century is gonna put us through.)))

http://www.boingboing.net/2010/04/19/shanghai.html

INDIA ZOO / 印度动物园画展与摄影

*When you're young, hip, female, Chinese, and backpacking through India.

*Pity we don't have the soundtrack.

http://www.douban.com/event/album/25929537/

*A bhangra-Cantopop mashup? Well, maybe.

Showtime: Pumzi

*It's cyberpunk sci-fi dystopia from Kenya. No, I'm not kidding. When have I ever lied to you about a thing like this.

via @laurenbeukes, who is from South Africa and has a whole lot goin' on

Gojiyo, an Indian Virtual World

*Only runs under Windows. But hey, it's like a commercially-supported Bharatiya Second Life. With avatar avatars.

via @GaryPHayes

http://www.gojiyo.com/welcome/tos

(((The fine print in these things is always fascinating. Every virtual world built to date has been a rackety Favela dictatorship, full of petty theft, ruthless surveillance, banishment, and desaparecidos. Kind of an X-ray of the Indian online unconscious mind going on here with Gojiyo.)))

1. The following is a partial list of ...

Arphid Watch: health dystopia

*Super-interesting to see so many network-based mashups of fringe political ideologies, these days. This one's got some RFID terror in it, which is why it showed up on my radar. But it's also peddling quack nostrums and attacking the FDA, psychiatry, and Big Pharma, in a wild collision of hippie communard dropout and working-class TeaBagger.

*Natural News reads a lot like a decorticated, ideologically-reversed version of Mondo 2000. If you replaced Mondo's endless obsessions with smart...

Showtime: Gary Chang's Hong Kong Apartment

*The cheery, upbeat, sino-green narrative here can't disguise the disquieting aspects of this. This gizmo-laden showpiece feels like the first urban space I've seen that belongs by rights in a "city of software." It's like an apartment made of pull-down menus. Favela Chic perfection in impossible circumstances.

*Consider a little augmented-reality projection mapping in there, to make those constricting walls seem infinite… "I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of...