Bruce Sterling's Blog, page 703

Brasil: Emergent Hairstyle and Makeup Superpower

http://cutclub.wordpress.com/2009/12/29/retrospectiva-da-beleza-de-2009/

*Never mind the Portuguese text; just whip on down to #9 there, and check out noted Twitter maven Cibelle totally rocking her Brazilectronica Tropicalista schtick. The woman basically lives in London, so this is Brazilian cultural imperialism in action. It's an offshored-popstar look, meaning rather more Brazilian than actual Brazilians.

*This woman performs in the actual no-kidding Favela Chic nightclub. Would it...

Four Modes of Gothic dissimulation and a will-to-ignorance

*Gettin' all Žižek on your medieval whatever.

http://larvatusprodeo.net/2010/01/04/the-politics-of-climate-change-the-impossibility-of-conservatism-and-the-role-of-the-imaginary/

"Žižek argues that "the dominant ideology is mobilising mechanisms of dissimulation and self-deception which include a will to ignorance"…

For Žižek, transformations are at work which call forth such a doubled effect:

"If this sounds apocalyptic, one can only retort that we live in apocalyptic times. It is easy to see...

Inflatable Street Art

*Looks like I'm a tad behind the street-art hipster curve on this effort. Then again, not just every town has big puffy street gratings.

*Keen to see the first graffitist hauled into court for this offense against public decorum. "He built a big inflatable minotaur on my stoop, officer."

Dead Media Beat: Lost Formats Preservation Society

*Full of Gothic High-Tech beauty, even as ghost silhouettes.

http://www.experimentaljetset.nl/archive/lostformats.html

Kazys Varnelis and his decade ahead

*Hmmm… seems to have decaying imperial splendor at the top and weird favelas all over the bottom, with no remaining middle class.

http://varnelis.net/blog/the_decade_ahead

(…)

Gopal Balakshrishan predicts that the future global economy will be a stationary state, a long-term stagnation akin to that which we experienced in the 1970s and 1980s. China will start slowing. The United States, EU, the Mideast and East Asia will all make up a low growth block, a slowly decaying imperium. India...

Neave Television

*Messed UP!

http://www.neave.com/television/

Students generating flower vases

*Nothing to make an astonished world fall on its ear, but… given that it's 2010 now, these are *students* doing this stuff.

*By the end of the decade, it'll be Mrs McNamara's fourth-grade art class fabbing vases and bringing 'em home to adoring Mom.

http://www.case-inc.com/content/scripted-vases-experiments-computational-design-and-rapidmanufacturing

The Indians-Writing-English Literary Crowd

*There are days when I'd strongly agree with everything this critic says.

*On the other hand — if you're modern Indian writing in English, and you're increasingly famous and successful, and you have a global audience — what the heck are you doing moaning about the not-particularly-glittering local literary past? You oughta be churning out some 21st-century forward-looking gibberish like nobody anywhere has imagined.

*You oughta be aiming to entertain the Brazilians, Indonesians and Chinese, ...

Copenhagen

Spime Watch: Blippy

*Spimes. So last-decade. Yeah, maybe.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/12/11/...

"As the Internet matures, (((you wish, geekboy))) slowly but surely everything we do in the real world is going social. But there's a limit to how much information we can explicitly share on all the various services. A new service, Blippy, launching today in private beta, has an interesting way to take something you do everyday, buy things with your credit card, and automatically push those transactions...