“Of course there is no Hadid to be found yet in Britain apart from the woman herself and her colleagues in a converted school in Clerkenwell. She won the competition for the Cardiff Bay opera house years ago, only to be stymied by the forces of English conservatism and Welsh parochialism, a deadly combination.”
» Gabion.com: “Zaha Hadid brings subtlety to Cincinnati. Not something it’s used to.”
King’s Lead Hat is my I-Ching:
“The weapon’s ready (ready Freddy) the guns purr – The satellite distorts
his voice to a slurHe gives orders (finger pie) which no-one hears – The king’s hat fits
over their earsHe takes his mannequin (tram line) cold turpentine – He tries to dial out 999999999
He dials reception (moving finger): he’s all alone – He’s just a figment
on the telephone!
At least perhaps it was.
I’d always thought it was: “He’s just a figment of the telephone”; which popped into my head when I read this piece on “digital self-fashioning”.
Ah well.
James Spahr can see the formally- attired digital simian lurking and plotting in all things silicon.
1977. A New Hope. Ash are born, and this is written in Creative Computing magazine:
“The programmer-student acquires a modeus operanti for problem-solving. He plans and weighs his actions, making allowance for unforseen events, and balances the initial programming cost with subsequent debugging effort. He evolves to be a more perceptive, better balanced individual with a deeper understanding of the machine as well as himself”
Hmm.
» Computing Power to the People – A Conservative Ten-Year Projection (man-machine interaction, realism in the classroom) by Tien Chi Chen, Creative Computing, 1977
[via boingboing]
“We should be able to sink storage piles in the ground. When you move house, you should go down into the basement and stick a giant spike into the earth, hook it up to your network, and the planet acts as a giant hard drive.”
Also found this morning, more seventies space-art from Don Dixon, including, coincidentally “Data Mountain – allegory on civilization’s efforts to store data, from clay tablets to futuristic crystals”
» Don Dixon Portfolio Images 051-100 (1968-1979) / 085- Data Mountain
Got my tickets last night for Comica at the ICA on Sunday 29th June.
Fantastic to see the array of “funny books” in the ICA bookstore next to learned tomes on high art and philosophy.
The arresting, iconic Guy Fawkes mask of Prisoner 5, Larkhall resettlement camp should stop a few folk in their tracks…
Good on the ICA for putting the festival together. Only last year we were discussing lobbying them to put something like this on. Hope it draws a good crowd, and good discourse.
From John Gray’s “Al Qaeda and what it means to be modern”:
“For Saint-Simon and Comte, technology meant railways and canals. For Lenin it meant electricity. For neo-liberals it means the Internet. The message is the same. Technology – the practical application of scientific knowledge – produces a convergence in values. This is the central modern myth, which the Positivists propagated and everyone today accepts as fact.”
I’m about a third of my way through. It’s compact [120-odd pages?] and it’s a cracking read so far.
For someone who works in technology, and has perhaps would be characterised as vaguely-progressive-but-healthy-sceptical liberal view of it’s beneficial effects; it’s a very challenging but valuable viewpoint to be exposed to.
Mike Lee make us all look like the ugly puny humans we are, daily. Go and visit him at once.
With all the hoo-haa about the New York Times, the part that blogs played in the upheaval there, the constant bickering about blogs by pro/am journos etc; it’s fantastic to see that not all parts of the media are being forced to wise up to their ‘former audience’.
The caption below proceeds each weekly showing of “The Daily Show” on CNN Europe; accompanied by a thunderous James-Earl-Jones-type reading the text in voice-over:
It’s so patronising it makes me giggle very time. Often I wonder whether Jon Stewart and his crew of merry pranksters didn’t insist on it in their distribution contract. It’s half-disclaimer, half-comedy-warm-up.
Perhaps other scandalised big media should follow suit…
Petafloptimism 