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Arphid-sniffing Robot Portraiture
Obsessed with the production design of The President’s Analyst
I thought that delivering my webstock talk, and finishing reading Welcome To Mars, Cold War Modern and The Bomb while on holiday would let me escape my obsession with the post-war and the high-modern. I had reckoned without James Coburn.
Tom Armitage picked up on my love of the Derek Flint movies, and suggested that I had not really experienced Coburn at the height of his powers until I had experienced him in “The President’s Analyst“. The plot is a thing of gossamer, and the dialogue is probably best described as “very much of it’s time”, but the production designs and way that product and environment is photographed is wonderful.
I watched it on my flight to Etech, and went a little crazy taking screengrabs of every beautiful detail I saw…
The complete set is here, but I want to just point out a couple of wonderful moments.
The Archigram-esque travelling gate-lounges of Dulles, shot to echo the infrastructure of Apollo, and foreshadowing somehow the decaying post-future of Lebbeus Woods. 
The classic Cold-War combo of the long fluoro-lit corridor with tiny psuedo golf-cart.
Amphibious vehicles and long-zooms…
Headquarters of Corporate Evil, designed by Bruce Goff?
With corporate communications by DePatie-Freleng. (What was the first in this line of ‘hi-modern corporate communications animation vernacular’ as parodied eventually in Jurrasic Park amongst others?) 
My absolute favourite detail however, has to be – The Networked Shoe: 
That controls the corporate automatons 
Look at this… the way they are curled, and nested, and converging to a central control point… This might just be the ne-plus-ultra of command-and-control cybernetics of the cold war meets the high-modern consumer culture! 
As Coburn himself might say “Beautiful… BEAUTIFUL!” 
Cornelius has a posse
It’s the 25 anniversary of the Miner’s Strike.
I was around 11 or 12 at the time, along with the Falklands War and the ongoing existential background-radiation (!) of the Cold War it was one of the defining events of the 1980s that I ‘woke up’ in.
My elder siblings were watching Boys from The Blackstuff to make sense of the recession, the end of Britain-as-industrial-power and the human toll it was taking.
I read Skizz.
Skizz is still one of the best slices of storytelling, and certainly characterisation Alan Moore has ever done I think.
If you’re not familiar with it, then the all-too-brief wikipedia entry sums it up quite well as “E.T. meets Boys from the Blackstuff“. It can still bring me to the verge of tears, and to think this was in a comic still at the time aimed at and read by kids is remarkable and wonderful.
The sad demise of the DFC aside, I really hope that as we tumble into seemingly-similar times, someone else will write something as powerful and moving and life-affirming for a younger audience.
Joe Jackson and Jamais Cascio Vs The Collapsitarians
On the (27 hour) plane ride back from New Zealand, I watched a lot of movies, some unremarkable – some wonderful. Watching Happy-Go-Lucky was painful for some reasons, and beautiful for others – but it definately hit me with the pink laserbeam between the eyes.
Watching classics like The Apartment and Manhattan made me wonder at the romances we’d write about some cities, and Slumdog Millionaire bizarrely seemed like a continuation of that: a romance of the maximum-city.
But, beside that – everytime a movie finished, the entertainment system reset to it’s main menu, with one of those airline entertainment system pseudo-radio stations playing on a loop.
And I hit the same point in the loop everytime.
And at that point in the loop played the same song everytime.
The song was a romance of the city.
A romance of electricity and colour and life and density of opportunity.
Electricity so fine Look and dry your eyes
The song was “Stepping Out” by Joe Jackson.
Go and listen.
Watch.
I’ll stay put.
In recent months I’ve definitely fallen into a Collapsitarian rut of sorts.
We - Are young but getting old before our time
This won’t do.
As Jamais Cascio says, quoting Evelin Lindner:
“Pessimism is a luxury of good times. In difficult times, pessimism is a
self-fulfilling, self-inflicted death sentence.”
The wave of stuff coming down the lightcone is for sure a Danmaku-like bullet-curtain of environmental, societal and technical challenges, but I like Danmaku!
That’s where the action is, where the flow is felt, and where design wrangling of the sweetest kind can be done.
So, more wrangling, less hand-wringing.
Big bets should be made.
Happy-gets-lucky!
It took at 27 hour flight to realise that 27 years ago in 1982, Joe Jackson knew this and planted a time capsule into culture to help me with 2009.
It’s The Anti-Collapsitarian Anthem.
We - So tired of all the darkness in our lives With no more angry words to say Can come alive Get into a car and drive To the other side
That’s some foresight, right there. So if you are feeling a little collapsitarian, try stepping out.
You - Can dress in pink and blue just like a child And in a yellow taxi turn to me and smile We’ll be there in just a while If you follow me
Thanks Joe.
The Swarming Christ of the Insectoids
Lake Matheson, Nr. Fox Glacier, New Zealand, originally uploaded by moleitau.
Now we pause for some station-identification: Hi. This Is Magical Nihilism.
“Sometimes we inclined to conceive it as sheer Power, and symbolized it to ourselves by means of all the myriad power-deities of our many worlds. Sometimes we felt assured that it was pure Reason, and that the cosmos was but an exercise of the divine mathematician. Sometimes Love seemed to us its essential character, and we imagined it with the forms of all the Christs of all the worlds, the human Christs, the Echinoderm and Nautiloid Christs, the dual Christ of the Symbiotics, the swarming Christ of the Insectoids. But equally it appeared to us as unreasoning Creativity, at once blind and subtle, tender and cruel, caring only to spawn and spawn the infinite variety of beings, conceiving here and there among a thousand inanities a fragile loveliness. This it might for a while foster with maternal solicitude, till in a sudden jealousy of the excellence of its own creature, it would destroy what it had made.
But we knew well that all these fictions were very false. The felt presence of the Star Maker remained unintelligible, even though it increasingly illuminated the cosmos, like the splendor of the unseen sun at dawn.”
“Aim for the smoke at Erebus”
Great ‘pirate’ map, International Antarctic Centre, Christchurch, NZ, originally uploaded by moleitau.
A fantastic pirate map of instructions for the ‘bag drag’ at Scott Base, Antarctica.
The Demon-Haunted World: My Webstock ’09 talk
Thanks to Tash, Mike, Ben and Deb and all your team of special agents for inviting me and looking after us so amazingly. And, extra special thanks to the Webstock participants for indulging me during this and the fine conversations with you all in the bar afterwards!
And, of course – thanks to Carl Sagan for the title…
If you were there and enjoyed it – run, don’t walk to Adam Greenfield’s site and pre-order “The City is here for you to use”!
Do-ism
I wrote a little thing for the Howies spring catalogue:
I’m a designer that mainly works with digital materials, and while the pleasure of tinkering with a machine is something that I get quite a lot in software, to tinker in hardware and software (especially Meccano) is a rarer thing.
It seems to activate a way of thinking with the eye, the mind and the hand that is entirely natural, and the playful problem-solving instincts of childhood come rushing back.
Kevin Kelly writes in an essay about Artificial Intelligence that problem-solving is not just an abstract process of the mind, but something that happens in the world, and brands those who don’t believe this as indulging in ‘thinkism’.
The intelligence of the hand, and the eye, and the body, working with material things in the world, instead of abstract symbols in a computer you might call ‘Do-ism’.
Russell wrote something lovely for it:
Technology is not the enemy. Inattention and waste are the enemy. If you don’t notice your footprints you won’t clean them up. So remember to take notes and use whatever tools can to keep you paying attention.
Yep!
As for the machine…
It’ll get finished this year, honest…
No pants!
Twitter / C. S. J. Bofop: No pants!, originally uploaded by moleitau.
Momus has found a book with passages by Brian Eno’s tutors on the young man’s working style while at art school:
“October 13th, 1967. Brian laid his radio-lightwave machine out along the studio. Everyone who walked in front of it interrupted transmission. Philip became interested, helped him fiddle about with the equipment. It reminded me of boys playing with electric trains.”
And, this one made me smile:
“February 15th, 1968. Watson, Dyer and Brian had a long discussion about Brian’s electronic machine. Watson had got Brian a grant of £17 towards building the machine. Brian had come up with some snags and intended to present his work in the form of a written report. Watson argued that this was not good enough; he would learn something by not only producing the machine, but in assessing the effects of its operation. Dyer said now that Brian had proved that the machine was operational there was no point in actually making it. Watson said to me afterwards that Dyer was basically an engineer and that Brian had to decide if he was an engineer or an “artist”. Brian had finally accepted his point of view that the machine would have to be finished and operated.”
Go read the lot of it.
Hacking The Earth
The Book Arrives!, originally uploaded by Jamais Cascio.
Futurist and all-round-smart-cookie Jamais Cascio has a book out taking a sober and critical look at geoengineering.
It’s called “Hacking The Earth” and it’s available from Lulu.
Petafloptimism 