“I started the work in 2012 and yet people have asked me if this is a response to Covid! Although yes, it was postponed in April 2020 because of the lockdown and then in the July. I thought it was hilarious that a lot of artists were so desperate to make sure that they didn’t lose visibility that they were doing these shows anywhere, everywhere from their toilet to the fucking bedroom. This is actually a chance to live in the present and actually check this thing out. Are they really so fucking worried about their audience, whether they’re going to be there when you come back? Jesus Christ!”
Recent research has included going back to studying Brutalism, especially the Russian and Asian variants, which tend to be grand and a bit mad:
These aren’t the grandest or the maddest, but the most relevant to what I’m doing. The lower one is reminiscent to me of a building Sir Peter Cook showed in a talk at the AA once, which he described as having “landed.”
“Architecture,” he once said, “is what you do with the potential of life.”
Despite having once been interviewed by an architecture magazine, I know nothing about architecture except that I’m interested in it. I suspect that, if you want to be a better writer, you can either learn everything there is to know about just a few things, or be generally interested in as many things as possible. I am, for better or worse, a generalist.
That famous generalist Buckminster Fuller once said, “Specialization tends to shut off the wide-band tuning searches and thus to preclude further discovery.” “Wide-band tuning searches” describes my process to a fairly scary degree.
(Also, there was a time when radio waves had architecture for tuning searches:)
(Radio has been on my mind a lot lately too.)
I think my adult interest in the field began with the discovery of ARCHIGRAM, a speculative architecture collective that Cook was part of.
“If we consider for a moment Christo’s seminal work – the ‘wrapped cliff’ – we might see it in one of two ways: as a wrapped cliff or; preferably, as the point at which all other cliffs are unwrapped. An Archigram project attempts to achieve this same altered reading of the familiar (in the tradition of Buckminster Fuller’s question, ‘How much does your building weigh?’). It provides a new agenda where nomadism is the dominant social force; where time, exchange and metamorphosis replace stasis; where consumption, lifestyle and transience become the programme; and where the public realm is an electronic surface enclosing the globe.”
“Speculative proposal for ‘city’ suspended on tension system: expanding to cover the earth”
I once wrote a story, ELEKTROGRAD: RUSTED BLOOD, that was informed by my interest in Archigram. (UK) (US) In my head, it was going to be the start of a whole series, with each story containing an Archigram or other experimental-architecture element…
Located at the end of a 300ft dock in Rhinebeck,NY is this detached floating bedroom cabin named @theswamphaus. This cabin features a transparent roof for star gazing…
The exoplanet is slightly greater in size and mass than Earth and is located at a distance from its star where its temperature would be neither too hot nor too cold for liquid water to exist on its surface. The astronomers believe it could be an “ocean planet,” a planet completely covered by a thick layer of water, similar to some of Jupiter’s and Saturn’s moons.
Sitting here thinking about a floating room for a water world under a big falling sky.
a mainstreaming of Q’s core tenets to the point where the basics of QAnon—the drops, the obscure “comms”—were no longer necessary, or even desirable. Q was no longer the cool, secret club that you had speak the jargon to have a chance of getting into. It was just “conservatism” now.
That’s a longread piece, but I think that quote resonates. The whole thing is very well written.
I took a break, because I had work to do and it was too damn hot to multitask. Please enjoy this giant E.coli by Luke Jerram as recompense:
Aether are making ambient-music glasses:
The glasses have built-in Bluetooth open-ear audio speakers embedded in each temple of the sleek frame, which delivers pleasant sound that adapts seamlessly to the surrounding environment. Isolating ambient noise yet never blocking it out, the captivating wearable design lets users engage with the world around them while customizing their own personal soundscape at any given moment.
This may be worth following up later:
Serial Reader might be onto something. The free app currently offers around 800 public domain novels (here are some hot titles from 1921), and will dole out your chosen book in daily 20-minute bites. To some, that might sound like a miserable approach to reading canonical literature: How, for example, are you supposed to get swept up in the profane and tidal lilt of Ulysses if you put it down before you’ve even had a chance to look up “heresiarch”?
pubg.queue.push(function(){pubg.displayAds()})
But I can see the appeal. As someone who has to read for a living, any kind of for-pleasure text is usually reserved for bedtime, which means 15 minutes of groggy and glazed page-skimming… So why not just take that 20 minutes and put it somewhere else, when I’m more alert?
Cosmotechnics. “Yuk Hui… defines the concept of cosmotechnics as a “unification of the cosmos and the moral through technical activities, whether craft-making or art-making”.”
Good morning computer. I spent yesterday trying to fix my newsletter – you can once again subscribe at http://orbitaloperations.com – and the other sick chicken passed in her sleep overnight, so today is about digging a very big hole under very high heat. But:
Or: it’s not social media, it’s just media. This explainer from Cal Newport on Facebook/Instagram feeling the need to pivot towards TikTok’s methods makes one thing very clear:
TikTok, by contrast, doesn’t depend on …painstakingly accumulated social data. It instead deploys a simple but brutally effective machine learning loop onto the pool of all available videos on its platform. By observing the viewing behavior of individual users, this loop can quickly determine exactly which videos will most engage them; no friends, retweets, shares, or favorites required.
What he describes there is, to my eyes, actually an upgraded TiVo box. If you’ve ever used a TiVo box, you know this experience – you watch a crime show one time, and two days later it’s recorded five other crime shows for you because it thinks you like crime shows now. That isn’t social media. That’s just media. Clever television.
