Gallery: Laurie Lipton.
Gallery: Hrair Sarkissian.
Gallery: Zhou Zixi
WARREN ELLIS LTD Articles.
Gallery: Kin Coedel in Tibet.
People complaining about Roald Dahl being edited for sensitivity, nobody anywhere noting that Dahl revised his own work more than once – the one that comes to mind is the 1973 revision of Wonka that takes out the previous statement that the Oompa Loompas were Africans who Wonka had smuggled off the continent in crates. This reflects the changes he made to his own book when he wrote the screenplay for the 1971 Gene Wilder film, following the NAACP bringing pressure to bear on that part of the concept. Dahl was fine with revision and only occasionally got the arseache with adaptation – and had a heavy hand when adapting others – and liked money.
Notes on the film ELPIS:
Elpis marks a new path in the filmmaking trajectory of Rouzbeh Rashidi. Almost completely erased: people, bodies, figures – which is surprising, coming from an artist who has previously invested so much creative energy into the visualisation of human presence and performance. Now, there is mostly landscape, often held by a static camera for a long time; landscape warped and tunnelled – an effect achieved, not by digital manipulation, but optically, via the extensive use of (as the filmmaker tells us) various XIX century “photographic portrait objective lenses”. The future of cinema calls to us from the past …
Gallery: Cleon Peterson.
There are many benefits to a solitary life in nature: there’s the psychological peace that comes with living an unobserved life
An unobserved life. That’s a thing to sit with.
Harking back to the eighties experiments of David Carson’s RayGun magazine and the work of Jeffery Keedy, Ed Fella and co from the Cranbrook Academy of Art, Plastikcomb combines a love of early US advertising imagery with everyday imagery, bold typography and visual evidence of the printing process. Their tagline ‘Digital is dead’ is evident throughout.
John Coulthart on the novel THE ZEN GUN, a book he’d previously avoided for pretty much exactly the same reasons I’ve avoided it. He notes, that, as ever, Bruce Sterling gives good quote that draws the eye:
Yet Bayley’s elemental energy, his mastery of the sense of wonder, cannot be denied. His work is the very antithesis of tired hackdom. To invent an entire self-consistent cosmology and physics for a $2.50 DAW paperback…is one of those noble acts of selfless altruism that keep SF alive.
Book designer WH Chong on covers for Le Guin, Asimov, Herbert
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Mary Queen of Scots wrote in code.
Roman dodecahedrons may have been used for secret sorcery:
Its magical purpose could be explained by a variety of factors. First, dodecahedrons were mostly found in the Gallo-Roman Empire, an offshoot of the Roman Empire in which magic rituals were known to have taken place. The lack of written records about dodecahedrons may point to a need to use these objects in secret, as divination and magic rituals were punished severely in the Roman Empire. Dodecahedrons have often been found near burial sites, where these rituals may have taken place.
Mark Power’s Shipping Forecast photographs:
Though the shipping forecast is still broadcast daily on BBC Radio 4, the strange resonance of what Seamus Heaney called “that strong gale-warning voice” may not, in an age of digital information overload, cast quite the same spell it once did on the collective imagination. It nevertheless remains a constant for many listeners, reassuring in its steadiness even as it gives notice of unruly swells and approaching storms in those faraway-sounding hinterlands of Dogger, Viking and German Bight.
“It occupies a deeply rooted place in our culture,” says Mark Power, whose book The Shipping Forecast comprises photographs from the 31 sea areas that are enumerated in the daily radio litany. “For many of us there is an essential mystery to the shipping forecast that perhaps comes from hearing it in the background as a child, but not really understanding it. And, even as we grow older, it’s difficult for most of us to understand it, because we’re not depending on it the way sailors or trawler crews depend on it.”
A superb piece by Richard Foster on the Echo and the Bunnymen album PORCUPINE, which produced what were for me two seminal singles, “The Back Of Love” and “The Cutter:
Shankar had previously added strings to ‘The Back Of Love’, also produced by Broudie, then going under the name of Kingbird, a moniker given to him by a depressed Liverpool mate who saw the musician as a magical figure. This guise allowed him to adopt a more shamanistic, interventionist role than merely being credited “producer” of a Bunymen record. In true Liverpool style Broudie saw the role behind the mixing desk as mythopoeic, an almost physical adjunct to the soul, akin to summoning up a creative unguent akin to the Cthulhu tales
A new Fatima Al Qadiri EP.
Gallery: Joseph Yaeger.
Here’s some unusual criteria to consider when deciding what to wear: if you’re scanned by facial-recognition software, do you prefer being detected as a zebra, giraffe, or a dog? Cap_able, an Italian fashion-meets-tech startup, prompts consumers to consider individual rights to privacy when making decisions about self-expression. The studio’s inaugural project, the Manifesto Collection, combines knitwear with an algorithm into a kind of 21st-century camouflage that protects the wearer’s biometric data without the need to conceal the face.
Think of bringing a pot of water to the boil: As the temperature reaches the boiling point, bubbles form in the water, burst and evaporate as the water boils. This continues until there is no more water changing phase from liquid to steam.
googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display(‘div-gpt-ad-1449240174198-2’); });This is roughly the idea of what happened in the very early universe, right after the Big Bang, 13.7 billion years ago.
A group of scientists, including several with the University of Chicago and Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, have released one of the most precise measurements ever made of how matter is distributed across the universe today.
Combining data from two major telescope surveys of the universe, the Dark Energy Survey and the South Pole Telescope, the analysis involved more than 150 researchers and is published as a set of three articles Jan. 31 in Physical Review D.
Among other findings, the analysis indicates that matter is not as “clumpy” as we would expect based on our current best model of the universe, which adds to a body of evidence that there may be something missing from our existing standard model of the universe.
Physicists have invented a new type of analog quantum computer that can tackle hard physics problems that the most powerful digital supercomputers cannot solve.
Via John Coulthart – the ten commandments of Jan Svankmajer:
Imagination is subversive, because it puts the possible against the real. That’s why you should always use your wildest imagination. Imagination is the biggest gift humanity has received. Imagination makes people human, not work.
