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Tag: art

morning computer curtains

Published December 16, 2024 by Warren Ellis

Reuben Wu.

It was a dialogue as grim as the language of thunder. The jerkings of his arms cut the sky into pieces, and in the cracks there appeared the face of Jehovah swollen with anger and spitting out curses. Without looking, I saw him, the terrible Demiurge, as, resting on darkness as on Sinai, propping his powerful palms on the pelmet of the curtains, he pressed his enormous face against the upper panes of the window…

THE STREET OF CROCODILES, Bruno Schulz

It was my idea that I would walk through the mirror in my own room. The mirror would soften, and I would be in another land. The moment of the mirror’s softening would be perfection. It would be the coalescing of image and sensation into something more and other than either of these two. It would be analogous to learning to fly or practice telekinesis. Having passed through a buoyant vertical curtain, I would find everything to surprise me.

Of Unicorns: On My Little Pony, by Lucy Ives

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morning computer engine steam

Published December 11, 2024 by Warren Ellis

Mars-1.

A spacecraft that can provide the propulsion necessary to reach other planets while also being reproducible, relatively light, and inexpensive would be a great boon to larger missions in the inner solar system.

The idea is called Hummingbird, and it’s basically an engine and fuel tank with slots in it for mounting CubeSats. The whole thing was set to weigh 80 kg fully-fuelled. The idea, however, is eleven years old and nobody tried it. I imagine it’s being resurfaced now because people are thinking about the US presidential transition and the seesaw potential between either NASA getting superfunded or being essentially folded into a superfunded SpaceX. If you want to make a future NASA-as-SpaceX-service still look like NASA, lofting a hundred cheap exploratory probes looks virtuous and science-y.

Maybe they can go and find dark comets.

Like the Saunders-Roe test site at High Down, the Ansty (space rocket) test bed used thousands of gallons of water running through a curved duct to soak up the heat from the engine. Huge columns of steam rose up into the Midlands sky. There were occasional complaints from the maternity hospital nearby, not about the danger, but the noise. Sometimes, if a cloud already heavy with vapour passed overhead, the extra steam was just enough to make the droplets precipitate out and start a very localised shower. One memorable day, an inspection team from the Ministry of Supply were soaked by a downpour a hundred yards across and never wondered why they had been placed at that exact spot on the tarmac to witness a firing.

BACKROOM BOYS, Francis Spufford

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morning computer mountain

Published December 10, 2024 by Warren Ellis

Conrad John Godly.

I like a good mountain. There’s a couple sitting in the back of this magnificent film poster by Brian Hung.

We don’t really have mountains where I live. I walked up part of the Wrekin when I was a little kid, but people in other parts of the world would call that a hill. I remember being in Oregon and seeing Mount Hood way in the distance painted bronze by the late afternoon light and just staring at it.

And in (this piece by Zhu Da, by contrast, the trees and rocks and mountains are brushstrokes and gestures. His vision is calligraphic.

“Four monks posted at the edge of the terrace of the monastery courtyard scan the far reaches of the valley. As soon as they glimpse the guest of honour they sound their enormous dun-chen horns, whose deep bass tones reverberate in the steep, white heights of the mountain. The silent snow captures and amplifies this extension of the human voice as it rings out to welcome the guest. Simultaneously a fire of sweet-smelling herbs is lit. Soon afterwards the rgya-glin oboes are heard. The lama climbs slowly upwards and the music does not cease until he has crossed the threshold of the monastery.”

OCEAN OF SOUND, David Toop

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Morning computer hovering

Published December 8, 2024 by Warren Ellis

Masakatsu Sashie.

Not long after it brought on a fresh crew of astronauts, China’s Tiangong space station has received yet another group of new visitors: fruit flies.

As Space.com reports, the critters — consisting of 15 adults and 40 pupae — caught a ride aboard the recent Tianzhou 8 resupply mission, which successfully linked up with the orbital outpost on November 15.

Now, the flies will be used to study the biological effects of living beyond the pull of Earth’s gravity — and beyond the purview of its magnetic field.

Synthesizer workstations can look like the inside of NASA command modules for spaceflights, so it makes perfect sense that a synthesizer session could be used to create an ersatz field recording of an orbital space station. Such “space ambience,” or satellite ASMR, is heard here as an array of clanking and voices and beeps and signals, and an overall metallic reverberance that lends the whole thing a sense of place.
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morning computer horses

Published December 6, 2024 by Warren Ellis

Himalayan art.

Herman Melville’s writing farm:

Melville’s desk is flanked by bookshelves. A fireplace behind him boasts a poker forged from a whaling harpoon. According to the docent who led us on a tour, this setup, impressive as it is, was only temporary. Melville’s eventual plan was to raze the house and build a grander structure featuring a “writing tower.”

How did Melville make use of these spaces? We can gain some insight into his daily routine from a letter he wrote to a friend during this period:

I rise at eight–thereabouts–& go to my  barn–say good-morning to the horse, & give him his breakfast…My own breakfast over, I go to my work-room & light my fire–then spread my M.S.S. on the table–take one business squint at it, & fall to with a will.  At 2 1/2 p.m. I hear a preconcerted knock at my door, which (by request) continues till I rise & go to the door, which serves to wean me effectively from my writing, however interested I may be. . . .

Brocani conjures together all your favourite European cultural and historical myth figures in order to attack the centuries of ‘sublimation’ that have produced our cities and their inhabitants. The gang’s all here: Frankenstein’s monster gropes towards the awareness that his mind is a universe; Attila, naked on a white horse, liberates his people from their ignominy; the ultra-caustic Viva bemoans the frustrations of married life and drifts into the elegiac persona of the Bloody Countess Bathory; Louis Waldon is a hip American tourist searching for the (missing) Mona Lisa. The range is extraordinary, from stand-up Jewish comedy to a kind of flea-market expressionism. Brocani’s approach is contemplative rather than agitational, which confounds the impatient; Gavin Bryars’ lovely Terry Riley-esque score matches the ambience exactly.

I think a lot of writers ask questions like, “what are the stakes here? Why should a reader care?” I don’t think I ask those right away. I just start writing and try to write something that isn’t boring and then, only later, once I’ve written four or five stories, do I get a sense that this story, for whatever reason, seems to have something more going on. When I’m writing, I’m trying to get in a flow state and trust my gut and not overthink things and discover things as I’m writing them.

ALSO:

morning computer: some useful things first thing in the day

I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company. My weekly newsletter is at https://orbitaloperations.beehiiv.com/. Out now: DESOLATION JONES: THE BIOHZARD EDITION, THE DEPARTMENT OF MIDNIGHT audio drama podcast.

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Eating The Sun

Published November 17, 2024 by Warren Ellis

In a series of papers led by the Blue Marble Space Institute of Science (BMSIS), a team of researchers examines what Earth’s level of technological development (aka “technosphere”) will look like in the future. In the most recent installment, available on the arXiv preprint server, they offer a reinterpretation of the Kardashev Scale, which suggests that civilizations expand to harness greater levels of energy (planet, host star, and galaxy).

Instead, they suggest that the Kardashev Scale establishes upper limits on the amount of stellar energy a civilization can harness (a “luminosity limit”) and that civilizations might circumvent this by harnessing stellar mass directly.

The Old Ways: Ben Edge’s Folklore Rising Playlist:

As I arrived at Tower Hill tube station, and walked out into the busy road, I could see in the distance a group of people processing in a line, draped in white cloaks. Completely unbeknown to me, it happened to be the day of the Spring Equinox, the time of year when night and day are of equal length, and the long darks days of winter are behind us and the long bright days of summer are now on the horizon.

Transparent, glass-like planes sweep across Daniel Mullen’s canvases, dancing across the color spectrum and layering or rotating with mathematical precision.

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