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Illustration Friday: Cars
In an earlier posts I put down the growth in Dubai because of the unsustainability of the development. But recently I have come across some very interesting projects that use Dubai's abundant natural resources (mainly sunlight and wind).
Check this out. A very interesting project that incorporates solar panels and wind turbines. What's equally interesting is that there was concern for incorporating social spaces and using the design to reference middle eastern Islamic architecture and geometric patterns.
Check this out. A very interesting project that incorporates solar panels and wind turbines. What's equally interesting is that there was concern for incorporating social spaces and using the design to reference middle eastern Islamic architecture and geometric patterns.
Renee Byer recently won a Pulitzer Prize for this incredibly heart-wrenching series of photographs for the Sacramento Bee.
The images remarkably steer clear of saccharin sentimentalism and reveal the intimate pain of a mother who must confront every parent's nightmare. There is a delicacy to the way Byer has handled the events and their representation. It is honest and not intrusive but yet brutally there-in-the-moment. Byer's work reminds me of Philip Jones Griffiths but without sweeping political undertones. The story is simply and powerfully life affirming.
The images remarkably steer clear of saccharin sentimentalism and reveal the intimate pain of a mother who must confront every parent's nightmare. There is a delicacy to the way Byer has handled the events and their representation. It is honest and not intrusive but yet brutally there-in-the-moment. Byer's work reminds me of Philip Jones Griffiths but without sweeping political undertones. The story is simply and powerfully life affirming.
Sometimes, it seems, we are consumed by visions of the future. I think this is a learned behavior as capitalism, at this point in time, seems obsessed with selling us a shinier, technologically enhanced version of ourselves. Techno-fetish lust abounds and the never ending cycle of new product introductions continues unabated. Everyday there are countless technological devices that bring to the mix unnecessary new features or styling.
There are moments, however, when the national (or global?) psyche bubbles up and we are forced to face our demons. Iraq is ever present as is global warming. Corruption, corporate greed, and the list goes on and on. We try desperately to hide in our personal mediascapes but we can't escape the real world.
This week there was an item that kept popping up. The Ministry of Defence in the UK released a report about future threats. The report outlines the use of such technologies as neutron, biological, and chemical weapons. More interesting is that it discusses social class imbalances and even raises the spectre of a Marxist revolution.
The meager descriptions of the report got me thinking about this clip regarding the movie, The Children of Men:
Slavoj Zizek is one of the great thinkers of our time and lays it out for you in black and white about how the real story in the film is the background or the situation. To me it is the nagging sense that everything in the techno-present isn't rosy and outside of our mediated bubble things are beginning to disintegrate.
But I am not really interested in what the film reveals as these fears we openly express everyday or, in the least, surround us in a subtle mediated hum.
The more interesting concern is that our governments are unable to envision a new world and instead prepare for the worst. Yet "the worst" that is "probability-based, rather than predictive" is actually the made-for-film simulacra/parable of what exists now.
It strikes me as wholly plausible that late capitalism, as Zizek reports, has run its course and instead of investing in new paradigms (that could do a hell of lot more to saving the planet, for instance) the vision lingers in a pitiful old-school utter villainization of alternative economic and social models.
This reveals that those in power are of a generation trained to be in their place (often narrowly defined, uncreative roles). They are so uncreative, in fact, that they can't even see that a real defense would be to attack the inequality and the existing system - not their country's own citizens. Needless to say, it is time for visionaries to put forth their imagined realities.
There are moments, however, when the national (or global?) psyche bubbles up and we are forced to face our demons. Iraq is ever present as is global warming. Corruption, corporate greed, and the list goes on and on. We try desperately to hide in our personal mediascapes but we can't escape the real world.
This week there was an item that kept popping up. The Ministry of Defence in the UK released a report about future threats. The report outlines the use of such technologies as neutron, biological, and chemical weapons. More interesting is that it discusses social class imbalances and even raises the spectre of a Marxist revolution.
The meager descriptions of the report got me thinking about this clip regarding the movie, The Children of Men:
Slavoj Zizek is one of the great thinkers of our time and lays it out for you in black and white about how the real story in the film is the background or the situation. To me it is the nagging sense that everything in the techno-present isn't rosy and outside of our mediated bubble things are beginning to disintegrate.
But I am not really interested in what the film reveals as these fears we openly express everyday or, in the least, surround us in a subtle mediated hum.
The more interesting concern is that our governments are unable to envision a new world and instead prepare for the worst. Yet "the worst" that is "probability-based, rather than predictive" is actually the made-for-film simulacra/parable of what exists now.
It strikes me as wholly plausible that late capitalism, as Zizek reports, has run its course and instead of investing in new paradigms (that could do a hell of lot more to saving the planet, for instance) the vision lingers in a pitiful old-school utter villainization of alternative economic and social models.
This reveals that those in power are of a generation trained to be in their place (often narrowly defined, uncreative roles). They are so uncreative, in fact, that they can't even see that a real defense would be to attack the inequality and the existing system - not their country's own citizens. Needless to say, it is time for visionaries to put forth their imagined realities.
I know I have been negligent in keeping up with the posting but, hey, haven't you heard that blogging is, like, so 2005 and, for all intents and purposes, dead.Anyway, with that said, I must say that I have updated the all my sites just to keep them tidy. Metasurface has been turned into a general homepage that will primarily host the links to academic writings (metasurface.net/deeper) and the two blogs - metasurface blog and parallel practice.
The blogs have moved to blogspot and I think by the end of the school my focus will be primarily on parallel practice.
Not that it matters. Metasurface is dead. Long live Metasurface.
Cartoon Brew has an interesting post about a animator who has used After Effects, a post-production effects editor and video compositing tool, to add balloons into well-known films. The results are very well done and very funny. I have added them all below:
My wife and I just celebrated our 11th wedding anniversary recently and it is hard to believe that during a sizable chunk of our married life the US has been at war in Iraq. My daughter is as old as the war and just celebrated her 4th birthday. (If the war was a child it'd be jumping on the couch, and telling potty jokes)
It is interesting to see how, beyond the daily potpourri of images of violence and political talking heads, we visualize the war, the costs of war, the other, and, really, how the visual becomes a playground where we think through all facets of our situation trying to make sense of nothing less than our political reality.
Here are two illustrations of that:
The Iraq Veterans Memorial is a video tribute to fallen soldiers in the vein of the Vietnam memorial or the AIDS quilt project.
Rageh Inside Iran is a BBC documentary that gives the viewer a very complex, nuanced view of Iranians.
UPDATE:
Additional videos to check out: Hometown Baghdad follows several young Iraqis as they struggle to survive in Baghdad.
It is interesting to see how, beyond the daily potpourri of images of violence and political talking heads, we visualize the war, the costs of war, the other, and, really, how the visual becomes a playground where we think through all facets of our situation trying to make sense of nothing less than our political reality.
Here are two illustrations of that:
The Iraq Veterans Memorial is a video tribute to fallen soldiers in the vein of the Vietnam memorial or the AIDS quilt project.
Rageh Inside Iran is a BBC documentary that gives the viewer a very complex, nuanced view of Iranians.
UPDATE:
Additional videos to check out: Hometown Baghdad follows several young Iraqis as they struggle to survive in Baghdad.
My wife Lipi sends this one: Normal Room is social media/design culture taken to its breaking point. The premise of the site is this: upload pictures of your house to share it with a global audience.
That's it.
What results is, as Lipi describes, strangely fascinating. What I find interesting is that people make no attempts what-so-ever to clean or organize the rooms they are showing and a meta-reading of the whole experience of viewing several hundred pictures of various rooms in homes all over the world is that we, as citizens of that giant condominium we call planet Earth, pretty much all have really bad taste.
There are, of course, some anthropological investigations begging to be done. How, for instance, does the Irish family squeeze into that teeny bathroom, get the door closed, pull down their pants, and successfully navigate to the toilet without falling into the shower? Or what is wrong with the Brazilian kids? Why is their bedroom so frighteningly clean?
Billed as an inspirational interior design resource, Normal Rooms does little to inspire thoughts about design but instead is the internet equivalent of driving through the neighborhood on a winter's evening and peering the windows of your neighbors' homes.
If some of the web 2.0 has been about getting the average person to share their creative enterprises with an international crowd of like-minded people then I think it is important to note that what seems to matter to most is not cutting-edge aesthetics or the latest design fashion. It is, instead, comfort and the grind of everyday life.
And piles of books and magazines, apparently.
That's it.
What results is, as Lipi describes, strangely fascinating. What I find interesting is that people make no attempts what-so-ever to clean or organize the rooms they are showing and a meta-reading of the whole experience of viewing several hundred pictures of various rooms in homes all over the world is that we, as citizens of that giant condominium we call planet Earth, pretty much all have really bad taste.
There are, of course, some anthropological investigations begging to be done. How, for instance, does the Irish family squeeze into that teeny bathroom, get the door closed, pull down their pants, and successfully navigate to the toilet without falling into the shower? Or what is wrong with the Brazilian kids? Why is their bedroom so frighteningly clean?
Billed as an inspirational interior design resource, Normal Rooms does little to inspire thoughts about design but instead is the internet equivalent of driving through the neighborhood on a winter's evening and peering the windows of your neighbors' homes.
If some of the web 2.0 has been about getting the average person to share their creative enterprises with an international crowd of like-minded people then I think it is important to note that what seems to matter to most is not cutting-edge aesthetics or the latest design fashion. It is, instead, comfort and the grind of everyday life.
And piles of books and magazines, apparently.
This week's technofetish award goes to all those who are drooling about the new Apple iPhone. My reaction at the announcement was: *sigh* a phone. Apart from being a little turned off by the hype (can't anyone see how the slavish followers reflect the 90s Microsoft fan club or is that just an ex-Seattlite privilege), I have to admit that I am not excited by the fact that it is an all in one package - phone, camera, internet device, media player. I actually like my appliances being separate so that when one gets outdated it is less expensive (in theory) to upgrade. Furthermore, the whole phone thing (what Jobs calls the killer app) didn't interest me simply because, surprise, I rarely use a phone (cell or otherwise).
Kottke has a wonderful distillation of all the recent writing about the iPhone.
While I thought the design of the phone and interface was very beautiful both, at closer inspection, leave a little to be desired. I don't want to go into detail (see some of the mentions in the Kottke piece) but I will say that the iPhone does begin to spark my interest when you think of small computers such as the oqo. I am more than eager to see a full-fledged OS X machine in a package slightly larger than the oqo or the iPhone with features like voice recognition and touchscreen/stylus input.
Heck, you could make calls through something like skype if you really needed, as I have ascertained from exhaustive informal research and eavesdropping, to tell your friends about the incredibly mundane things about your life that you wouldn't normally tell anyone (except perhaps your gastroenterologist).
I think if Apple did a small form factor sub-notebook with touch/voice/stylus and it could perform some of the same tasks as both the iPhone and appleTV devices, then I think they'd be looking a more than the 1% market share they are hoping to attract (which I am sure they will get) and would have a product that is perhaps more attractive to the Japanese and European market where space is premium.
But Apple Inc. is more about cleaning up: Taking the jumble that is out there and making it better. My bet, though, is that the iPhone is just a test technology that is a stepping stone to a larger more powerful device (sub-notebook? tablet? both?).
Note: Blake, a grad student, asked why voice recognition and speech-to-text technology that has been around for a while wasn't incorporated to make facilitate speedier texting.
Kottke has a wonderful distillation of all the recent writing about the iPhone.
While I thought the design of the phone and interface was very beautiful both, at closer inspection, leave a little to be desired. I don't want to go into detail (see some of the mentions in the Kottke piece) but I will say that the iPhone does begin to spark my interest when you think of small computers such as the oqo. I am more than eager to see a full-fledged OS X machine in a package slightly larger than the oqo or the iPhone with features like voice recognition and touchscreen/stylus input.
Heck, you could make calls through something like skype if you really needed, as I have ascertained from exhaustive informal research and eavesdropping, to tell your friends about the incredibly mundane things about your life that you wouldn't normally tell anyone (except perhaps your gastroenterologist).
I think if Apple did a small form factor sub-notebook with touch/voice/stylus and it could perform some of the same tasks as both the iPhone and appleTV devices, then I think they'd be looking a more than the 1% market share they are hoping to attract (which I am sure they will get) and would have a product that is perhaps more attractive to the Japanese and European market where space is premium.
But Apple Inc. is more about cleaning up: Taking the jumble that is out there and making it better. My bet, though, is that the iPhone is just a test technology that is a stepping stone to a larger more powerful device (sub-notebook? tablet? both?).
Note: Blake, a grad student, asked why voice recognition and speech-to-text technology that has been around for a while wasn't incorporated to make facilitate speedier texting.
The last post got me to thinking about mythologies. One that I see students buying into all the time is that media are inert. When I taught Introduction to Visual Communications, I was surprised by how students were unaware of the "mediatedness" of their daily lives. After all, sometimes I go home with "plastic poisoning" from spending too much time in front of the computer only to go online minutes after the kids go to bed. But I also spend a lot of time in social situations. Could I be the one believing in something that is fundamentally incorrect?
So, as a sort of New Year's experiment, I am going to follow New York Magazine's lead and write about my Media Diet. Here it is:
Wednesday: 7:15 - 7:30 - Check email and quickly review nytimes.com, cnn.com, commondreams.org, huffingtonpost.com, digg.com, gizmodo.com, and surf for CFPs (calls for papers)
7:35 - 8:00 - Watch Arthur while feeding the kids.
8:40 - 9:00 - Listened to iPod on my commute (car stereo doesn't work): Oldies - Police (Roxanne), Pink Floyd (Wish you were here), Beatles (Strawberry fields)
9:00 - 9:10 - Walked to work from far reaches of parking lot listening to iPod (too cold to read): Jazz - John Coltrane (Ev'ry Time We Say Goodbye), Ahmad Jamal (The Awakening)
9:30 - 9:50 - Review CFPs (calls for papers)
10:00 - 10:10 - Review digg.com, drawn.ca, boingboing.com
11:05 - 11:25 - email
11:25 - 11:30 - prepare last post
1:00 - 1:20 - prepare this post
(more later)
So, as a sort of New Year's experiment, I am going to follow New York Magazine's lead and write about my Media Diet. Here it is:
Wednesday: 7:15 - 7:30 - Check email and quickly review nytimes.com, cnn.com, commondreams.org, huffingtonpost.com, digg.com, gizmodo.com, and surf for CFPs (calls for papers)
7:35 - 8:00 - Watch Arthur while feeding the kids.
8:40 - 9:00 - Listened to iPod on my commute (car stereo doesn't work): Oldies - Police (Roxanne), Pink Floyd (Wish you were here), Beatles (Strawberry fields)
9:00 - 9:10 - Walked to work from far reaches of parking lot listening to iPod (too cold to read): Jazz - John Coltrane (Ev'ry Time We Say Goodbye), Ahmad Jamal (The Awakening)
9:30 - 9:50 - Review CFPs (calls for papers)
10:00 - 10:10 - Review digg.com, drawn.ca, boingboing.com
11:05 - 11:25 - email
11:25 - 11:30 - prepare last post
1:00 - 1:20 - prepare this post
(more later)
Open Democracy is an interesting website that:
is the leading independent website on global current affairs - free to read, free to participate, free to the world...offering stimulating, critical analysis, promoting dialogue and debate on issues of global importance and linking citizens from around the world.This article captured my attention recently. How many mythologies have you bought into recently?
Here's a list of 50 interesting things that we now know that we didn't know at this time last year.
Very funny list of failed holiday specials. There are such goodies as: Muppet Christmas with Zbigniew Brzezinski, A Canadian Christmas with David Cronenberg, and Ayn Rand's A Selfish Christmas.