What happens when you mix the long tail concept with niche fetishism? check out smashmyphone to find out.
I mean, how many people can there be willing to pay to see pics and vids of female feet smashing mobile phones? Some things would never happen without the web.
(via)
Camouflage Comics: Dirty War Images aims at producing reflections - both in the form of verbal and visual material - on the interplay between art, dictatorship and human rights in general and the legacy of the Argentine "dirty war" (1976-83) in particular, with a focus on comics.
I have a fascination with faraway traffic cams mediated by the small screen of a 3G mobile phone.
Thanks to this elegant application, I drift and click across the traffic cams of end-of-night Manhattan. A virtual flaneur strolling down trans-atlantic airwaves.
The 5-second refresh allows cars to appear and disappear. Stop-motion headlights. Traffic lights chase red and green.
I end up loitering on 9th avenue & 34th street as dawn breaks. Trucks and vans are urban blood cells rushing to nourish the city. The people driving cars remain unseen. Some must be going home. Others off to work.
Is someone crying? What songs are playing? Has someone just discovered love?
Surf smut with the appropriate soundtrack: Comfort Stand Recordings ("a community driven label where all releases are free with artwork and liner notes") brings you wakka chikka wakka chikka - porn music for the masses volume 1.
(via)
"Re-examines the clash of worldviews inherent in the 1993 conflict by asking players to assume the role of a resurrected "cult" leader in order to do divine battle against a crusading government. While the voices of far-off decision-makers seem resolute and determined, the "grunts" who physically assault the compound appear conflicted and naive in their roles. The game commemorates the tenth anniversary of the siege at a unique cultural moment in which holy war has become embedded in official government policy. In 2003, the spirit of Koresh has become a paradoxical embodiment of the current political landscape - he is both the besieged religious other and the logical extension of the neo-conservative millennial vision. Waco is a primal scene of American fear: the apocalyptic visionary - an American tradition stretching back to Jonathan Edwards - confronts the heathen "other" - in Waco Resurrection, the roles are anything but fixed."
(thanks to Regine Debatty)
Meetings. View on the suburbs of Milan. A wide open window in the distance. Voices and acronyms. English nouns become Italian verbs. A transparent plastic cup stuffed with strawberries. PDFs and PPTs. Waiting for a videoconference. Thinking of Beckett (whom I never liked). Polyphonic tones ring out at irregular intervals aping radio snippets. The air outside runs wild with the promise of summer.
This is the story of what happens when the butterfly effect is butchered by religious intolerance.
This is the story of a 21-year-old Nigerian journalist, a miss world beauty pageant and 15 fateful words.
This is the story of Isioma Daniel:
"On Monday I heard of the fatwa by email. I used one cyber-cafe but later had to move to different places because there were too many Nigerians and I was worried that someone might cotton on. When I browsed through the Google news site I read the fatwa by the Zamfara state government through their spokesperson, Mamuda Aliyu Shinkaf. "Like Salman Rushdie, the blood of Isioma Daniel can be shed. It is abiding on all Muslims wherever they are to consider the killing of the writer as a religious duty." I felt calm. It was then I realised that there was no going back to Nigeria. This was no longer a lie-low-until-it-all-blows-over-then-you-can-come-back scenario. Two hundred people dead; in the name of religion."
(via)
I stand in shadows asking nobody in particular if the knowledge worker is a ghost.
(image recontextualized thanks to Carey Young's basement clearout)
Blogstar theater is:
"a weekly web show in which people create theatrical reinterpretations of strangers' blog entries, in video format. Anyone can produce and submit an episode, and every blog is a potential source of material. The project, an experiment in participatory mass media, is a show by everyone, for everyone, and about everyone."
(via)
"Bacteria have been programmed to behave like computers, assembling themselves into complex shapes based on instructions stuffed into their genes... researchers programmed E. coli bacteria to emit red or green fluorescent light in response to a signal emitted from another set of E. coli. The living cells were commanded to make a bull's-eye pattern, for example, around central cells based on communication between the bacteria. Other patterns produced with this new "synthetic biology" technique include a pretty good semblance of a heart and a rudimentary flower pattern."
(via)
The evening is balmy. In front of me a blade of pale grey tarmac underlines the green field that runs across my field of vision. A car just drives by. In the middle of the field a spit of luxuriant woodland; a farmhouse half-hidden. Further away, beyond the anti-flood bio-barrier, the treeline runs horizontal. I am viewing east.
To the south-east hills push to be young mountains. It is there that Bacchus pisses Bonarda. To the north, on a clear day, you can see snow-capped alps.
Behind me the sun cuts sharp shadows on a white wall. All around birds tweet the reggae of the impending night. Two bicycle riders look small in the distance. Time running so fast to seem still.
We moved just outside Pavia just before last Christmas. Into rural settings. Towards the tip of a tongue of earth defined by two major rivers: the Ticino and the Po'. The land as flatly crumpled as the page of an ancient book. The agriculture of subsequent civilizations hangs in sub-historic particles in the air. Today, all around is extreme green.
(to be continued...)
(Sanctuary of the Madonnna of Boden, 2002 - photo by Marianna)
Published by Coconino Press, Baru's L'arrabbiato (originally in French) is a remarkable comic. It tells a classic, dare I say archetypal, story: the angry kid from the no-hope neighbourhood who wants out, be a boxer and make some cash. In harsh conflict with his father who wants him to study. In mangled friendship with his Arab friend off to university.
What is remarkable is the emotional, the economic-driven intensity captured by the drawings, like Lee Strasberg's method applied to comic art. The anguish and the laughter become pungent punches that hit out from the delicately printed page.
Now awaiting vol.2
Three summers ago, when we moved to Milan from London, we received as part of a relocation package three months paid hotel accomodation. I was joining 3. There were three of us: me, marianna and our european baby daughter. In a numerology meets brand extravaganza we chose Milano 3.
Milano 3 is off the tourist track but definitely worth a visit if you're into the spaces and the architectures of those post-modern landscapes that already reek of retro. Where concrete and tarmac and manicured lawns give mundane form to concept and fiction.
Milano 3 is Ballardian in its hallucinated suburban qualities. In the hotel-residence we stayed in, there were international families. Scores of Peruvian nannies in the park. TV people from Mediaset channels would wander about. Marianna kept comparing vistas with frames from Truffaut's Fahrenheit 451. The aesthetics aligned with 60-70s sci-fi seen on screens. Where else?
Milano 3 was the brainchild of Silvio Berlusconi, built back before his days in politics, when he mingled bricks'n'mortar with bits'n'bytes of infotainment. A clone of Milano 2, another Berlusconi project. These are whole neighbourhoods on the fringes of Milan. Not exactly gated communities, but highly patrolled. Gardens and trees. Flats and villas. Greens and browns the former. Reds and oranges the latter. Colour-coded in a marketing brochure. The logo is everywhere. But some colours are fading. Rusting. Cracks appearing in the walls.
We spent a delightful summer. Living in a L-shaped studio flat. Drinking shaken Campari with a drop of gin at dusk. Sharing anthropological tales of stories overheard in the sauna. Swimming in pool-blue water. Feeding ducks. Searching for the right place to live (we discovered the heart of old Pavia and fell in love one hot summer day). Escaping the heat in air-conditioned Feltrinelli media stores. Buying books. Driving off to the mountains or the lakes or the Vittoriale at the weekends. Taking pictures.
Photoshop blasphemy in nodal communication:
"A public prosecutor from Rome, Salvatore Vitello, charged Indymedia Italy with crimes of offence to catholic religion and personal offences to the Pope, asking for the shutdown of the IMC, for having published in the open publishing newswire a fake picture of the pope in a Nazi uniform."
Italy IMC article.
A sliver of intellectual foie gras from thought chef Michel Foucault:
"What strikes me is the fact that, in our society, art has become something that is related only to objects and not individuals or to life. That art is something which is specialized or done by artists. But couldn't everyone's life become a work of art? Why should the lamp or the house be an art object but not our life?"
(Found quoted in the Play Ethic)
