Preparing signed copies of my hand assembled “Mono No Aware” book for shipping to LOOK3 Photo Festival. If you can attend, come…

Preparing signed copies of my hand assembled “Mono No Aware” book for shipping to LOOK3 Photo Festival. If you can attend, come by! There’s so much going on… not in the least, dear friend @davidalanharvey has a fantastic exhibit of three of his works there – “Tell it like it is”, “Beach Games” and “Haenyeo” (all books, no less!), @panosskoulidas is releasing his first book “Death in Venice”, and the EPF 2015 winners will be announced plus almost all @burnmagazine books will be available on the spot…. it’ll be a big party I assure you 😊 #look3 #burnmagazine #epf2015 #fujifilm #tellitlikeitis #beachgames #haenyeo #deathinvenice #photobooks #allfunandgames #mononoaware by antonkusters (via https://instagram.com/p/2t0P2eCWlx/)

Histories’ shadows, ghosts, and specters are always present in the tangled political maneuverings of Southeast Asian…

“Histories’ shadows, ghosts, and specters are always present in the tangled political maneuverings of Southeast Asian nation-states. The elderly, often silenced, are among the keepers of these stories, the quotidian and lived realities coursing beneath the nationalist propaganda used by power holders to justify their “national interests” or “national security.” Ancestors’ graves are places for the fading and ever more haphazard retellings, particularly in Singapore, where graveyards are steadily being removed, producing legacy ghosts that not frequently, but also not infrequently, are said to cause bulldozers used in new construction to break down, requiring the rites of Taoist priests to smooth the way (e.g., Comaroff 2009).”

–Michael M. J. Fischer, ‘Ethnography for aging societies—Dignity, cultural genres, and Singapore’s imagined futures’ (2015)

While cutting graphene sponge with a laser, they noticed the light propelled the material forwards. That was odd, because while…

“

While cutting graphene sponge with a laser, they noticed the light propelled the material forwards. That was odd, because while lasers have been used to shove single molecules around, the sponge was a few centimetres across so should be too large to move.

The team placed pieces of graphene sponge in a vacuum and shot them with lasers of different wavelength and intensity. They were able to push sponge pieces upwards by as much as 40 centimetres. They even got the graphene to move by focusing ordinary sunlight on it with a lens.

”

–Spacecraft built from graphene could run on nothing but sunlight (viaiamdanw)

An incomplete list: No more diving into pools of chlorinated water lit green from below. No more ball games played out under…

“An incomplete list:
No more diving into pools of chlorinated water lit green from below. No more ball games played out under floodlights. No more porch lights with moths fluttering on summer nights. No more trains running under the surface of cities on the dazzling power of the electric third rail. No more cities. No more films, except rarely, except with a generator drowning out half the dialogue, and only then for the first little while until the fuel for the generators ran out, because automobile gas goes stale after two or three years. Aviation gas lasts longer, but it was difficult to come by.
No more screens shining in the half-light as people raise their phones above the crowd to take pictures of concert states. No more concert stages lit by candy-colored halogens, no more electronica, punk, electric guitars.
No more pharmaceuticals. No more certainty of surviving a scratch on one’s hand, a cut on a finger while chopping vegetables for dinner, a dog bite.
No more flight. No more towns glimpsed from the sky through airplane windows, points of glimmering light; no more looking down from thirty thousand feet and imagining the lives lit up by those lights at that moment. No more airplanes, no more requests to put your tray table in its upright and locked position – but no, this wasn’t true, there were still airplanes here and there. They stood dormant on runways and in hangars. They collected snow on their wings. In the cold months, they were ideal for food storage. In summer the ones near orchards were filled with trays of fruit that dehydrated in the heat. Teenagers snuck into them to have sex. Rust blossomed and streaked.
No more countries, all borders unmanned.
No more fire departments, no more police. No more road maintenance or garbage pickup. No more spacecraft rising up from Cape Canaveral, from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, from Vandenburg, Plesetsk, Tanegashima, burning paths through the atmosphere into space.
No more Internet. No more social media, no more scrolling through litanies of dreams and nervous hopes and photographs of lunches, cries for help and expressions of contentment and relationship-status updates with heart icons whole or broken, plans to meet up later, pleas, complaints, desires, pictures of babies dressed as bears or peppers for Halloween. No more reading and commenting on the lives of others, and in so doing, feeling slightly less alone in the room. No more avatars.”

–Emily St. John Mandel in Station Eleven

The technological construct of identity and the social construct of identity are different and have different implied social…

“The technological construct of identity and the social construct of identity are different and have different implied social contracts. The social construct of identity includes the property of imperfect human memory that allows the possibility of forgiving and forgetting, and redemption and reinvention. Machine memory, however, is perfect and can act as a continuous witnessing agent, never forgiving or forgetting, and always able to re-presence even the smallest detail at any future moment.”

–http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/swan20150519
(viawildcat2030)

There are whole generations of moviegoers for whom jetpacks don’t mean shit, whose first memories of NASA are the Challenger…

“There are whole generations of moviegoers for whom jetpacks don’t mean shit, whose first memories of NASA are the Challenger disaster. And you know what? Those same generations believe in driverless cars, solar energy, smart cities, AR contacts, and vat-grown meat. They saw the election of America’s first black president, and they witnessed a wave of violence against young black men. They don’t want the depiction of an “optimistic” future. They want a future where their concerns are taken seriously and humanely, with compassion and intelligence and validation. And that’s way harder than optimism.”

–No one cares about your jetpack: on optimism in futurism - Dangerous to those who profit from the way things areDangerous to those who profit from the way things are (vianataliekane)

It has long been believed that these “hemp rituals” were nothing more than a myth, but it is a fact this ceremony did occur. In…

“It has long been believed that these “hemp rituals” were nothing more than a myth, but it is a fact this ceremony did occur. In 1929, Professor S. I. Rudenko and his team of archaeologists were digging some ancient ruins near the Altai Mountains, on the border between Siberia and Outer Mongolia. They unearthed a 20-foot deep trench about 160 square feet in size.

Around the trench, they found the skeletons of horses and inside the trench was the embalmed body of a man and a large cauldron filled with the residue of cannabis seeds. It is interesting to note that the sacrifice of a horse was considered the most “prestigious” sacrificial gift to their pantheon of seven gods.”

–Karen Graham at the Digital Journal, “Ancient Scythians spread the use of cannabis in death rituals.” (Originally viaarchaeologicalnews.)

What we need, then, is more uncommon futurism. A futurism that cares not a whit about what’s hot right now, who remain stoically…

“What we need, then, is more uncommon futurism. A futurism that cares not a whit about what’s hot right now, who remain stoically unimpressed by drones and wearable IT, and who instead take it as their job to shock and awe CEOs with visions as radical as those of the futurists of yore. We need futurism that is less interested in agreeing with contemporary futurists and their ongoing circle-jerk, and who takes pride in offending and disgusting those futurists who would like to protect the status quo.”

–Alf Rehn

The Future Is A Confidence Trick

prediction, futures, social fabric, telegrams, communication, Warren Ellis

Prediction is an industry, and its product is a persuasive set of hopes and fears that we’re trained or convinced to agree upon. It’s a confidence trick. And its product comes so thick and fast that, like a plothole in an action movie, we’re carried on past the obvious failures and the things that didn’t even make sense if we had more than five seconds to think about them.

http://morning.computer/2015/05/the-future-is-a-confidence-trick/

No one cares about your jetpack: on optimism in futurism

jetpacks, futures, design, innovation, Madeline Ashby, optimism

America’s problem is not that it needs more jetpacks. Jetpacks are not innovation. Jetpacks are a fetish object for retrofuturist otaku who jerked off to Judy Jetson, or maybe Jennifer Connelly’s character in The Rocketeer. “We were promised jetpacks!” they whine. Yeah, dude, but what you got was Agent Orange. Imagine a Segway that could kill you and set your house on fire. That’s what a jetpack is. Jetpacks solve exactly one problem: rapid transit. And you know what would help with that? Better transit. Better telepresence. Better work-life balance. Are jetpacks an innovative solution to the problem of transit? Nope. But they sure look great with your midlife crisis. But railing against jetpacks isn’t an answer to the question. Why so negative?

http://madelineashby.com/?p=1809

There’s a funny moment toward the end of the book when Vertesi pays a visit to a researcher named Ross, who was known throughout…

“There’s a funny moment toward the end of the book when Vertesi pays a visit to a researcher named Ross, who was known throughout the Rover community for his image processing skills. Vertesi asks Ross to demonstrate his vaunted decorrelation stretch technique; a little perplexed, he opens the image processing suite on his computer, loads some sample images, and explains: “I just push this button.” The distinctive greens and purples that recalled, for Vertesi, the palette of Andy Warhol were the result of a software macro applying a mathematical formula. In fact, Warhol’s critique of art’s singularity and his embrace of the readymade in some ways anticipated the relationship between Ross and his images. When Vertesi wanted to include one of Ross’s signature stretches in an article she was writing, another scientist told her not to worry about tracking down permission. In a pinch, Ross’s colleague offered, he could recreate the image on the spot and give her permission to publish that one instead. Even as the aesthetics of Ross’s technique were admired, what made his images scientific was precisely the ability to reproduce them.”

–Pushing Pixels (viaiamdanw)