To question what seems so much a matter of course that we’ve forgotten its origins. To rediscover something of the astonishment that Jules Verne or his readers may have felt faced with an apparatus capable of reproducing and transporting sounds. For the astonishment existed, along with thousands of others, and it’s they which have moulded us.
What we need to question is bricks, concrete, glass, our table manners, our utensils, our tools, the way we spend our time, our rhythms. To question that which seems to have ceased forever to astonish us. We live, true, we breathe, true; we walk, we open doors, we go down staircases, we sit at a table in order to eat, we lie down on a bed in order to sleep. How? Why? Where? When? Why?
Describe your street. Describe another street. Compare.
Make an inventory of you pockets, of your bag. Ask yourself about the provenance, the use, what will become of each of the objects you take out.
‘How quiet these scenes are, how charged by a crisp light and brilliant clarity. They look like insignificant places, but all of them are full of significance for those whose loved ones died there. All are sites of premature death, all are sites where someone was killed, and most also index an unrestituted crime.
The American landscape is thickening with these incidents. If extra-judicial killing was always facile, the reporting of it is becoming so as well. This is the value of Begley’s project: to shift us into a sober space, a space of contemplation. It is important to have the numbers, but it is vital to have an affective intervention like this one as well, which shows us how difficult the current dispensation is to bear, and how it marks us, the streets on which we move, the places in which we live.’
In Lovecraft, nothing is pure evil, and nothing is good either. The moral of every Lovecraft story is: the world is more complicated than you think, and sometimes in ways that will shorten your lifespan! That’s a hard thing to swallow. Science fiction readers have a better time swallowing it, I think, than some other groups (novelty is part of the reason people choose science fiction over some other genres), but nobody particularly likes to think that everything they know is wrong. That said, it’s a realistic worldview – and Lovecraft was prescient in the sense that it’s a worldview that is far more clearly realistic now, when communications technologies have made it very easy to come across dissenting opinions and well-documented facts that explode your umwelt, than it was during an era when a telephone was an expensive luxury and basic literacy was far less common.
“The book is a slow form of exchange. It is a mode of temporality which conceives of public communication not as action but rather as reflection upon action. Indeed, the book form serves precisely to defer action, to widen the temporal gap between thought and deed, to create a space for reflection and debate. The book, as Marcel Proust recognized, is a fulcrum that creates space out of time.”
For translucence, against transparency: an account of conceptual art and its mediums.
“For me, the medium was never transparent, never something to be seen through, never a neutral delivery system. No matter how reduced the means, they always remained something material, something to be taken apart and put back together, something to be confronted. Any genuine critique can arise only out of the process of using the medium against itself. Far from being the “tedium” of this evening’s theme, this is how I see my job as an artist: to grapple with the means of expression until an idea finds its own form.”
AVIRIS-NG on the Twin Otter working the spill aftermath. First part of work - done! Check. #oilspill #refugiobeach by systemics.mx (via https://instagram.com/p/3GAWIgQk2V/)
A team of Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) investigators has made the first steps towards development of bioartificial replacement limbs suitable for transplantation. In their report, which has been published online in the journal Biomaterials, the researchers describe using an experimental approach previously used to build bioartificial organs to engineer rat forelimbs with functioning vascular and muscle tissue. They also provided evidence that the same approach could be applied to the limbs of primates
Art meets the science of bioluminescence in the stunning work of Lynette Wallworth at #ArtScienceMuseum #TheDeep by honorharger (via https://instagram.com/p/3kzkVlMunW/)
On November 13, 1854, theLondon Necropolis Railway Station opened its doors. Like Charon ferried souls to the Underworld in Greek mythology, the London Necropolis Railway carried the corpses to Brookwood Cemetery, known as London’s city of the dead, which was 25 miles away in Surrey. Brookwood Cemetery, the largest burial ground in the United Kingdom, was an aggressive solution to London’s grave shortage of the 19th century.
London’s buildings and streets sit on top of layers of dead bodies-Victorian graves on top of medieval graves on top of Roman graves. When London’s population more than doubled the early 19th century, the number of city’s corpses started to surpass available burial space within the city. The shortage of graves soon caused sanitation problems and a contributor to the outbreak of disease. In response to this crisis, the Parliament passed the Burial Act of 1852 that banned new burials within London. Luckily England’s railway boom in the 1830’s and 1840’s coincided with London’s problem of limited cemetery space.
In 1852, Sir Richard Broun and Richard Sprye proposed purchasing a large tract of land for a cemetery in Brookwood near Woking in Surrey, for the Brookwood Cemetery or the London Necropolis. Broun and Spyre did some macabre math and determined that with a death rate of 60,000 people each year, they needed at least 1200 acres for the London Necropolis. This would allow close to six million individual graves and would take more than 350 years to fill. Because Brookwood was about 25 miles from London, Broun and Spyre planned to use the London South Western Railway from London to Woking, built in 1838, to connect the deceased and mourners to the future cemetery.
The proposal was approved by Parliament in 1852 and the London Necropolis Company (LNC) was formed to manage construction of the railway station and the London Necropolis. The LNC purchased a considerable 2000 acres for the Brookwood Cemetery near Surrey. But Brookwood Cemetery stood out for its policies as well as its size. The LNC was forbidden from using mass graves for the poor, so no matter how destitute the deceased was they were still allowed the dignity of a separate burial. The cemetery was also one of the few that accommodated people of all faiths including Muslims and Sikhs.
In London, LNC leased land for a private station from the London South Western Railway, near Waterloo station on Westminster Bridge Road. The original London Necropolis Railway Station was a three-story brick structure lined with ornate gates and a not-so-subtle “Necropolis” sign on the roof. Operational from 1854 to 1902, it housed a ticket office, a mortuary, chapels, and waiting rooms.
In 1902, the station was moved to permit the expansion of the Waterloo station. The London South Western Railway relocated the London Necropolis Railway Station to a four-story building at 121 Westminster Bridge Road. This new station, opened from 1902-1941, had a ticket office, LNC offices and boardrooms, mortuary, storage rooms, waiting rooms, and a chapel.
The London Necropolis company sold three classes of funerals: first class allowed a person to choose a specific grave in the cemetery and a permanent memorial; second class allowed a person to choose the area for the grave and the right to place a permanent memorial for an additional cost; third class funerals were paid for by parishes and bodies were placed in graves reserved in an area reserved for that parish. Mourners attending first class funerals had separate waiting rooms, while mourners attending a third class funerals were assigned communal waiting areas.
The London Necropolis Railway and Station closed after the building and its tracks were devastated during a German air raid in 1941. The station at 121 Westminster Bridge Road was converted into an office building and the “London Necropolis” sign was covered.
By the time the London Necropolis Railway closed in 1941 it had ferried more than 200,000 bodies to the Brookwood Cemetery. Brookwood Cemetery is still a functioning cemetery and accommodates different kinds of burials: woodland, green, and cremated internments.
“The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and nondull. He is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with “Wow! Signore, professore dottore Eco, what a library you have ! How many of these books have you read?” and the others - a very small minority - who get the point that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you don’t know as your financial means, mortgage rates and the currently tight real-estate market allows you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menancingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.”
“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).”
“At the end of the panel with Penrose and Shadbolt, I dropped in a “let’s just fuck with you all for five seconds before we leave” notion from INJECTION: that if actual strong AI ever actually appeared (and it probably won’t, for many reasons, but bear with me), we need to consider the likelihood that it wouldn’t be a human-emulating AI, but a non-biological intelligence. And we don’t know what one of those would look like. I’m fond of the old saw that humans are the reproductive organs of machines, and I am entertained by the idea that, to a non-biological intelligence, we wouldn’t be a partner or a bacteria to be expunged, but a client species. “Client species” has a nice chilly ring to it. And if you want to go the “malign AI” route, consider that many systems act upon cognition in the human, including environmental response. Even plants have environmental response – what my old junior-school science teacher Mr Dingle, bless him, called “excitability.” Have fun considering what constitutes environmental response to a digital intelligence. Or, in fact, whether cognitive intelligence can exist without meeting the conditions for life.”
