BRIGHTON, UK — Attempting an interview with Chicks on Speed is a logistical challenge, as members of the art and music collective are dispersed around the world. So at time of asking these questions Alex Murray-Leslie was in Florence, Italy, and Melissa Logan was in Talinn, Estonia. The two founder members make it a condition that any interested journalists speak to both or none at all. Since other Chicks were said to be in Istanbul, Paris and a treehouse in a Redwood Forest, this writer was fortunate to keep things simple with just two long distance calls.
“However, through the strange aesthetics of an alien rhythmanalysis, (…) we might challenge the notion of reality as strictly corresponding to the total sum of sensed phenomena, and bring forth instead the potency of a speculative digitality that is inseparable from computation.”
– Eleni Ikoniadou in The Rhythmic Event. (viajuhavantzelfde)
Slow Action is a post-apocalyptic science fiction film which exists somewhere between documentary, ethnographic study and fiction. Slow Action applies the idea of island biogeography - the study of how species and eco-systems evolve differently when isolated and surrounded by unsuitable habitat - to a conception of the Earth in a few hundred years; the sea level rising to absurd heights, creating hyperbolic utopias that appear as possible future mini-societies.
Slow Action is filmed at different sites across the globe: Lanzarote - a beautiful strange island known for its beach resorts yet one of the driest places on the planet, full of dead volcanoes and strange architecture; Gunkanjima - an island off the coast of Nagasaki, Japan, a deserted city built on a rock, once home to thousands of families mining its rich coal reserves; Tuvalu - one of the smallest countries in the world, with tiny strips of land barely above sea level in the middle of the Pacific; and Somerset - an as yet to be discovered island and its various clades.
Slow Action, Ben Rivers’ first exhibition at Matt’s Gallery, is a post-apocalyptic science fiction film that brings together a series of four 16mm works which exist somewhere between documentary, ethnographic study and fiction.
Continuing his exploration of curious and extraordinary environments, Slow Action applies the idea of island biogeography - the study of how species and eco-systems evolve differently when isolated and surrounded by unsuitable habitat - to a conception of the Earth in a few hundred years; the sea level rising to absurd heights, creating hyperbolic utopias that appear as possible future mini-societies.
Slow Action is filmed at different sites across the globe: Lanzarote - a beautiful strange island known for its beach resorts yet one of the driest places on the planet, full of dead volcanoes and strange architecture; Gunkanjima - an island off the coast of Nagasaki, Japan, a deserted city built on a rock, once home to thousands of families mining its rich coal reserves; Tuvalu - one of the smallest countries in the world, with tiny strips of land barely above sea level in the middle of the Pacific; and Somerset - an as yet to be discovered island and its various clades.
This series of constructed realities explores the environments of self-contained lands and the search for information to enable the reconstruction of soon to be lost worlds.
The film’s soundtrack - narratives by writer Mark von Schlegell - detail each of the four islands’ evolutions according to their geographical, geological, climatic and botanical conditions.
Slow Action, inspired by novels such as Samuel Butler’s Erewhon, Bacon’s The New Atlantis, Herbert Read’s The Green Child and Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, embodies the spirit of exploration, experiment and active research that has come to characterise Rivers’ practice.
“The transorbital (If you are unfamiliar with the word ‘transorbital’, its definition is “Crossing through (If you are unfamiliar with the word ‘through’, its definition is “In one side and out (If you are unfamiliar with the word ‘out’, its definition is “In a direction away (If you are unfamiliar with the word ‘away’, its definition is “From a particular thing (If you are unfamiliar with the word ‘thing’, its definition is “An entity, an idea, or a quality perceived, known, or thought (If you are unfamiliar with the word ‘thought’, its definition is “Past tense and past participle of think.”) to have its own existence.”) […]”
It starts as a simple 8-word sentence, but the program randomly chooses words to define for the reader, and keeps defining words until the book is at least 50,000 words long.
“Last week, an official report from the parliamentary intelligence and security committee handed over responsibility for the UK’s fight against terrorism, or at least part of it, to Facebook’s algorithms – the automated scripts that (among other things) look at your posts and your networks to suggest content you will like, people you might know and things you might buy.”
My favourite thing to ferment, which has gone through five different versions since summer 2012. This is the best so far. I shredded turnips, mixed them with 1.5% salt, left them to macerate for an hour, then added 150g live yoghurt whey and 80g raw turnip juice. They have been in since 16th March, and are getting better and better. Spicy and savoury and electric with lactic acid.
The notion that sharing would do away with the need for owning has been one of the mantras of sharing economy promoters. We could share cars, houses, and labor, trusting in the platforms to provide. But it’s becoming clear that ownership matters as much as ever. Whoever owns the platforms that help us share decides who accumulates wealth from them, and how. Rather than giving up on ownership, people are looking for a different way of practicing it.
Welcome to a Special Edition of The Dark Extropian Report. It’s been a bumper few weeks, months and years even in the world of astrobiology, and in particular in the area related to the theory of Panspermia – the idea that life came riding in on an asteroid or comet to our planet. This is one of the very core ideas of Dark Extropianism; that we are inextricably bound to the cosmos, on a grand scale that at the very least is inter-planetary. That our fate lies there as much as our origins do. That we are more than just star dust, but part of a living system that spans billions of years, who’s distance is measured by the speed of light. That ecology is something that spans the galaxy. That we are not meant to stay here, that our destiny lies amongst the stars.
Solo for Violin Simultaneous performance, May 23rd 1964
Performed by Ben Vautier and Alison Knowles (not pictured) during “Fluxus Street Theatre” as part of Fluxus Festival at Fauxhall, New York City
Photograph by George Maciunas, 51 x 40.5 cm
“They don’t tell you that a lot of programming skill is about developing a knack for asking the right questions on Google and knowing which code is best to copy-paste. And they don’t let you in on a big secret: that there is no mastery, there is no final level. The anxiety of feeling lost and stupid is not something you learn to conquer, but something you learn to live with.”
(One of the toughest things to do when I’m teaching Processing is convincing the students who “just don’t get it ” to stick it out a little longer and persist in their efforts. I don’t expect all of my art students to become professional programmers. In fact I’m not sure if I have the mettle to do that myself. I do think that one of the many values of programming is that it “isn’t easy” and direct experience can cure the false perception. - J.L.)
Polyethylene (PE) has been considered nonbiodegradable for decades. Although the biodegradation of PE by bacterial cultures has been occasionally described, valid evidence of PE biodegradation has remained limited in the literature. We found that waxworms, or Indian mealmoths (the larvae of Plodia interpunctella), were capable of chewing and eating PE films.
Workers climb a ladder in to the rusting hulk of India’s first aircraft carrier INS Vikrant at a ship-breaking yard in Mumbai, India. The iconic naval vessel, that was purchased from Britain in 1957, played a key role during the India-Pakistan war of 1971 and was decommissioned in 1997. Picture: AP Photo/Rajanish Kakade
Here, we study the characteristics of functional brain networks at the mesoscopic level from a novel perspective that highlights the role of inhomogeneities in the fabric of functional connections. […] The results show that the homological structure of the brain’s functional patterns undergoes a dramatic change post-psilocybin, characterized by the appearance of many transient structures of low stability and of a small number of persistent ones that are not observed in the case of placebo.
The Atomium, a Brussels landmark, has a Twitter account and engages in copyright and more specifically Freedom of Panorama discussions. In the end it agreed that fixing copyright would make its life easier but admitted that it doesn’t fully understand the rules.
The casual alteration of idioms risks nothing less than “cultural and linguistic chaos”, it warns. Chinese is perfectly suited to puns because it has so many homophones. Popular sayings and even customs, as well as jokes, rely on wordplay. But the order from the State Administration for Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television says: “Radio and television authorities at all levels must tighten up their regulations and crack down on the irregular and inaccurate use of the Chinese language, especially the misuse of idioms.” Programmes and adverts should strictly comply with the standard spelling and use of characters, words, phrases and idioms – and avoid changing the characters, phrasing and meanings, the order said. “Idioms are one of the great features of the Chinese language and contain profound cultural heritage and historical resources and great aesthetic, ideological and moral values,” it added.
Documents published on November 25, 2014 by Süddeutsche Zeitung revealed more specific details about submarine cables currently tapped by GCHQ. Previous reporting had made it clear that GCHQ had submarine cable taps created in collusion with companies like Vodafone and BT Cable, but not which specific cables. Seeing Telegeography publishes landing point maps and submarine cable maps it seemed like a worthwhile exercise to better understand what, exactly, the reach of GCHQ’s submarine cable tapping might look like.
“Too much consistency is as bad for the mind as it is for the body. Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead.”
“But now, the end is indeed near for the spacecraft after eight years at Venus — four times longer than its primary mission. Although it is healthy and performing routine science operations, fuel is only standing at around 3 kilograms (6.6 pounds) and oxidizer at 5 kg (11 lbs). It’s possible not all of it is accessible due to propellant movement in the tanks, ESA said. The new maneuvers are expected to subtract 1.4 kg of fuel and 2 kg of oxidizer from these totals.”
“The awakening to the mystery of life is a revolutionary event; in it an old world is destroyed so that a new and better one may take its place, and all things are affected by the change. We ourselves have become mysterious strangers in our own eyes and tremblingly we ask ourselves who we are, whence we came, whither we are bound. Are we the being who is called by our name, whom we thought we knew so well in the past? Are we the form we see in the mirror, our body, offspring of our parents? Who, then, is it that feels and thinks within us, that wills and struggles, plans and dreams, that can oppose and control this physical body which we thought to be ourselves? We wake up to realize that we have never known ourselves, that we have lived as in a blind dream of ceaseless activity in which there was never a moment of self recollection.”
Gas roils around inside galaxies, forming new stars; it blows out of galaxies for its own hot reasons; it hangs around outside the galaxies, cools off, and falls back in to form more stars, then blows back out again, in, out, over and over. It’s like the galaxy is breathing.
This is sheerest anthropomorphism, which is a bad word among scientists. They don’t like it – neither did my editor — because it describes in human terms, something that should be described in its own terms. Thinking anthropomorphically, you’ll probably miss what the thing – the galaxy, the virus, the moving magma – is actually, truly doing.
But it was the breathing that got me — and breathing not anthropomorphically either, not in human terms but in its own terms. So what looks like anthropomorphism, the universe described in human terms, is really humans following the rules the universe follows. One of those rules is cycles — infalls and outflows, repeat repeat — that nourish some entity through time. Until sooner or later, somehow or other, the gas leaves the galaxy and doesn’t fall back in, and the stars burn up the remaining gas until it’s gone. When the galaxy can’t breathe any more, it dies.
That’s another of the universe’s rules: entities end. Humans, we’re so cosmopomorphic.
University of Leeds professor Brendon Nicholls made a list of the “Five African Novels to Read Before You Die” yesterday, and it’s a fine list, if your best-case scenario is that literate first-world types manage to read a handful of creative works from Africa in their lifetime. And let’s…
‘to influence a dying civilization by correcting an evolutive error by infecting the general mind with positive ideas’ - #hypotheticalapplication (*by #michaelcolombu) - god, how #paris needs that.. (via http://instagram.com/p/v84hAWQS0C/)
It stands 3.5 metres tall and is 5.5 metres long (11ft tall by 18ft long), suggesting it may have been a male that weighed up to six tonnes. The skeleton, which is 30,000 to 50,000 years old, was estimated to command a price of between £150,000 and £250,000. It had been in a private eastern European collection for years and was only assembled, including tusks, for the first time when it came to the auction house. Errol Fuller, the curator of the sale, said: “Although mammoth are not as rare as some dinosaur skeletons, the chances to buy an almost complete skeleton don’t come up very often. We had interest from private buyers as well as institutions from around the world and there was bidding going on between buyers in the sale room and on the phones.” The lot was offered at the auction house’s second Evolution sale, where a giant egg from the extinct elephant bird was also offered. A Chinese museum was the successful bidder paying £69,960 for the egg, which is more than 30cm in length. It had been expected to fetch between £30,000 and £50,000. Elephant birds were akin to giant ostriches and were native to Madagascar. They have been extinct since at least the 17th century. At the first Evolution sale, in November last year, a diplodocus skeleton named Misty sold for £400,000. It was originally bought anonymously, but the Obel Family Foundation later revealed that it was the purchaser and was donating the skeleton to the Natural History Museum of Denmark, in Copenhagen. (via Woolly mammoth skeleton fetches £189,000 at auction | World news | The Guardian)
“You gotta remember, and I’m sure you do, the forces that are arrayed against anyone trying to alter this sort of hammerlock on the human imagination. There are trillions of dollars out there demotivating people from imagining that a better tomorrow is possible. Utopian impulses and utopian horizons have been completely disfigured and everybody now is fluent in dystopia, you know. My young people’s vocabulary… their fluency is in dystopic futures. When young people think about the future, they don’t think about a better tomorrow, they think about horrors and end of the worlds and things or worse. Well, do you really think the lack of utopic imagination doesn’t play into demotivating people from imagining a transformation in the society?”
“That’s what the world is, after all: an endless battle of contrasting memories.” - Haruki Murakami / Another #tripleexposure collaboration between @cristina_fletesboutte in St. Louis, @mmelvinrodriguez in Winston-Salem, NC and @xinewin in Durham, NC. #mashup #echosight #ladyboos (via http://instagram.com/p/v3aazIpIKI/)
