radio_art
blogging on post-contemporary issues (edited and sometimes written by Antonio C-Pinto)

 







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  segunda-feira, 13 de setembro de 2004


Online surreal/comic short film: Beautiful. Xeni Jardin:

A disturbing new online art short from LA-based blogger, performance artist, and filmmaker Kitty Bukkake. Begins like a laudanum-induced Christina Aguilera karaoke hallucination, then u-turns into Carrie meets Karen Finley meets a back-alley psychosexual nightmare. Link, non-worksafe to the max.

[Boing Boing]
10:33:03 PM    comment []    


New York City art opening: Eric Paulos. David Pescovitz: BB pal Eric Paulos has work in Passage of Mirage, a group exhibition opening tomorrow night (9/14) at Manhattan's Chelsea Art Museum. Paulos and the Experimental Interaction Unit will debut Limelight, an ambient display that illuminates our culture's anxieties about terrorism, disaster, and other potentially-catastrophic threats.

Limelight (Feb 2003) 039_small1"Limelight is a personal tactical system that removes the burden of anxiety associated with our continuous worry of emerging global and local threatening conditions. Using a collection of embedded sensors, local measurements of radioactivity and RF signals are continuously scanned for hostile patterns. Similarly, remote precursors of threats such as the appearance and frequency of specific keywords and discussions by various military, news, and independent sources are continuously monitored. The collected data is carefully analyzed and summarized as a visual output where various threats are mapped across a spectrum of illumined and pulsing colors."
Link

[Boing Boing]
10:32:02 PM    comment []    


Is Hello Kitty a Copycat?. Xeni Jardin: A blogger who describes himself as an "extraordinary ordinary guy in Japan" says this on the 30th anniversary of Hello Kitty:

"Kitty's design was just a crib from ... Musti, created by the Belgian animator/director Ray Goossens (1924-1998) [Ed note: she's the center figure in the BoingBoing graphic at left]. Musti was started as an animation series on TV in 1968, and its picture books were also published. I read some of that books and loved it in my childhood. Although it is evident to everybody that Kitty was an imitation of Musti, Sanrio, the publisher of Hello Kitty have not touched on it. It is said that the total copyright fee for Hello Kitty reaches around 15 billion yen (13.7 million USD) per year, and Sanrio got 23.7 billion yen (21.6 million USD) gross sales in second quarter of 2004. I wonder why they don't feel shady about hiding the fact."

I'm no Hello Kitty historian, and that's news to me. Is it true? Link to post. This guy has a cool blog. His post about Japanese "jinxes" was also interesting.

On a related note, don't miss the image of "Hello Kitty De Milo" in this news story, which is, like, so obviously a total ripoff of some Greek art dude. Link (Thanks, Brian)

Update: This is turning into one big plushy piracy clusterfuck! BoingBoing reader Eva says, "See my response on Hello Kitty vs Musti here. Basically, I think Musti is in turn a rip off of the Dutch rabbit Miffy, which was published more than a decade before Musti." Link

[Boing Boing]
10:20:30 PM    comment []    


My American dream. Film: Architect Daniel Libeskind on how North by Northwest changed his life. [Guardian Unlimited]
10:18:25 PM    comment []    


Cory's next novel pre-sales at Amazon. Cory Doctorow:

Amazon's put up their sell-page for my next novel, "Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town," offering a 32% discount off the cover-price of $24.95 ($16.97 in total). The book's out in Februrary, and coincidentally, I just a couple hours ago overnighted the final version of the manuscript to my editor in NYC.

Someone Comes to Town is longest thing I've ever written -- longer than Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom and Eastern Standard Tribe put together. It's a kind of "Little, Big"-meets-"Crypotonomicon" story, a contemporary fantasy about free, unlicensed wireless networking, set in Toronto's bohemian Kensington Market.

I'm going to be posting the full text of this one under a Creative Commons license again when the time comes, and I've got some beautiful supplementary artwork to go with the gorgeous Dave McKean cover; McKean provided five digital paintings to Irene Gallo, Tor's brilliant, award-winning art director, and he's kindly granted me permission to use them all on the book's website when I ship it.

In the meantime, there's an excerpt or two online already. Enjoy!

Link

[Boing Boing]
10:17:17 PM    comment []    


Blair 'proud' of crusade against poverty. Antonio C-Pinto: An obscene divide separates the rich from the poor countries. But also inside rich countries we see a long term, probably irreversible wall separating the very rich, the rich and those who live in decency from those who have to sleep under the bridge.

Society: PM's declaration that the crusade against social exclusion is working coincides with new figures showing that homelessness has reached a new record high. [Guardian Unlimited]
10:15:46 PM    comment []    

Global to Local: the Social Future as seen by six SF Writers
the history chart of Industrial Civilization[This] Olduvai 'slide' from 2001 to 2011 may resemble the "Great Depression" of 1929 to 1939: unemployment, breadlines, and homelessness. As for the Olduvai 'cliff' from 2012 to 2030 — I know of no precedent in human history. — Richard C. Duncan

Antonio C-Pinto: John Shirley asked six science fiction writers, Cory Doctorow, Pat Murphy, Kim Stanley Robinson, Norman Spinrad, Bruce Sterling and Ken Wharton, about the future of us all (our ‘social future’, the future of this planet, and so on...). Good questions! Some amazing answers too. After reading this conversation piece it would be also scaring to go back to some dark warnings written in 1972, 1992 and 1999. For an overall picture of the dramatic crisis we are all falling into one should pay a visit to DIE OFF - a population crash resource page.

John Shirley [Locus Online]: Some questions are hard to formulate — but you carry them around inside you, like Confucius overlong in the womb, waiting for a way to ask them. I wanted to know about the quality of life in the future. I wanted to know about our political life; the scope of our freedom. I wanted to know what it was going to be like on a daily basis for my son and my grandson — I wanted to know if perhaps my son would do better to have no children at all. Those are general yearnings, more than specific questions. The questions I came up with still seem too general, and approximate. “I think it helps to use Raymond Williams' concept of 'residual and emergent,'” Kim Stanley Robinson told me, “...and consider the present as a zone of conflict between residual and emergent social elements, not making residual and emergent code words for 'bad and good' either.” Residual and emergent: yes. But what will reside and what emerge? From here, the future is just that unfocused. So I simply I asked the only questions I had... and six science fiction writers answered.

Cory Doctorow: “When the US dollar starts to drop against the laser-printed post-Saddam occupation Dinar, an unbacked currency, you know that your economy is in the deepest of shit.”.

Norman Spinrad: “The biggest change, one which I didn't get at the time, was the rise to dominance of the American Christian fundamentalist far right. Where are we going? If Kerry should be elected, back to the Clintonian middle. But if Bush is re-elected, straight into the worst fascist shitter this country has ever experienced. We're on a cusp like that of the Roman Republic about to degenerate into the Empire. Though in many ways it has already.”

Bruce Sterling's thinking that the leading trends are coming from outside North America: — “I used to think that the USA, being an innovative, high-tech polity, would be inventing and promulgating a lot of tomorrow's social change. I don't believe that any more. These days I spend a lot of time looking at Brazil, China, India, and Europe. Japan and Russia, interestingly, are even more moribund than the USA.”.

[Thanks to BoingBoing/ Cory Doctorow]

Link
2:07:04 AM  Google It!  comment []    



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