Futurismic

Another little gem spotted by the grinders: what would you get if you took the crime incident statistics for London and represented them as a 3D physical map?

Mount Fear is what you’d get. In the words of its creator, Abigail Reynolds:

The terrain of Mount Fear is generated by data sets relating to the frequency and position of urban crimes. Precise statistics are provided by the police. Each individual incident adds to the height of the model, forming a mountainous terrain … The imaginative fantasy space seemingly proposed by the sculpture is subverted by the hard facts and logic of the criteria that shape it.

While it makes for an intriguing art project, Mount Fear surely presages a short-range extrapolation of geolocative mash-ups.

In other words, being able to call up the data used for Mount Fear and overlay it on Google Maps running on your mobile device would make your next flat- or apartment-hunting experience that little bit more reassuring.

Or should that be less reassuring?

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It’s commonly said that “life imitates art,” but in this case life is art, to a disturbing degree: a curator was forced to “kill” an art exhibit, a living jacket on life support which threatened to grow beyond its boundaries. [m. christian]

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Another pair of sturdy nails were hammered into the coffin of old media business models yesterday.

First of all, Cory Doctorow released his new YA novel Little Brother …

“… as a free, Creative Commons BY-NC-SA licensed download (in many formats).

It’s my first young adult novel, a book about hacker kids who use technology to claw the Bill of Rights back from the DHS. Neil Gaiman said of it, “I’d recommend Little Brother over pretty much any book I’ve read this year, and I’d want to get it into the hands of as many smart 13 year olds, male and female, as I can.”

There’s a bunch of cool stuff to accompany the downloads, including a remix gallery and a simple system for donating copies to libraries and schools.”

And on the same day, almost as if they’d conspired together*, Trent Reznor dropped The Slip - an entirely new Nine Inch Nails album - on an unsuspecting world.

No build-up, no fanfare; just every flavour of audio format you could ask for (well, OK - no OGG), and a Creative Commons licence just like Doctorow’s book:

“… we encourage you to remix it, share it with your friends, post it on your blog, play it on your podcast, give it to strangers, etc.”

So that strange noise you may have heard yesterday was the sound of a thousand overpaid record executives wailing in horror; the sound of old business models crumbling under the weight of change.

This is the point where someone asks how it’s possible to make a living for the average artist without Doctorow or Reznor’s niche-superstar status. And I’ll be totally honest - I don’t know yet, though I have some ideas.

But I’ll tell you what I am sure of; I’m going to learn a lot more by watching what Doctorow and Reznor are doing than I’d learn by listening to the old guard complain that they’re not playing fair. I suspect you will, too, whatever you may think of their art.

[ * Doctorow protests innocence on this one; Reznor was unavailable for comment. ]

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We’re all about the plausible end of near-future science fiction here at Futurismic, but that doesn’t mean we don’t get a sordid guilty kick out of some lurid old-school pulp material every once in a while. So many thanks to cuddly comics curmudgeon Warren Ellis for bringing the Pulp Of The Day blog to my attention - schmaltzy old pulp fiction covers for your eyeball delights, forsooth!

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Art must change anew -
for now we have machines which
compute our poems.

[Yes, I know that's not a proper haiku, sorry. I had a late night last night.][Image by *slm*]

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One of my favorite settings for science fiction is after the fall of Man. You know the one, where cities are deserted, weeds growing up through the streets, etc. Occasionally there are humans eking out a living, but they are no longer dominant. Yeah, that kind. Well, a book that came out recently, The World Without Us, imagines what would happen environmentally if humans just vanished from the face of the earth. I prefer humans to still be around in my stories, but this concept is fascinating.

If you scroll down on the website’s main page, you’ll find an artist’s rendition of New York between 2 days and 15,000 years after the disappearance of humanity. According to the book’s author, the subways would flood after only three days, after twenty years streets would collapse and rivers would form in the space left over.

Meanwhile, I’m waiting for the post-nuclear holocaust genre to pick back up.

[image from mondolithic.com]

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Totally pointless, and more an art project than anything else, these Russian-made goggles filter the real world electronically and make it look like some crude digital simulacrum … or the worst acid trip anyone ever had. They’d have cleaned up if they’d been renting these out at Burning Man. [William Gibson] [Image by Don_Gato]

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Another new tool appears in the arsenal of marketers for their eternal crusade to make us buy overpriced crap we don’t need - the FogScreen projects imagery onto a vertical sheet of engineered water mist, effectively creating a billboard that can be walked through without physical harm. As someone who subscribes to the Bill Hicks philosophy on marketing [YouTube, very NSFW], I’m not looking forward to having to step through one of those for every few yards of street I walk down.

Talking of advertising, BoingBoing draws our attention to the exploits of Cayetano Ferrer, who produces billboards decorated with pictures of the things that the billboard hides with its bulk. Maybe he also shares the Hicks philosophy, and this is some way of deconstructing the advertising paradigm. Then again, he’s an artist - so he’s probably just trying to sell himself. Quelle paradox!

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Fear not, folks - Elton John is here to save us from the impending degradation of culture! Because, you see, the reason there’s so much rubbish music and art about these days is because we all spend too much time on the internet. It’s a relief to know he’s worked out why his own contributions to global culture have been so unilaterally appalling over the last decade or so … though I can think of numerous artist and musician acquaintances whose work has been enhanced or expanded for the better by their use of the internet, be it for networking or acquiring new tools or ideas. Clay Shirky agrees, too - destroying limits liberates creativity, as opposed to stifling it. But it also destroys the culture that went before it … which is probably what has Sir Elton so worried.

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Take a trip back into the early eighties - here’s an archive of scanned covers from old editions of Interzone. As far as graphic design is concerned, we’ve come a long way, baby. [Full disclosure: I am Interzone's reviews editor.]

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Digital cameras are capable of capturing colors in areas of the spectrum invisible to normal human sight. Kameraflage is a technique for creating designs that incorporate elements that only show up in digital photos. Get this into the hands of that bong hits for Jesus kid, quick. [engadget]

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It’s all there in the title, basically. “Experiments in Galvanism” is an art installation that consists of tank of mineral oil containing a dead frog … which has been rigged up with a miniature webserver, so that you can control the twitching of its limbs from anywhere in the world. [BoingBoing]

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When you think about it, Drew Harry’s got a point. Developing a virtual world that slavishly apes the real is kind of stupid. His meeting spaces arrange people based on their allegiances, representing a person’s expressed opinions by aligning them physically in a wide open space. I don’t know if that’s what I’d choose to emphasize, but giving up the virtual Aeron chair makes sense. [kurzweil]

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