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!
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*]
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]
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]
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!