Tag Archives: art

Blog

Surveillance state update: The war on documentation

2 Comments

big-brotherFormer FBI agent and current ACLU lawyer Michael German shares some insights into the mentality behind the arrests of journos and other mostly harmless people at some shindig or other that was going on in St. Paul, MN this week.

He cites guidelines issued to the LAPD:

It lists 65 behaviors that they say are behaviors related to terrorism, and the one that pertains here is “takes pictures or video footage.” [The entry on p. 40 reads: “Takes pictures or video footage (with no apparent esthetic value, i.e., camera angles, security equipment, security personnel, traffic lights, building entrances, etc.).”] “No apparent esthetic values?” So apparently they’re going to be sending police officers to art school to understand esthetic values.

But it actually mentions taking video footage of taking video footage of security personnel. So the mere taking of photographs or video footage of law enforcement – even law enforcement doing something improperly – they’ve identified that as a precursor to terrorism. So now you might understand why these police officers are focusing on people with cameras. It’s because it’s actual policy to do so.

[Interview: David Neiwert, firedoglake; image: mikecolvin82]

Blog

Independent science fiction in action – Deadbooks.com and Phasma Ex Machina

It looks like people have busy over the summer; within the space of twenty-four hours, the Futurismic inbox has received news of two independent science fiction-related projects looking for an audience.

And because we like people who get out there and have a go under their own steam, we thought we’d give them a mention.

Deadbooks.com

Deadbooks.com logoWhat is Deadbooks.com? Here’s the blurb from the site:

Deadbooks.com is a massive Hyper-Serialization of Hasso Wuerslin’s SF-Horror series, The DeadBooks.

Spanning 150 chapters, involving 100 actors, and the cutting-edge sounds of musical artists worldwide, Deadbooks.com is a revolutionary mash-up of story-telling techniques.

The first ten-hour season is available now.

The first ten hour season?! You can’t fault the ambition there, can you? In his email, Wuerslin says the project has taken him eight years to finish:

“There may be purists out there who think I’m trying to kill ‘The Novel’, but I disagree. Why shouldn’t the novel stretch out in new directions; transform into a new form of entertainment?”

When CD-ROMs were the IT buzzword of the day, they promised us that multimedia novels would be ubiquitous – has the idea finally found a home on the web in the form of Deadbooks.com? Go take a look and find out, then come back and let us know what you think.

Phasma Ex Machina

Phasma Ex Machina logoPhasma Ex Machina is a forthcoming independent sf/horror movie which “follows the lives of two brothers and an electrical engineer trying to decipher a series of strange events. Everything changes when they discover that the distance between the living and the dead isn’t all that far.”

Phasma Ex Machina‘s producers are seeking feedback from the sf community about their concept. From the email:

“We are currently in the preproduction stages of the film and one of our foremost goals is to increase the authenticity of the supernatural and sci-fi genres. Your readers can give advice on what they would or wouldn’t like to see in a supernatural/sci-fi film.”

Hmm, crowdsourcing the test audiences, eh? From the reviews I’ve seen, I think George Lucas should have looked at doing something similar with his most recent output… If you’re intrigued and want to learn more, take a look around on the Phasma Ex Machina website. You can leave your feedback and opinions on their forum, too – but feel free to share ’em here as well, OK?

Blog

Surveillance as (dark) art – the Static Obesity Logging devive

1 Comment

Benjamin Males\' Racial Targeting System in actionAs a contrast to my earlier post about the cyclist panopticon being a positive manifestation of the potential of ubiquitous surveillance, here’s a project from the Royal College of Arts in London that rather neatly illustrates the flipside.

According to we-make-money-not-art, the Static Obesity Logging device:

… can be installed almost anywhere. The casing of the innocent-looking device conceals a computer, digital and analogue inputs and outputs and a camera. The system is able to remotely calculate Body Mass Index and communicate the data via wired and wireless networks.

Given recent hints from the UK government (among others) that they may start legislating against obesity, this is pretty Orwellian stuff. But the other of Benjamin Males’ projects is even darker – it’s a Racial Targeting System.

The [RTS-2] is a fully portable real-time image-processing platform that has the ability to automatically find and follow faces and then analyse and store their race data.

I guess we should be thankful that we’re seeing these devices being made by artists as a commentary on current affairs rather than reading about their deployment on the streets where we live.

That said, one can’t help but worry that what has been implemented by an art student is very likely to have been at least conceived of by our terror-fied governments. [story originally spotted at Hack-a-Day; image borrowed from Benjamin Males’ website]

Blog

Does science need art to answer fundamental questions?

5 Comments

Violin and Playing Cards, Cubist painting by Juan Gris That’s the question posed in this fascinating article by Jonah Lehrer at SEED Magazine. Riffing on the possibility that Niels Bohr may have been influenced by his interest in Cubism when he came up with his new model of the atom, Lehrer argues that science needs art in order to answer the most fundamental questions:

Physicists study the fabric of reality, the invisible laws and particles that define the material world. Neuroscientists study our perceptions of this world; they dissect the brain in order to understand the human animal. Together, these two sciences seek to solve the most ancient and epic of unknowns: What is everything? And who are we?

But before we can unravel these mysteries, our sciences must get past their present limitations. How can we make this happen? My answer is simple: Science needs the arts. We need to find a place for the artist within the experimental process, to rediscover what Bohr observed when he looked at those cubist paintings. The current constraints of science make it clear that the breach between our two cultures is not merely an academic problem that stifles conversation at cocktail parties. Rather, it is a practical problem, and it holds back science’s theories. If we want answers to our most essential questions, then we will need to bridge our cultural divide. By heeding the wisdom of the arts, science can gain the kinds of new insights and perspectives that are the seeds of scientific progress.

(Via Idea Festival.)

What do you think? Is he on to something, or is this just a romantic plea to an unromantic world to put art back on the pedestal of importance it once occupied?

(Image: “Juan Gris: Violin and Playing Cards (1995.403.14)”. In Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–.)

[tags]art,science,physics, neuroscience[/tags]