Coyote and the Mummy Cat

We all know the classic scene from cartoons: the cat reaches a precipice but goes on walking, ignoring the fact that there is no ground under its feet; it starts to fall only when it looks down and notices the abyss. When it loses its authority, the regime is like a cat above the precipice: in order to fall, it only has to be reminded to look down... (Zizek on Mubarak)

Venus as a Boy

The real aesthetic experience of the New York World’s Fair of 1939 and 1940 was laid in the Amusement Zone, more precisely, inside a pavilion designed by Salvador Dali and simply called Dream of Venus. It is now recognized as one of the earliest full-scale installation pieces, including sound and performance, which make it one of the first (multi)-media artworks. Inside the “wet” part of the pavilion, there was a large number of objects inside a water tank: clusters of telephone earpieces, typewriters, fireplaces, mummified cows, seaweed turned into chains, etc. The “dry” part had, among several objects, a piano with a woman’s body for the keyboard and was populated basically by “mermaids” clad in lobsters loincloths, providing to visitors a sexually charged environment and, in addition, a powerful introduction to the Surrealistic Movement by its most charismatic figure. (photo: Eric Schaal, “Piano Mannequin”, Interior of Salvador Dali’s “Dream of Venus” pavilion, New York World’s Fair, 1939)

Pneumatic Parliament

In Robert Fisk in Egypt: "Death throes of a dictatorship" post at BoingBoing...

RebNachum (10:01 PM, Jan 29):
Well, this is what I'm saying. I share the same worries/ignorance; the Muslim Brotherhood would not be my preferred regime change either, or ought be for many who advocate the cause of personal freedom and civil rights, but it's too early to tell, I suppose.

Kuja (sometime, Jan 30):
Agree, but one have to recognize that install a democracy over dictatorship pronto is not a trivial task (in fact, it is an American illusion). I'd rather go with Peter Sloterdijk, who imagined that the US Force should parachute a "pneumatic parliament" at a recently conquered barbarian country (or even at a recently overthrown dictatorship; it might work for Tunisia, Egypt, etc.)

Memory Graphisches

Above, Göttweig Abbey (near Krems an der Donau) looks down Wachau valley. Here, in 1739, Paul Troger has painted the famous fresco in which the Roman Emperor Charles VI is represented as Apollo. The abbey owns a collection of more than 30,000 engravings, the largest Austrian private collection of historical prints. The majority of the stock comes from the Renaissance and Baroque periods. Bellow, the Piazza San Marco, exactly as I have seen before my last caressed metempsychosis.

Beloved in a Bootle

Remember when Jeannie eventually got trapped in her bootle? Because it is exact the feeling I've been experimenting wherever I talk with my girlfriend (who is doing her MA in London) via Skype.

Two Hunches

Two photos which has taken me up with reminiscences: Anthony Goicolea's (bellow) recollects south Bahia’s skies and Patrick Millard's suggests lucid dreams taking place on obscure river banks...

Our agreements to disagree

[A says: “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it”, apocryphal quotation atributed to Voltaire] XNOR [B says: "Where (or of what) one cannot speak, one must pass over in silence" Proposition 7, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Ludwig Wittgenstein]

TsA ≠ TfB, TsB ≠ TfB
TsA ≠ TsB, TfA ≠ TsB
TfA ≠ TsA, TfA ≠ TfB
Thus
A ≠ B
Q.E.D.

The Underside of America

More than a plain cultural critic, the American writer Mark Dery might well be labeled a sub-cultural critic, such is the range of subterranean topics he dives into: fringe religions, trash movies, eudaemonists (and demonists)... Uncanny subjects drawing on the "unconscious" of America, the psychic object officially inaugurated in 1909 by Sigmund Freud, after his visit to the freak amusement parks of Coney Island.

“Das Unheimliche”

Jim Woodring (center) and Max Oppenheim (via Mark Dery)

Fear of Self

Is it better to live as a monster or to die as a good man? (Teddy Daniels/Andrew Laeddis in Shutter Island, 2010). "And what if the therapist thus misreads blessed ignorance as unbearable suffering?" (Descartes and the Post-Traumatic Subject, by Slavoj Zizek)

Gobbledygook or Googledygook?

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The Thing

On the banner above, the Big Other of the Internet...

"Multiple" Choice

Please, pick one of the two objet petit a: Berenice or Cheshire Cat?

Dressed to feel

Scramble suit or bio-adapter, that's the question. Concerning the former, one will notice in the the picture above the character putting on a curious piece of "wearable computing", a kind of suit that give a perfectly anonymous appearance to undercover police detectives working for a highly dystopian DEA idealized by Philip K. Dick in the novel A Scanner Darkly (1977). Quoting the author, the suit is:

an invention of the Bell laboratories, conjured up by accident by an employee named S. A. Powers... Basically, his design consisted of a multifaceted quartz lens hooked up to a million and a half physiognomic fraction-representations of various people: men and women, children, with every variant encoded and then projected outward in all directions equally onto a superthin shroudlike membrane large enough to fit around an average human. As the computer looped through its banks, it projected every conceivable eye color, hair color, shape and type of nose, formation of teeth, configuration of facial bone structure - the entire shroudlike membrane took on whatever physical characteristics were projected at any nanosecond, then switched to the next...

Certainly a superficial device, nothing more than a walking screen. By the other hand, Oswald Wiener, an author yet to be valued (and, as a result, translated to English!!), imagined a completely different wearable in the novel Die verbesserung von mitteleuropa, roman (1969/1985). At the end of the book, included in an appendix, the author introduces the bio-adapter:

it knows from its sensors when a human being is inside preparing for a journey. Immediately after activating the start lever (which thereby becomes non-functional, it is just as quickly dismantled and added to the material reserves) the adapter begins to work. It closes by itself and makes air available for breathing. The air-conditioning unit provides ideal "external" conditions. Steered by a number of sensors which are located along the contours of the human body, the adapter fits closely to the latter on all sides, without however coming into contact with it, except in those places which are necessarily affected by gravity. By means of these sensors the adapter perceives each movement of the human body, anticipating it at a particular spot by buckling ahead.

But more importantly:

the bio-adapter can be compared to a selectively bred uterus ("joy suit") which, as a result of continual adaptation, is able to meet the most varied requirements of highly organised living creatures. It can be interpreted both as the hypertrophy of the modules of organs, a process which at first extends into the area of "physically external," and as the nervous structural complex of its owner, and from this point of view it is a converter of the pleasure impulses which human beings project onto their environment (servo-narcissus).

The complete English excerpt is here. One certainly would agree that Wiener's device is in fact an observable equipped with an algedonics counter. I've doodle what would be its working schemata:

Homo Otarius

Franco Mattes, from 0100101110101101.org, has just placed a billboard in the center of Ljubljana, Slovenia, for the 28th Biennial of Graphic Arts. The work is called "Bagless Canister Cyclonic Vacuum" and it's the answer to this question: What if you strip down all world's ads of all those Passenger's Seat with 4-way Power Adjustment Odyssey Honda Cars and 9.99c Handmade Glycerin Soap Soaps and Free Delivery Books and Free Nights & No-Fee Flights and Last-minute Deals Big Savings Travel Right Now Flights and Counter-High Office Refrigerators and Two 2.26GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon Nehalem Processors Computers and Titanium Technology Fused Graphite Tennis Racquet Super Sale and Mega Pixel Canon CMOS Sensor Digital High Camera and Leakage Tested Microwaves and 30-Pack Sidenafil Citrate (100mg) Vadenafil (20mg) and Tadafil (20mg) and Dyson Stowaway Dc20 Bagless Canister Cyclonic Vacuum Cleaner and Super High Resolution Dynamic Contract Ratio Auto Motion Plus SRS TruSurrount Component Composite S Video PC Inputs TV Set and Megatronix Megalarm Viking & Megapage Automobile & Motorcycle Security & Remote Starter Systems Fantastic Bargains and Sales and and and?

Big-T

I ever thought that I was walking on the edge... But after reading Absinthe & flamethrowers, by William Gurstelle, now I know that I belong to the golden third of the population who thrills in taking calculated risks, be them physical or intellectual (a penchant for scuba diving and practicing long shots as a way of learning). Happiness is a warm gun?

The Man in the Moon

Maybe this is a question of pareidolia, but I see the boy from The Last Guardian (the PS3 debut of "Ico" and "Shadow of the Colossus" videogames' creator) in Klee's Pierrot Lunaire (1925). Maybe it is because I'm completely mondestrunken lately. "Pierrot Lunaire'! It calls for prudence!" (Musil, again; and again; ever).

Again and again and again

See this movie as if you were reading a book; read a book as if you were seeing this film; "live life like a character in a book" (Musil). See again Vigo's L’Atalante might be a timeless experience.

The pen is mightier than the sword

Above, side effects of Mightier, by Ratloop, a sci-fi game about terraforming. Certainly, a true indie game, tailored for... Ludic savants? Hands-on young adults? Hardcore brainies? Dumbed down genius? Ex-future genius? Well. It is for anyone who don't care about GPU intensive graphics...

New Myths

Jusifrasa and its nemesis General Tarn... From Galactrix. A structural symbol for the time being.