The Latest from Boing Boing |
- ACLU: America is riddled with politically motivated surveillance
- Toronto cops justify extreme G20 measures with display of LARPing props, weapons from unrelated busts
- Zombie pirate will eat your brains: International Make-Up Artist Trade Show
- The worst ad ever made (print division)?
- Tom Chick on giving popular games bad reviews
- Brass balls in the Boing Boing Bazaar
- Shopper angered at Toronto mall closure
- World Cup vuvuzela poster
- Shane Speal's "Chugger" 2-string cigar box guitar
- Get These Games (a bit cheaper): Xbox Live Chime, Darwinia, more on sale
- Copyright best practices for communications scholars
- Ambient touch: Hemisphere Games' Osmos due July 8th for iPad
- Aziz and her dignity (a Boing Boing guest-dispatch from Pakistan)
- Hulu due for PlayStation 3 in July, Xbox 360 in 2011
- G20 police used imaginary law to jail harass demonstrators and jailed protestors in dangerous and abusive "detention center"
- The drug policy expertise of Richard Nixon and Art Linkletter
- Finger Painting on Apple iPad
- The War Project: Susannah Breslin launches Iraq/Afghan war vet interview series
- Do we play Farmville because we're polite?
- Tip Top Cleaning Village
- Female genital mutilation at Cornell? It's complicated.
- Mark on The Sound of Young America
- Dogs are great at finding bad weeds except when there are squirrels
- Marina Gorbis on social organizations
- Moby's classic rave mix
- History of the camping stove
- BB's Dean Putney on TWiT
- Buzz Aldrin on PooFOs
- Frank McCarthy's undersea action illustrations
- Photographs of an imaginary Ballardian office park
ACLU: America is riddled with politically motivated surveillance Posted: 30 Jun 2010 12:30 AM PDT A new ACLU report, "Policing Free Speech: Police Surveillance and Obstruction of First Amendment-Protected Activity," documents recent cases of politically motivated surveillance across America -- cases in which people were put under surveillance "for doing little more than peacefully exercising their First Amendment rights." ACLU Study Highlights U.S. Surveillance Society
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Posted: 30 Jun 2010 12:25 AM PDT Toronto Police are on the defensive this week as they attempt to defend their heavy-handed tactics during the G20. To prove the seriousness of the threat to public security, they took police on a tour of weapons confiscated from activists. Only there's a problem: some of these weapons were taken from people who weren't demonstrators. And some of them weren't weapons -- the police proudly displayed the blunt arrows and chainmail they confiscated from a live-action role-player who was taking the train to a game: In addition to the arrows - which Mr. Barrett made safe for live-action role playing by cutting off the pointy ends and attaching a bit of pool noodle covered in socks - police displayed his metal body armour, foam shields and several clubs made of plastic tubing covered with foam and fabric.'Weapons' seized in G20 arrests not what they seem (Thanks, Adam and Yehuda!) (Image: Jill Mahoney/The Globe and Mail)
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Zombie pirate will eat your brains: International Make-Up Artist Trade Show Posted: 29 Jun 2010 11:24 PM PDT This week, make-up artists gathered at the Pasadena Convention Center for the International Make-Up Artist Trade Show (IMATS). The event featured Emmy-winning make-up artists, YouTube sensations and students competing with an "Alice in Wonderland" theme. The LA Weekly has an extensive image gallery with photographs by Star Foreman, including this scary pirate shown here. (thanks, Liz Ohanesian) |
The worst ad ever made (print division)? Posted: 29 Jun 2010 06:20 PM PDT Mark Duffy, the crank behind copyranter, calls this "the dumbest ad I've ever seen." (Actually, he tags it with a question mark, so there's a little wiggle room there.) I don't know about that. It's had some awfully stiff competition this year, what with Dockers' "I wear no pants" campaign and the DiGiorno spots about the idiots who try to blame muddy footprints on a non-existent delivery guy. But I'll say this: This print ad for Samsonite, created by an ad agency in South Korea, is among the worst ads of the year, because it manages to combine in one package empty visual flash with total messaging incomprehensibility. The sheer accomplishment of it is beautiful, in a way. You could argue, I guess, that any advertising which gets people talking about your product is good advertising, but I don't buy it. The argument is maddeningly simplistic. It's like saying "There's no such thing as bad publicity." No? Just ask Phil Spector about that. In the meantime, enjoy the supreme badness of the Samsonite intramural hockey team taking to the ice with sticks made from roller bags. PS: Duffy also hates Capri pants. So there's that. |
Tom Chick on giving popular games bad reviews Posted: 29 Jun 2010 05:25 PM PDT A decade ago, the gaming world went gaga for Deus Ex, a dark conspiracy thriller with expansive ambitions and supernaturally bad dialog. Though flawed and ugly, many saw in it the future of sandbox-style gaming, and they had visceral fun playing it. Tom Chick, however, just saw crates. Lots and lots of crates. His minority report remains the perfect hype-ignorant video game review: so outraged were fans that the review's publisher ran an appropriately adulatory 'second opinion' shortly thereafter. Rock Paper Shotgun honors the feat with an interview: One angry fellow - he was a kid really - sent me a picture of himself, pointing a gun at the camera. He wrote something like "go ahead, make my day" in the email. I suppose that could be considered a death threat, but I would have preferred something more dramatic like "I will totally kill you because you didn't like Deus Ex!" I tried for a while to respond to everyone as graciously as I could, but I eventually petered out. So if you wrote me an angry email ten years ago, I apologize for not getting back to you.Chick also explains how the notorious "7-9" scale of game review ratings works: you ask an editor if it exists, he says it doesn't. Then, when you assign something "3," it does. |
Brass balls in the Boing Boing Bazaar Posted: 29 Jun 2010 07:35 PM PDT Yes, brass balls. An easy-to-assemble kit, created by Paul Spinrad, MAKE editor and author of such timeless tomes as the RE/Search Guide To Bodily Fluids and The VJ Book. These balls are $18 in the Boing Boing Bazaar and would make a wonderful gift. For someone. Paul says: You don't need a semiotician to know that these bad boys are full of meaning. As a token of esteem, they have a purity that makes other gift attempts look weak. Gleaming atop your desk at work, these totems of potency dare people to acknowledge their presence with a calibrated test-blend of serious appreciation and ironic distance-- and woe be to anyone who calibrates incorrectly. Everyone will want to touch the brass balls, feel their impressive weight, their uncompromising hardness. They are the family jewels.Brass Balls Kit |
Shopper angered at Toronto mall closure Posted: 29 Jun 2010 04:04 PM PDT |
Posted: 29 Jun 2010 02:11 PM PDT On sale at GrowingSignals.net |
Shane Speal's "Chugger" 2-string cigar box guitar Posted: 29 Jun 2010 03:30 PM PDT My pal Shane Speal is selling signed and number "Chugger" 2-string cigar box guitars for $75 each. They sound great! |
Get These Games (a bit cheaper): Xbox Live Chime, Darwinia, more on sale Posted: 29 Jun 2010 01:57 PM PDT This week's 'Deal of the Week's on Xbox Live contain a few former Games To Get names, including charitable music puzzler Chime (above, truly one of the Xbox 360's top downloadables) and Introversion's Darwinia, alongside another top recommendation, the time-shifting action puzzler Misadventures of P. B. Winterbottom. If you've been holding out for whatever reason on any of the above, now's the time to pounce on each. |
Copyright best practices for communications scholars Posted: 29 Jun 2010 02:22 PM PDT Pat from American University's Center for Social Media writes in with new of the new "Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Scholarly Research in Communication:" This code joins a suite of codes of best practices in fair use that enable users to employ their fair use rights with confidence. Every confident fair use user is also aware of the importance of balance in copyright provisions and the importance of asserting, defending and promoting provisions in copyright law that give people access to copyrighted material, to create more culture.Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Scholarly Research in Communication (Thanks, Pat!) |
Ambient touch: Hemisphere Games' Osmos due July 8th for iPad Posted: 29 Jun 2010 01:41 PM PDT Above: the first video of multiple IGF award finalist and all around fantastically ambient game Osmos running on the iPad, ahead of its July 8th App Store release date. I've been lucky enough to spend the past couple weeks with a pre-release version of the game and it's quickly become one of my iPad favorites. You'll have to reconfigure your brain slightly to adjust to its particular brand of ambient play: though it shares some of the same basic consume-to-consume-more mechanics as something like Katamari, attempting to approach it with the same carefree knockabout spirit is a quick way to instant failure. Instead, you'll need to more slowly and strategically work your way around each level, looking for openings and playing the waiting game. Hemisphere have more information on the new additions to the iPad version (and the iPhone version to follow a month later), and, coincidentally, Steam has the PC and Mac version of the game currently on deep discount for a mere $2.50 to give it a whirl ahead of time. Osmos for iPad, coming July 8th [Hemisphere] |
Aziz and her dignity (a Boing Boing guest-dispatch from Pakistan) Posted: 29 Jun 2010 08:16 PM PDT Since it's pride week, I thought I'd share a small story about the disenfranchised transgendered community here in Karachi.
Ashi stands by the door of the shared house where she lives with Aziz and Nighat. (Photo: Bassam Tariq.) Last week, my uncle took me to meet one of his old neighborhood's infamous icons, Aziz Mamoo. She lives in a small one bedroom shack located in the heart of a very disturbed ghetto. Aziz Mamoo is transgendered or, as they're known in South Asia, a hijrah. At the age of 11, she was kicked out of her house by her brothers and found refuge with the local hijrah guru, Hajji Iqbal. Iqbal took her in and taught the young Aziz how to sing and dance. Every town in Karachi has a designated guru who is in charge of the hijrahs in their area. The guru becomes both the mother and father to their communities hijrahs. The local guru feeds them, provides them shelter, and teaches them how to pray and live a modest life. When there is a birth of a child that is transgendered, some families leave the infant at the guru's doorstep. After the death of Hajji Iqbal, Aziz Mamoo became the local guru of her neighborhood. Countless babies have been left at her doorstep and though she has very little to offer, she never turns them away. The two kids that live with her now are Ashi and Nighat. Many more lived with her before, but she kicked them out after they started doing, as she calls it, "number two work." 'Number two work' is a euphemism for prostitution and it's become a common job for many hijrahs in Karachi. According to Aziz Mamoo, there are two kinds of hijrahs: those that dance and pray at weddings and aqiqahs (a celebration commemorating the birth of a child), and those that prostitute or beg for money on the main roads. Aziz Mamoo despises the latter. "Woh bhanchots!" Those sister-fuckers, she curses, "they give us a bad name. We don't beg on the streets. We may not have much, but we do have our dignity."
My uncle grew up in Karachi and has had a lot of friends that frequent the prostitute hijrahs. He mentions that many men dress up as hijrahs just to be accepted as homosexuals. As he puts it, his friends rave about the fellatio these hijrahs give. There is a grey area when it comes to the street hijrahs, they are either transvestites or transgendered, but there really is no way of knowing from the surface. My uncle was keen on asking Aziz about her own sexual desires. She was quick to reply, "We cannot bare a child nor do we have the ability to impregnate. We just desire two things: good clothing and decent food. With what we do, we make enough to live." Aziz Mamoo started to feel a little uneasy and kept looking over at her clock. I wondered if we were overstaying our welcome, nevertheless, I was compelled to ask another question. "If I have a child that's transgendered, would you recommend me bringing them to you? Or do you feel I should keep the child and raise them?"
It's important to note that in the middle of asking this question, Aziz interrupted me and muttered, "God forbid that you have a transgendered child." After she let me finish my question she continued, "Keep them. take care of them, educate them. Don't let them stray into our line. We are uneducated. We scour our neighborhoods day and night looking for someone that will hear us sing and dance. This is no way for anyone to live." Minutes later, my uncle signaled to me that it was time for us to leave. After we said our good byes, I asked Aziz Mamoo what she was doing for the rest of the day. "It is Sunday," she said, "today is for us."
Ashi and Nighat laugh at an inside joke. (Photo: Bassam Tariq.) |
Hulu due for PlayStation 3 in July, Xbox 360 in 2011 Posted: 29 Jun 2010 01:18 PM PDT While it might not quite be on artistic par as Europe's score with arthouse film streaming service MUBI, the announcement of Hulu Plus -- an ad-supported and subscription based alternative to the current TV streaming service -- has also brought word that both the PS3 and Xbox 360 will be getting their own on-dash version. The guided tour of the $9.99 per month service notes that the PS3 version will launch in July with full seasons of current programming (full list here), along with full series archives of shows like Buffy, X-Files and Arrested Development (full list of those here, too). An Xbox 360 version will follow after the holidays. Currently the service is invite only, with the iPhone and iPad viewers already available as a free download on the App Store. Read more about the new service via Hulu's latest blog post, and see the video tour here. |
Posted: 29 Jun 2010 02:00 PM PDT Last week's G20 summit in Toronto saw the extraordinary -- and appalling -- use of Now the Toronto police have admitted that the law used to harass and search many of those demonstrators wasn't a real law, just something that they made up. At the same time, disturbing first hand reports of the dangerous and abusive conditions inside the detention centers are emerging online. Blog.to just got a press tour of the center and has photos. (Thanks, Chris, Aaron, and Tim!)
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The drug policy expertise of Richard Nixon and Art Linkletter Posted: 29 Jun 2010 12:10 PM PDT Radley Balko pointed to this hilarious transcript of a conversation about drugs between Richard Nixon and Art Linkletter. Linkletter: "There's a great difference between alcohol and marijuana."Presidents Say the Darnedest Things |
Posted: 29 Jun 2010 12:05 PM PDT Amazing work from David Kassan. As much as I want pressure sensitivity, talented artists seem to have few problems lacking it. Now, there's a lot I don't like about the iPad. But whenever I read someone claim you can't create anything on it, the only thing I learn is what sort of creativity they value. Try and Tell the Difference Between This iPad Artwork and A Real Masterpiece [Gizmodo] [Thanks, Joel!] |
The War Project: Susannah Breslin launches Iraq/Afghan war vet interview series Posted: 29 Jun 2010 12:02 PM PDT Freelance journalist, photographer, and former Boing Boing guestblogger Susannah Breslin has launched a major new endeavor: The War Project. I've seen it develop over many months, and I'm so excited to see it go live today. The first piece: Staff Sgt. Fred Minnick. He's out of the military now but was deployed to Iraq as an Army photojournalist. Here's his personal website. He wrote the book Camera Boy: An Army Journalist's War in Iraq. Here's Susannah's post on the project, which includes some background. Susannah is also interested in connecting with more Iraq and Afghanistan veterans who may be interested in being interviewed for the project (she is only interviewing Iraq and Afghanistan veterans, not vets of other wars). Susannah takes all the photos, and the site was designed by Chris Bishop. Follow The War Project on Twitter to get alerts when a new interview goes live: @TheWarProject. Do go have a look, and check back as more interviews are added. This is critical, valuable material, and I can't think of any journalist better equipped to present these stories than Susannah. |
Do we play Farmville because we're polite? Posted: 29 Jun 2010 11:29 AM PDT The secret to Farmville's popularity is neither gameplay nor aesthetics. Farmville is popular because in entangles users in a web of social obligations. When users log into Facebook, they are reminded that their neighbors have sent them gifts, posted bonuses on their walls, and helped with each others' farms. In turn, they are obligated to return the courtesies. As the French sociologist Marcel Mauss tells us, gifts are never free: they bind the giver and receiver in a loop of reciprocity. It is rude to refuse a gift, and ruder still to not return the kindness.[11] We play Farmville, then, because we are trying to be good to one another. We play Farmville because we are polite, cultivated people.I don't play Farmville, but I do keep my Facebook page pretty app-free because I fear getting entangled in such obligations. |
Posted: 29 Jun 2010 11:11 AM PDT |
Female genital mutilation at Cornell? It's complicated. Posted: 29 Jun 2010 11:20 AM PDT By now, you've heard the story about Dix P. Poppas, a pediatric urologist at Cornell University who published research dealing with a new technique for cutting oversized clitorises off of baby girls—and who used repeated examinations with a vibrating device* to verify, as the girls grew, that their nether-region nerve endings still worked. Dan Savage brought the initial posting on the Hastings Center's Bioethics Forum to broader public attention. Jezebel focused in on the part about the vibrating device. And Slate tried, and mostly failed, to find a contrarian "this isn't as bad as it sounds" angle. As I read up on the story, though, I realized that nobody was explaining what was really going on here. Not fully, anyway. See, Poppas wasn't just pulling this idea out of his rear. And his patients weren't just little girls with slightly larger-than-average clitorises. In fact, the children were born intersexed—genetically female, but with ambiguous genitalia caused by a hormone imbalance. For these girls—and other children born with a variety of intersex conditions—genital surgery in infancy is standard practice. It happens all over the United States every day. The only thing that makes Poppas different was his follow-up procedures (a whole problematic can of worms that the sources above cover very well.) But just because Poppas was following standard practice doesn't mean there's nothing to question. Doctors recommend genital surgery for intersex babies on the assumption that it would be psychologically damaging to grow up with private parts that are so outside the norm—your parents wouldn't be able to handle it and would reject you, you'd be tormented by peers, etc. But the thing is, there's no evidence that this is true. We don't know that intersex people who've had the surgery lead happier lives than those who haven't. Nobody has ever systematically followed up with the patients to find out. Here's what we need to be asking questions about: Why are we performing purely aesthetic surgeries that come loaded with a lifetime of possible side-effects—from incontinence to inability to orgasm—when patients are too young to consent and there's no evidence that the surgery offers them any benefits? *NOT an actual dildo vibrator, as I understand it. Read the Slate piece for more detail.
You might think the idea that "people are freaked out by ambiguous genitalia and happier with normal" would just be common sense. But reality and common sense don't always align. There's been no research on outcomes for intersex adults, but there have been lots of intersex adults who've spoken up about being miserable with the results of childhood surgeries. Realistically, there are probably people who are happy with their surgeries, too. But, with the evidence we have, all we can say for sure is that there's no guarantee surgery is the right way to go, psychologically, for each individual. Meanwhile, the standard practice is to not offer individual choice. I'm going to go out on a limb and call that wrong. But this isn't just oppressive to people who don't fit a neat gender binary. It's also not scientific medicine. I love modern medicine. The skeptic movement has turned me into an advocate of evidence-based medicine—the simple idea that tradition, anecdote and common sense aren't good enough reasons to ask a patient to spend money and risk side-effects on a treatment. If there's no solid, scientific evidence, what you're doing isn't medicine. It's woo-woo magic. But I think people often forget that this doesn't just put the smack down on things like homeopathy and chiropractic. Mainstream medical treatments have to be held to the same standard. And they don't always measure up, either. Case in point: My lower back. Since I was 21, I've been privileged to enjoy periodic bouts of horrible searing pain shooting around my hips and down my legs. Doctors tended to prescribe me muscle relaxers and tell me that, at some point, I'd probably have to have surgery. But about a year and a half ago, I got a new doctor, Jonathan Tallman. And he was different. Instead of relying on anecdote and common sense, Dr. Tallman looked at the research. He told me that studies didn't really show evidence of success for muscle relaxants, or surgery, or chiropractic, or any number of expensive treatment options. In fact, he said, studies were often stopped because the control groups—who were just doing moderate, daily exercise—were the only ones who saw any reduction in back pain. "So, why don't you try exercise," he said. I haven't had any back pain since. That's evidence-based medicine in action. Dr. Poppas? That's what happens when well-meaning doctors stop practicing medicine and start practicing woo-woo magic. Poppas wanted to introduce a surgical technique that would preserve as much nerve tissue as possible. That would normally be laudable. But what he should have been doing was studying whether the surgery was necessary at all. Research and follow-up studies could end up showing that intersex children do get psychological benefits from growing up with "nomalized" genitals. I don't know. Nobody does. But you can't just assume a treatment is successful because you think it ought to be. Until there's evidence, one way or the other, surgery on the genitals of intersex children shouldn't be any more legitimate than trying to fight off malaria with a sugar pill. Image courtesy Flickr user ida_und_bent, via cc |
Mark on The Sound of Young America Posted: 29 Jun 2010 11:14 AM PDT Jesse Thorn interviewed me on his wonderful interview program, The Sound of Young America, about my book, Made by Hand. Mark Frauenfelder is the founder of the seminal zine and blog Boing Boing, the editor of Make Magazine, and the author of the new book Made By Hand: Searching for Meaning in a Throwaway World, about the pleasure of making things yourself.Mark Frauenfelder, Founder of Boing Boing and Author of Made By Hand: Interview on The Sound of Young America |
Dogs are great at finding bad weeds except when there are squirrels Posted: 29 Jun 2010 12:22 PM PDT A recent study experimenting with the use of trained dogs to detect invasive plants in North America found that canines are indeed better than humans at finding spotted knapweed. However: The dogs' performance wasn't perfect: they tended to issue more false alarms than humans. And one of the animals, Tsavo, was prone to "distraction by ground squirrels," the authors note. But overall, the results suggest that dogs could be valuable additions to teams on the hunt for invasive plants. |
Marina Gorbis on social organizations Posted: 29 Jun 2010 10:38 AM PDT In her continuing research on why traditional corporate structures and policies won't keep big companies alive, Institute for the Future executive director Marina Gorbis writes, "We invented social technologies, now let's invent social organizations": Our technology tools and platforms are highly participatory and social. They take advantage of intrinsic human motivations to contribute in order to be noticed, to share opinions, to be a part of something greater than ourselves. Otherwise how would one explain remarkable success of Wikipedia and many other crowdsourced sites that rely on contributions of volunteers? Our business models, by contrast, are based primarily on monetary rewards. They are mostly hierarchical and non-participatory decisionmaking processes (Facebook's unilaterial decisions regarding changes in privacy terms for members is but one example). And they operate without the kind of transparency of information when applied to their own operations that is at the core of communities they enable."We invented social technologies, now let's invent social organizations" |
Posted: 29 Jun 2010 12:37 PM PDT XLR8R asked Moby to spin a set of old-school rave tracks! Now where the hell is my glow stick? From XLR8R: It's easy to throw around words like 'legend' and 'pioneer' when talking about electronic music, and let's face it, half the time people won't say boo about these labels, most likely because they don't know who they hell you're talking about. But when it comes to true-blue dance music heavy-hitters, the kinds of artists that even your mom has heard of, it's hard to top Moby. The man has changed a lot since getting his start making high-energy rave tunes in the early '90s, but even as his music has morphed, changed, and, yes, mellowed, it's always been clear that Moby still has a soft spot for that bygone era. Here at XLR8R, we've been itching for someone to do a classic rave mix, so we figured who better than Moby to put together a pumping session full of hyperactive synth stabs, feel-good piano melodies, whooshing hoover sounds, and endlessly pulsing beats. To our delight, he was up for the challenge, and the mix does not disappoint.Podcast 148: Moby's Old-School Rave Mix |
Posted: 29 Jun 2010 10:04 AM PDT The item above is one of Alexis Soyer's Magic Stoves. First patented in 1849, the Magic Stove was the prototypical gas camping stove. Cabinet magazine reveals the history of this revolutionary and beautifully-designed device. From Cabinet: The small, portable burner was designed to run on pressurized fuel and to have sufficient heating power to cook a meal in a couple of minutes. The Magic Stove's first appearances in the great outdoors reflected the grandiosity of its gentlemanly origins... "Mad" Lieutenant Gale, a daredevil hot-air balloonist, wanted to take the Magic Stove on board, but died too soon in a botched ascent. Explorers took the stove with them on their expeditions. In 1850, the Admiralty ordered some Magic Stoves for Captain Horatio Austin's expedition to the Arctic in search of Sir John Franklin, prefiguring Amundsen's use of the Primus stove on his journey to the North Pole."Hot on the Trail" |
Posted: 29 Jun 2010 09:55 AM PDT On the way home from FOO Camp this weekend, our wunderkind software hacker Dean Putney landed on This Week In Tech with Leo Laporte, Kevin Rose, Owen JJ Stone, Dan Shapiro, and our pal Tim Shey of Next New Networks. Check out Dean geeking out on NoSQL and grokking Digg v.4! TWiT 254 |
Posted: 29 Jun 2010 11:23 AM PDT Buzz Aldrin interviewed in Vanity Fair: A couple of years ago you hinted that you might've seen a UFO during a space mission. Is it possible you were just looking at floating bags of your own poo?As commenters pointed out, Buzz is actually saying the bags of dumped poop were very close, not the UFOs. However, the article also links to Buzz talking about UFOs in this YouTube video. Important to note though is that in a recent Skeptical Inquirer article, Aldrin says his comments on the UFO "sighting" have been taken out of context over the years. |
Frank McCarthy's undersea action illustrations Posted: 29 Jun 2010 09:09 AM PDT Over at Brian Lam's wonderful new Scuttlefish blog, about his love for the ocean, he shares some terrific undersea art by illustrator Frank McCarthy. The artist, who died in 2002, was a movie poster master and also did the concept art for Thunderball (1965). Above is a poster montage for Around the World Under the Sea (1966). "Art of the Thunderous Ball" |
Photographs of an imaginary Ballardian office park Posted: 29 Jun 2010 09:14 AM PDT Wandering through a massive office park outside of London, artist Nicholas Cobb was reminded of JG Ballard's marvelous dystopian novels set in gated communities and sprawling, manicured business parks. Inspired, Cobb built a detailed architecture model and made magnificent photographs of an imaginary corporate campus where work is done, as well as "extracurricular activities of a more malevolent nature." You can see some of the images, with Cobb's text and accompanying Ballard quotes, at Ballardian. The full book documenting the project is available at Blurb. From Ballardian: In the summer of 2008 I went for a series of walks along arterial routes heading out of London. That summer I had read several of J.G. Ballard's novels including Super Cannes, which is about disturbing behaviour amongst the inhabitants of a gated community isolated from the world. On one of these ambles I chanced upon a recently completed building development. I felt compelled to enter this beautifully landscaped glass and steel environment. It appeared as if no expense had been spared. What I encountered there helped to crystallize some vague ideas that became the photographs that are presented in this collection. The idyllic setting combined with the ever-present 'security' got under my skin and left me wondering about a dystopian outcome for this kind of world.The Office Park (Ballardian) The Office Park by Nicholas Cobb (Blurb) |
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