Ultramundane
(Illustration by Danilo Agutoli)
Justin McGuirk identifies the obsession with functionality — introduced by modernism and amplified by the market — as the driving force behind the proliferation of super-efficient products, which instead of giving us more leisure create new forms of enslavement. (Domus)
2 days ago
Ray Harryhausen, Effects Innovator Behind Jason and Sinbad, Dies at 92
(Ray Harryhausen with some of his “creatures.” Photo by Martin McNeil/WireImage, via Getty Images)
Ray Harryhausen, the animator and special-effects wizard who found ways to breathe cinematic life into the gargantuan, the mythical and the extinct, died on Tuesday in London. He was 92 and lived in London.
Often working alone or with a small crew, Mr. Harryhausen created and photographed many of the most memorable fantasy-adventure sequences in movie history: the atomically awakened dinosaur that lays waste to Coney Island in “The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms”; the sword fight between Greek heroes and skeleton warriors in “Jason and the Argonauts”; the swooping pterodactyl that carries off Raquel Welch in “One Million Years B.C.” (New York Times)
2 weeks ago
Under the bonnet of the Internet
(View of the hall containing a series of Sketchbots for the sand portraits. Photo by Andrew Meredith)
In a few short decades, computing has become intimate and personal. The Internet has insinuated itself in the stuff of daily life completely, becoming indistinguishable from life itself. While this possibly sounds sinister, the experience of it is completely normal, unremarkable, banal even.
But of course, it is completely remarkable. So remarkable, and yet still so invisible, that it requires a physical exhibit in order to reveal and explain it.
Enter “Chrome Web Lab”, a large-scale public exhibition at the London Science Museum, integrated with an online platform. It features a series of “experiments” that each expose a different aspect of the inner workings of the Web, and explain the computational magic that keeps it all humming along. It’s the product of many people and many companies, foremost among them Tellart and Google Creative Lab.
3 weeks ago
A Bronx Genre Gone Global
(A promotional flier for a 1981 event in Waterbury, Conn. Cornell University Hip Hop Collection.)
The message was explicit: come in peace, ladies for free. Proper attire required, no sneakers allowed. 9:30 p.m. until. Be there y’all.
Combining rub-on deco lettering, photo booth portraits and comic book cutouts, the promotional fliers spread the word through the South Bronx of the latest set by Kool Herc, the Cold Crush Brothers, D.J. Jazzy Jay or the Soul Sonic Force MCs. (New York Times)
4 weeks ago
MoMA to raze ex-American Folk Art Museum
(Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times)
It’s incredible that this building, one the best architecture projects in the last decades can not be reused and it’s going to be town down after only 12 years. Here is the news from the New York Times:
When a new home for the American Folk Art Museum opened on West 53d Street in Manhattan in 2001 it was hailed as a harbinger of hope for the city after the Sept. 11 attacks and praised for its bold architecture.
“Its heart is in the right time as well as the right place,” Herbert Muschamp wrote in his architecture review in The New York Times, calling the museum’s sculptural bronze facade “already a Midtown icon.”
Now, a mere 12 years later, the building is going to be demolished. (New York Times)
1 month ago
Hackers Create An Amazing, Illegal Portrait Of The Internet
Someone hacked almost half a million devices around the world. Why? They wanted to see what the internet looked like. It wasn’t malicious. The file itself was the size of a small JPEG. It was given the absolute lowest priority. And it was set to self-destruct if anything went wrong. But this small file allowed one single hacker to measure the Internet activity of nearly half a million connected devices around the world, then share the results with everyone. (Fast Company)
1 month ago
DIY Magazines
(A social media timeline. Data from September 2012. Infographics by Simone Trotti)
“What decades of magazine design have put together, it has taken only a few years of apps to rent asunder. As mainstream print publications awkwardly rework themselves for Web and tablet, a set of websites and apps has created an alternative model for consuming, saving and sharing media. They are social, they are publication agnostic, and more often than not, they treat magazines, newspapers, blogs and catalogues as a kit of parts to be disassembled at will. Your will. You choose your apps, your bookmarklets, your pins, and what you are doing is assembling your own perfect publication.” Alexandra Lange for Domus
2 months ago
A 30-Year Time Lapse of the Lower East Side
(Delancey and Orchard Streets, circa 1980. Photo by Brian Rose and Edward Fausty)
Don’t miss this exhibition by Brian Rose and Edward Fausty at Dillon Gallery in New York that opens this Thursday, March 7:
Toward the end of 1979, Brian Rose and Edward Fausty began roaming the Lower East Side of Manhattan with a Japanese view camera attached to a tripod. New York City’s fiscal crisis was a fresh memory, and gentrification had not yet arrived. Tenements seemed to burn daily. But the frontier-like nature of the neighborhood and the availability of cheap rent encouraged an explosion of creativity. (New York Times)
Brian Rose is one of the contributions included in Boundary, the upcoming issue of MAS Context.
2 months ago
Stanley Kubrick: a retrospective
(Stanley Kubrick, installation view at the LACMA. Photo by Museum Associates/LACMA)
If you are in Los Angeles, this exhibition should be in your agenda:
“Stanley Kubrick breaks with strict chronology and instead creates clusters of visual and informative “microclimates” within the exhibition hall — a different weather for each film discussed, as it were, with meaningful asides to present Kubrick’s work as a photographer for Look magazine in the 40s and his research for two unrealised films, referred to as Napoleonand Aryan Papers. In doing so, the retrospective conveys quite well the “bodily” experience of immersing oneself in a world or point of view through film. At the same time, it provides a necessary cerebral lifejacket: just enough background text, comparison, and thematic cohesion to buoy the viewer from drowning in the various dramas on display.” (Domus)
2 months ago
Architecture of adrenalin
Speed, force, energy, beauty, harmony, emotion, fear and excitement. This set of physico-perceptive factors with a potent reaction poétique offer a good starting point for thinking about the aesthetics of what may be the most spectacular architectures of amusement: roller-coasters. This is what the English-speaking world calls these veritable machines pour le plaisir, or perhaps even architectures de vertige, but to everyone else they are known by their original name as “Russian mountains”. (Domus)
3 months ago
