“In the 1970s and 1980s, the sci-fi art of Japanese illustrator Shusei Nagaoka graced numerous album covers and appeared in a variety of advertisements, magazines, and movie posters.” via Pink Tentacle
(1) ONTOLOGY
That branch of metaphysics which concerns itself with the problems of the nature of existence or being.
(2) Imagine a pale blue morning sky, almost green, with clouds only at the rims. The earth rolls and the sun appears to mount, mountains erode, fruits decay, the Foraminifera adds another chamber to its shell, babies’ fingernails grow as does the hair of the dead in their graves, and in egg timers the sands fall and the eggs cook on.
(3) Sarah Boyle thinks of her nose as too large, though several men have cherished it. The nose is generous and performs a well-calculated geometric curve, at the arch of which the skin is drawn very tight and a faint whiteness of bone can be seen showing through, it has much the same architectural tension and sense of mathematical calculation as the day after Thanksgiving breastbone on the carcass of a turkey; her maiden name was Sloss, mixed German, English and Irish descent; in grade school she was very bad at playing softball and, besides being chosen last for the team, was always made to play center field, no one could ever hit to center field; she loves music best of all the arts, and of music, Bach, J.S; she lives in California, though she grew up in Boston and Toledo.
(4) BREAKFAST TIME AT THE BOYLES’ HOUSE ON LA FLORIDA STREET, ALAMEDA, CALIFORNIA, THE CHILDREN DEMAND SUGAR FROSTED FLAKES.
With some reluctance Sarah Boyle dishes out Sugar Frosted Flakes to her children, already hearing the decay set in upon the little white milk teeth, the bony whine of the dentist’s drill. The dentist is a short, gentle man with a moustache who sometimes reminds Sarah of an Uncle who lives in Ohio. One bowl per child.
(5) If one can imagine it considered as an abstract object, by members of a totally separate culture, one can see that the cereal box might seem a beautiful thing. The solid rectangle is neatly joined and classical in proportions, on it are squandered wealths of richest colours, virgin blues, crimsons, dense ochres, precious pigments once reserved for sacred paintings and as cosmetics for the blind faces of marble gods. Giant size. Net Weight 16 ounces, 250 grams. “They’re tigeriffic!” says Tony the Tiger. The box blatts promises. Energy, Nature’s Own Goodness, an endless pubescence. On its back is a mask of William Shakespeare to be cut out, folded, worn by thousands of tiny Shakespeares in Kansas City, Detroit, Tucson, San Diego, Tampa. He appears at once more kindly and somewhat more vacant than we are used to seeing him. Two or more of the children lay claim to the mask, but Sarah puts off that Solomon’s decision until such time as the box is empty.
(6) A notice in orange flourishes states that a Surprise Gift is to be found somewhere in the packet, nestled amongst the golden flakes. So far it has not been unearthed, and the children request more cereal than they wish to eat, great yellow heaps of it, to hurry the discovery. Even so, at the end of the meal, some layers of flakes remain in the box and the Gift must still be among them.
(7) There is even a Special Offer of a secret membership, code and magic ring; these to be obtained by sending in the box top with 50 cents.
(8) Three offers on one cereal box. To Sarah Boyle this seems to be oversell. Perhaps something is terribly wrong with the cereal and it must be sold quickly, got off the shelves before the news breaks. Perhaps it causes a special, cruel cancer in little children. As Sarah Boyle collects the bowls printed with bunnies and baseball statistics, still slopping half full of milk and wilted flakes, she imagines in her mind’s eye the headlines, “Nation’s Small Fry Stricken, Fate’s Finger Sugar Coated, Lethal Sweetness Socks Tots.”
(9) Sarah Boyle is a vivacious and intelligent young wife and mother, educated at a fine Eastern college, proud of her growing family which keeps her busy and happy around the house.
(10) BIRTHDAY
Today is the birthday of one of the children. There will be a party in the late afternoon.
An excerpt. Read the entire story here
“In this image, we are looking at the core of the blogosphere. The dark edges show the reciprocal links (where A has cited B and B has cited A), the lighter edges indicate a-reciprocal links. The larger, denser area of the graph is that part of the blogosphere generally characterised by socio-political discussion (the periphery contains some topical groupings). Above and to the left is that area of the blogosphere concerned with technical discussion and gadgetry…”
Mapping The Blogosphere, DataMining, via Hip Flask
“SF names not a generic effects engine of literature and simulation arts (the usual sense of the phrase “science fiction”), so much as a mode of awareness, characterized by two linked forms of hesitation, a pair of gaps.
“One gap extends between, on the one hand, belief that certain ideas and images of scientific-technological transformations of the world can be entertained, and, on the other, the rational recognition that they may be realized (along with their ramifications for worldly life). It is a gap that lies between the conceivability of future transformations and the possibility of their actualization. In its other aspect, SF names the gap between, on the one hand, belief in the immanent possibility (and perhaps inexorable necessity) of those transformations, and, on the other, reflection about their possible ethical, social, and spiritual interpretations (i.e., about their embeddedness in a web of social-historical relations). This gap stretches between conceiving of the plausibility, i.e., the prospective factual reality, of historically unforeseeable innovations in human experience (nova) and their broader ethical and social-cultural implications and resonances. SF thus involves two forms of hesitation—a historical-logical one (how plausible is the conceivable novum?) and an ethical one (how good/bad/altogether different are the transformations that would issue from the novum?) These gaps compose the black box in which scientific-technological conceptions, ostensibly unmediated by social and ethical contingencies, are transformed into a rational, “realistic” recognition of their possible materialization and their implications.
“SF embeds scientific-technological concepts in the sphere of human interests and actions, explaining them and explicitly attributing social value to them. This may take many literary forms, from the resurrection of dead mythologies, pseudo-mimetic extrapolation, and satirical subversion, to utopian Auffiebung. It is an inherently, and radically, future-oriented process, since the exact ontological status of the fictive world is suspended. Unlike historical fiction (of which SF is a direct heir), where a less intense suspense operates because the outcome of the past is still in the process of being completed in the present’s partisan conflicts, SF is suspended because all the relevant information about the future has not been created yet, and never can be.
“Since future developments influence revisions of the past, SF’s black box also involves the past, in the hesitation that comes in anticipating the complete revision of origins. A past that is not yet known is a form of the future. So is a present unanticipated by the past. Further, since SF is concerned mainly with the role of science and technology in defining human—i.e., cultural—value, there can be as many kinds of SF as there are theories of culture. Obviously, this conception of SF concerns the range of possible science fictions, many of which have not been realized (for many and various reasons), and not just the actual historical production of the commercial genre known as Science Fiction…”
Istvan Csieser-Ronay Jr. “The SF of Theory: Baudrillard and Haraway”. Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 18., No. 3. Science Fiction and Post Modernism, pp 387-88.
Wikitude Augmented Reality: WTC – Its not there but its there from Wikitude on Vimeo.
“In his 2006 novel, Spook Country, the science fiction author William Gibson described a new form of sculpture based on augmented reality. The artist builds virtual objects located in particular spaces, tied to their location using GPS co-ordinates and only visible using special goggles that superimpose the 3D image on the real world. In almost record time, science fiction has come true as the Wikitude augmented reality browser for Android or iPhone has been used to rebuild the World Trade Centre in New York.
“As this rather disturbing video shows, visitors to Ground Zero need only download the Wikitude app and hold up their phones to see where the skyscrapers would have fitted into the skyline. Move around the site and the digital model can be seen from all angles. Trees in the background seem to interrupt the effect slightly, but this is a very early release and such problems should not be impossible to fix. The World Trade Centre is the first 3D model to have been added to Wikitude, which has only been capable of adding text tags and linked media to locations until now.
“It’s difficult to decide whether this is a very modern moving tribute to a great tragedy, or a cynical opportunistic way to cash in on a nation’s desire to remember its past. One of the founders of Wikitude was in Manhattan on September 11 2001 and says that making the model was something they had wanted to do for personal reasons, and I hope that is the case.”
Twin towers rise again in slightly creepy-feeling use of augmented reality
“Anthropology, perception psychology, neurology, phenomenological sociology, ethnomethodology and even ethology (in its study of imprinting in animals), all confirm the quantum mechanical and Existentialist view that the world we perceive is a Mickey Mouse cartoon our brains have created out of signals that arrive as raw energy at the rate of millions of bleeps per second. Which type of Mickey Mouse cartoon—or Homeric epic, or Soap Opera—we make of these signals depends on our genes (which species of brain we have—mammalian, serpentine, insectoid etc.), and next on our imprints, and our conditioning and “learning” or brainwashing by society, and these are perpetuated by our lazy habits and only sometimes modified or somewhat transcended by our efforts at creativity and higher awareness.
“The various “models” of quantum mechanics—and it is symptomatic that we dare not call them “theories” any more—are all in direct contradiction to common sense and to common sense-data (the Mickey Mouse cut-outs our brain constructs from the energy bleeps it receives). Each type of quantum model is at least as weird as Dali’s Debris of an Automobile Giving Birth to a Blind Horse Biting a Telephone.
“Is Schroedinger’s cat in the famous gedankenexperiment dead or alive, or both, or somewhere in between? Each quantum model gives a different answer to that crucial question, just as different quantum models tell us that an unmeasured particle is simultaneously spin-up or spin-down or both or neither. Heisenberg said Eintsein’s attempt to find out what such and unmeasured particle is “really” doing was “like the medieval debate about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.” Why should an unmeasured particle not also be giving birth to a blind horse biting a telephone?
(The only particles we know anything about are the measured ones, which are shaped and to some extent created by the measurements. just as the only people we know anything about are the encountered ones who are shaped and to some extent created by our encounters with them. You knew that already, didn’t you?)
“Back in Joyceland, there is the Garry Owen mystery. Garry is a dog, and in the world of appearances one can even say Garry was a “real” dog. That is, he was whelped in 1888 and was owned by J. J. Giltrap, a Dublin breeder of pedigreed Irish setters. In a 19th Century novel, if Garry Owen appeared, he would be a definite and specific dog corresponding to the 19th Century delusion that a definite and specific “reality” exists somewhere apart from observers and observings. In the quantum comedy of Ulysses, there are three Garry Owens, or three Mickey Mouse cut-outs of the infinite space-time process called “Garry Owen,” each seen by one of three different observers: the first is a lively and endearing animal, the second is a surly and dangerous brute, and the third actually talks and even recites Gaelic poetry. This is the kind of attention to existential, phenomenological relativity that makes Joyce contemporary, whereas “realistic” writers are still living in medieval Aristotelian myth. Joyce’s multi-valued dog is as paradigmatic of our age as Schroedinger’s dead-and-alive cat.
“Elsewhere in this volume I enquire into the length of King Kong’s penis. My conclusions are relative to the context in which Kong belongs—the context of surrealism and dream—and are not consistent with the logic of Aristotelian “reality.” But to Aristotle a penis, like any other rod, has a “real” length which is “essential” to its “nature,” and we have known since Special Relativity (1905) that there is no such “real” length in experience, but only the various lengths (plural) of various observers or observing instruments. Like Dali’s Andalusian Dog and Joyce’s three-headed Irish setter, Kong’s penis and an Einsteinian rod are “in the eye of the beholder,” as it were. This is why all people with a good scientific education understand at once the answer to Zen Buddhist riddle, “Who is the Master who makes the grass green?”‘
Robert Anton Wilson, “Preface”. Rudy Rucker, Peter Lamborn Wilson & Robert Anton Wilson, eds. Semiotext [e] SF. New York: Autonomedia. 1989. pp 18-19
Image: Edith Joy Rae, A nude with Mickey Mouse hair April 17. 09. Via Daily Painters
“Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace.
These brave men, Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin, know that there is no hope for their recovery. But they also know that there is hope for mankind in their sacrifice.
These two men are laying down their lives in mankind’s most noble goal: the search for truth and understanding.
They will be mourned by their families and friends; they will be mourned by their nation; they will be mourned by the people of the world; they will be mourned by a Mother Earth that dared send two of her sons into the unknown.
In their exploration, they stirred the people of the world to feel as one; in their sacrifice, they bind more tightly the brotherhood of man.
In ancient days, men looked at stars and saw their heroes in the constellations. In modern times, we do much the same, but our heroes are epic men of flesh and blood.
Others will follow, and surely find their way home. Man’s search will not be denied. But these men were the first, and they will remain the foremost in our hearts.
For every human being who looks up at the moon in the nights to come will know that there is some corner of another world that is forever mankind.”
On July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin became the first men to walk on the moon. This speech, revealed in 1999, was prepared by Nixon’s then speechwriter, William Safire, to be used in the event of a disaster that would maroon the astronauts on the moon. Watergate.info
Josh Keyes, Entangle I, 2009
Acrylic on panel, 30″x40″.
Josh Keyes, Drifting, 2009.
Acrylic on panel, 30″x40″.
Josh Keyes, Totem II (Raven Steals the Light), 2008.
Acrylic on panel, 24″x18″.
“Metafiction is a term given to fictional writing which self-consciously and systematically draws attention to its status as an artefact in order to pose questions about the relationship between fiction, and reality. In providing a critique of their own methods of construction, such writings not only examine the fundamental structures of narrative fiction, they also explore the possible fictionality of the world outside the literary fictional text [...]. The term [...] itself seems to have originated in an essay by the American critic and self-conscious novelist William H. Gass. However, terms like ‘metapolitics’, ‘metarhetoric’ and ‘metatheatre’ are a reminder of what has been, since the 1960s, a more general cultural interest in the problem of how human beings reflect, construct and mediate their experience of the world. Metafiction pursues such questions through its formal self-exploration, drawing on the traditional metaphor of the world as book, but often recasting it in the terms of contemporary philosophical, linguistic or literary theory. If, as individuals, we now occupy ‘roles’ rather than ’selves’, then the study of characters in novels may provide a useful model for understanding the construction of subjectivity in the world outside novels. If our knowledge of this world is now seen to be mediated through language, then literary fiction (worlds constructed entirely of language) becomes a useful model for learning about the construction of ‘reality’ itself.
“The present increased awareness of ‘meta’ levels of discourse and experience is partly a consequence of an increased social and cultural self-consciousness. Beyond this, however, it also reflects a greater awareness within contemporary culture of the function of language in constructing and maintaining our sense of everyday ‘reality’. The simple notion that language passively reflects a coherent, meaningful and ‘objective’ world is no longer tenable. Language is an independent, self-contained system which generates its own ‘meanings’. Its relationship to the phenomenal world is highly complex, problematic and regulated by convention. ‘Meta’ terms, therefore, are required in order to explore the relationship between this arbitrary linguistic system and the world to which it apparently refers. In fiction they are required in order to explore the relationship between the world of the fiction and the world outside the fiction.
“In a sense, metafiction rests on a version of the Heisenbergian uncertainty principle: an awareness that ‘for the smallest building blocks of matter, every process of observation causes a major disturbance’, and that it is impossible to describe an “objective” world because the observer always changes the observed. However, the concerns of metafiction are even more complex than this. For while Heisenberg believed one could at least describe, if not a picture of nature, then a picture of one’s relation to nature, metafiction shows the uncertainty even of this process. How is it possible to ‘describe’ anything? The metafictionist is highly conscious of a basic dilemma: if he or she sets out to ‘represent’ the world, he or she realizes fairly soon that the world, as such, cannot be ‘represented’. In literary fiction it is, in fact, possible only to ‘represent’ the discourses of that world. Yet, if one attempts to analyse a set of linguistic relationships using those same relationships as the instruments of analysis, language soon becomes a `prisonhouse’ from which the possibility of escape is remote. Metafication sets out to explore this dilemma.
“The linguist L. Hjelmslev developed the term ‘metalanguage’. He defined it as a language which, instead of referring to non-linguistic events, situations or objects in the world, refers to another language: it is a language which takes another language as its object. Saussure’s distinction between the signifier and the signified is relevant here. The signifier is the sound-image of the word or its shape on the page; the signified is the concept evoked by the word. A metalanguage is a language that functions as a signifier to another language, and this other language thus becomes its signified.’
“In novelistic practice, this results in writing which consistently displays its conventionality, which explicity and overtly lays bare its condition of artifice, and which thereby explores the problematic relationship between life and fiction – both the fact that ‘all the world is not of course a stage’ and `the crucial ways in which it isn’t’. The ‘other’ language may be either the registers of everyday discourse or, more usually, the ‘language’ of the literary system itself, including the conventions of the novel as a whole or particular forms of that genre.”
Patricia Waugh, Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Concious Fiction. London/New York: Methuen. 1984. pp 2-4.
Image: RIBA Robot Nurse Bear
“The density of human life in cities breeds what Fritz Lieber dubbed “megalopolisomancy,” or city magic. With so many lives interconnected by time and space in one small area, you’re bound to start seeing ghosts. There’s something dark and mystical about urban life, where possibility shades into probability without much warning. Spasms of weath generate surreal structures and events; vast communities of artists build imaginary worlds in the middle of the street. If mirrored buildings can disappear into clouds, and shop windows promise perfect bodies draped in gold, why can’t vampires lurk in alleys and mutants live in storm drains?” Welcome to the Future Metropolis, io9
“Complexity Theory looks at how complex systems can generate simple outcomes. Consider the billions of cells that make up a person and yet they all manage to work together in such a way that the body works as a single unit. Our body works to keep us alive. We get hungry when we need food; we get thirsty when we need water. We can think and learn and we have a distinct personality. Something happens when large numbers of individual units come together and interact intensely with each other. New levels of operating just emerge through what is called self-organisation. By looking at a single human cell, you could not tell that it would be able to operate with other cells to form a human body.
“A city also has a large number of intensely interacting units. This time human beings form the units. Once again, we would not know from examining a single human being that they would gather together in the millions to form cities. It is an emergent property, so that a city takes on a life or a personality of its own, which has self organised out of the interactions of all the people who live in the city.We cannot predict what a complex system will evolve into. When we think about it, all life from the smallest cell to the largest animals are complex adaptive systems and life always provides us with a mystery.”
