WORLD WORLD WORLD . COM

Just a very nice driving journey with sun rising, from Calais to Paris after the overnight ferry.

My van is s - l - o - w . . .
It is good, it gives me time to take pictures and talk with clowns.

If you want, you can have these pictures full quality (34mb .zip).

Back in Paris for a few days in my parents house, I found a book I bought long ago.
Before I was born people used to have an incredible sense of humour. They were soooo convinced nuclear was no danger, so they issued this fancy book with spaghetti-western font:

Roughly, it explains how nuclear is cool because it kills less people than coal exploitation does :

Than we come to the design part of it : the nuclear waste disposal (click to enlarge) :

So basically these are simpler tankers UK nuclear services just throw in the middle of the ocean, where no one will be able to locate them precisely ever. And the technique they use to “secure” the tankers is quite hi-tech you will agree :

And british nuclear waste managment services have been practicing this fancy sport since nuclear waste exist on these particularly exciting spots :

So I guess I must add these precious points on this map of the immaculate oceans, how sad :

If the milk is sour, we will have no choice but to drink it :

And we cant ever get the truth about all this stuff, even if they know about it…

Who is “we” and who is “they” in the previous sentence? Guess.

But now comes real serious criticism, the one I can do as I am a qualified graphic designer :

The book, printed in 1981 and only borrowed three times from the RCA librairy is completely falling apart today (2008)… This is very worrying… How can a group of engineers responsible for the management of nuclear waste design and mass produce so fragile books? This is scary… This is absolutely scandalous! This binding is extremely dangerous! What if somebody reads this book in a bit careless fashion?!! What if someone drops the book? Everything could happen! Imagine the worst!
The whole nuclear thing is badly binded… Can we trust people who cant design a several centuries traditional knowledge (book binding), design nuclear waste tankers that are supposed to last until radioactive matter becomes harmless (at least 10′000 years)…

Now, you have only a few days left, if you are in London, to run see this exellent exhibition “NUCLEAR: Art & Radioactivity” by the Art Catalyst, Chris Oakley and Simon Hollington & Kypros Kyprianou until the 30th of November 2008 at the Nicholls & Clarke Building, Spitalfields, London E1 (Liverpool street station). It is about what I’ve been talking so far, but not from 1981 standpoint of view, it is a serious update, it is free, it is spooky, strong, strange, where is art, where is radioactivity, are we safe?

Last year, high court judge Jeremy Sullivan caused an apparent setback to the government’s nuclear energy ambitions by ruling that public consultation into the creation of a new fleet of nuclear power stations was “misleading” and “seriously flawed”. Soon after these events, Simon Hollington & Kypros Kyprianou started a residency at The British Atomic Nuclear Group as part of a public perceptions programme. Hollington & Kyprianou’s work in Nuclear is the outcome from this residency, particularly their work within B.A.N.G’s wide-ranging public consultation into the possibility of siting a nuclear power facility in the heart of London. Their new installation, ‘The Nightwatchman’ traces changing perceptions of the nuclear power industry over its 50 year history through a single immersive narrative environment, blending fact and fiction into a darkly humorous journey through hard-nosed PR and spin to a logical hysteria.

Chris Oakley’s new film ‘Half-life’ looks at the histories of Harwell, birthplace of the UK nuclear industry, and the new development of fusion energy technology at the Culham facility in Oxfordshire. Oakley gained the cooperation of both these organisations in his research and filming. The film examines nuclear science research through a historical and cultural filter. With the recent widespread acceptance of the reality of climate change driven by carbon dioxide emissions, the work explores the realities and myths surrounding the nuclear sciences.

Enjoy !

Alvaro Cassinelli is making a great project called Ourobouros… You can participate to this project if you have a webcam and internet access, just contact him.

“Ouroboros” is a shared virtual space, a world-scale tunnel built by chaining video-conferencing cameras and projectors in a closed loop around the world. This virtual space comes into contact with the Earth at several entry points or “Gates” situated in different cities, each standing in a location particularly representative of the place (public squares, markets, private homes, etc). Each Gate is simply composed of a (portable?) projection screen, a video camera a little far away, and an “interstitial” public space in between. The camera captures the whole view – that is, the passersby and the standing projection screen blended in the background - and the resulting live stream is sent over the Internet to be projected onto a similar structure - in a different city, in a different country, in a different continent. The process repeats itself until the loop is completed, as the final video is projected back onto the first screen - only to restart a tour in an eternal circulation (Fig.1a). In its (almost) instantaneous travel around the world, the video stream will gather “souvenirs” of the visited places. People from all around the world will appear on the screen as standing in the middle of a tunnel whose walls are composed by an infinite recursion of (Matryoshka-like) nested video windows; one can recognize the actual location of the shooting in each of these rectangular frames.

It would produce an image such as this one :

and be displayed in public space:

I just think this is quite magical… AAAhhhh….

Interestingly enough, you can find some formal reference to this kind of space and time traveling in traditional japanese architecture when it comes about Torii :

And now, a surprise : when I first started blogging -not so long ago- the very first article I wanted to write about was the work of Bryan Fu on Brain disorders. I talk about it here, since Ouro Boros is what he did in this stunning video “Brain Disorder, Transient Global Amnesia” (a few years ago) while studying media arts in London, please click on the image below (links to the genius video) >>

Transient Global Amnesia

- A passing episode of short-term memory loss without other signs or symptoms of neurological impairment

- Disoriented to place and time

I shoot a series of still shots on different objects. The shots can be a movement, or just an object that can show the change of time. When the change is completed, the clip end.

With the special arrangement, every object seems changing in real time. The audience may realize that the object that has shown before is now showing again when the change is completed. The overall flow is like recalling the memory of the audience. Something started few minutes ago and is processing in every second, may now be forgotten.

And he did a couple of really amazing videos (click on them below), available here to watch, all exploring the visual reprezentation of supposed brain damage effects:

Full text documentation about each video here, by Bryan Fu.

Now you want to be brain damaged too!

http://www.apple.com/trailers/sony/2012/

Never before has a date in history been so significant to so many cultures, so many religions, scientists, and governments. 2012 is an epic adventure about a global cataclysm that brings an end to the world and tells of the heroic struggle of the survivors.

A film directed by Roland Emmerich, in theaters (USA): July 10, 2009. By then I must have the 2012hopes.com website a reliable and used ressource…

Dover, ferry port

Dover, ferry port. In about an hour, I’ll be in a van, in a boat, on the sea, aaaahh nice……..
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http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/cildomeireles/default.shtm

I just come back from the amazing exhibition of Cildo Meireles at the tate Modern in London, I can only recommend it. it is happening until the 11th of January, amazing! Move in elastic time, walk on brocken glass, swim in talc, play with atoms, get trapped in fish nets, so much stuf you can touch, throw, play with, just the way I like things to be accessible, playful, enjoyable!

‘My work aspires to a condition of density, great simplicity, directness, openness of language and interaction.’
Cildo Meireles

A key instigator of Conceptual Art, Brazilian artist Cildo Meireles has made some of the most politically telling, aesthetically seductive and philosophically intriguing works of the last four decades. With a characteristic economy of means, he distils complex ideas into single objects or environments.

Meireles was born in 1948 in Rio de Janeiro, where he still lives and works. His father worked for the Indian Protection Service and, as a boy, the artist accompanied his family on their constant moves throughout the vast Brazilian territory. We often catch glimpses of these childhood experiences through his art.

His work inherited the legacy of Neo-concretism, a Brazilian movement of the late 1950s that rejected the extreme rationalism of geometric abstraction in favour of more sensorial, participatory works, which engage the body as well as the mind. The utopian optimism of the Neo-concrete artists foundered after the coup of 1964, which ushered in an oppressive military regime.

Meireles’s generation, emerging in the late 1960s and 1970s, were known for more politically engaged works, the extremity of their actions mirroring the extreme political situation. Meireles himself, however, links these two strands of Brazilian art.

‘In some way you become political when you don’t have a chance to be poetic. I think human beings would much prefer to be poetic’, he explains.

As Guy Brett, co-curator of this exhibition, has said, ‘A work by Meireles often starts in a commonplace, usually domestic object, or a childhood memory, which becomes transmuted into a perceptual, philosophical, even a cosmological speculation, without, however, losing its grit, its roots in social reality – a reality often harsh but marked by human resilience and inventiveness.’

So if you pass by London, do not miss it, go!

Be a search engine all weight champion. 5 minutes per day, results not
guaranteed. By Cesar Harada, thanks to Ross Cairns and Nicolas Myers, naughty boys.

==Define a nice identity for yourself==
Choose a good, relevant domain name : if you are a Ping-Pong racket maker, best it to have http://pingpongrakets.com as your domain.
Than it is a good idea to name each of your page, your sub-folders relevantly http://pingpongrakets.com/buy/nice_green_rackets.htm (with title “buy nice green Ping-Pong racket”),  so people would easily remember them and it will be indexed better.

==Submit your URL to Search engines and directory==
<b>submit your website to search engine</b>
Tell Google where to look,
http://www.google.co.uk/addurl/?hl=en&continue=/addurl
Tell Yahoo where to look
http://search.yahoo.com/info/submit.html
Tell AltaVista
http://addurl.altavista.com/

<b>directories</b>
http://www.google.com/dirhp
http://www.dmoz.org/about.html
http://www.dmoz.org/add.html

==Cleaning your pages code==
<b>tag your pages properly, like Chris Woebken.</b>
<meta name=”description” content=”A young energetic designer exploring
Interaction Design”/>
<meta name=”keywords” content=”Interaction Design, Experience Design,
Experiments”/>

==Spread the world==
<b>increase statistically the number of visits</b>
*make good works (that could be useful!)
*E-mail your friends (ask them to spread)

==Keep your visitors inside your website==
<b>increase the number of internal links</b>
Make people navigate inside your many pages.

==Get them into your website==
<b>increase incoming links</b>
*Propose your works to bloggers, make sure you have them in your newsletter.
*Official magazines and websites.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank

==Install Google inside your website==
<b>Install an internal search engine in your website</b>
http://www.google.com/coop/cse/

==Make yourself famous==
<b>wikipedia</b>
Have you written a good article about yourself on Wikipedia? No? Pay someone to do it!
<b>flickr</b>
Open a flickr account, post all your pictures in there, make friends,
ask your friends to comment the pictures to start the fuss
<b>youtube (dailymotion, vimeo, sevenload)</b>
<b>be on facebook, but with not your face as profile picture, post
your work in there instead of family and friends on holidays</b>

==Be a low grade hacker==
<b>social bookmarking (delicious, reader…)</b>
Create multiple identity on socialbookmarking sites and comment (from
your different identities) how amazing your stuff is!

==Stop being hacker, be polite with robots==
<b>map out, clean directory</b>
Create web crawlers readable directory listing:
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/docs/en/sitemap-generator.html
<b>Create a map of your website</b>
http://www.mypagerank.net/

==Using Google==
<b>analytics</b>
Install google to track your visitors
https://www.google.com/analytics
optimize languages , operating system according to your visitors profiles, geolocalizing their IP adress.

==Publish fake stats about your popularity==
http://www4.clustrmaps.com/
Take still images from other websites stats map and embed in your ownpage (with a broken link to source of course).

==Become Google bitch==
<b>ad word</b>
https://adwords.google.com/

==Be everybody’s bitch==
Stop programming your website, use a CMS (Content Managing System) that automatically includes you in its directories, such as Indexibit
http://www.indexhibit.org/participants/

==Be a slave to the machine==
Make sure your RSS feed has always something new everyday or more
frequently, attach yourself to the machine.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS_(file_format)

==Invade==
<b>more domains</b>
buy more domains
<b>more subdomains</b>
create more sub.domains
<b>Create Linkfarms</b>
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_farm
And the nastiest way to invest in linkfarming in buying other people “expired” domains names (that’s evil) : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGvEoYjFlRc

==Be a thief : Republish good articles, talk about famous people and events==
Copy-paste good articles from major websites. Prefer the one with quite famous topics, and even better : republish access-limited websites (learn also to be “anonymously famous” at that point).

==Pollute the “real” unsustainable earth==
Buy the medias, print giant colourful posters and stick them in the streets, sponsor events, publish derivated products like puppets, open a charity, shake the hands of major states presidents, top models, actors, popes and soccer players, making sure your URL is always visible, even humbly in each of these cases, the subliminal at work.

==Become a hacker again==
<b>redirection </b>
Redirect the pages you don’t like, or pages everyone goes and redirect
them to the one you want
<b>mirror</b>
Mirror the pages you don’t like, or pages everyone goes and redirect
them to the one you want
<b>cloak</b>
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloaking
and drink enough to forget how naughty you are.

==Loose your friend==
<b>spam</b>
Send everyday thousands of email to promote your work, don’t forget to use a signature engine to protect your indentity …
http://mairas.net/projects/sigeng/
you will need something like this, but better !
<b>Micro-blogging, twitter, tumblr, moodblast</b>
Publish tiny pieces of thoughts, personal feelings, all the time, to everyone, force people to RSS your content.

==Go to jail==
<b>homemade bot</b>
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_crawler
Buid one in your backyard!

==Change your life==
<b>now you are in jail, you have no friends, but you are at the top of
google results, well done!!!</b>

==Edit a CMS, get out of jail, be a charitable hotliner until death==
If you want to become a useful person again in the society you can program design frameworks and content management systems for others, debug version after version, translate in many languages and multiple platforms. After all the evil you have done to the world, you can start to empower others, make sure there is a link to your CMS editor website (in a Wordpress fashion).

==A quick call to Larry or Sergey==
Just ask them directly, they are nice guys aren’t they?!!

==Build something more powerful than google==
Just try.

==But hey, you cant do better than this?==

Today Google released the ice-cream background for email accounts… this feature is just.. TOO POWERFUL… Nothing you can do against this… Too cuuuute !!!!!!  AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHH Google’s got my soul!

From Pasta&Vinegar (nice!), thanks to R-echo

Incomplete buildings are something that fascinate me. The raw backbone of the buildings looks as if it had been never finished or strip naked after a momentarily stopped renovation. To me, the city of the near future definitely looks like this sort of architecture. And this fascination is not just poetic, it’s a very recurring encounter in lots of cities due to economic and cultural issues in construction.

For example, the picture above has been taken in Cusco, Peru. It nicely reveals how the floors reached different levels of completeness. The one above is a restaurant where I had lunch in august, whereas the two other stories below have a totally different affordance. Sometimes, it’s even more fascinating when you have incomplete skyscrapers, falling into despair. Some are totally abandoned, some only partly… with pockets of emptiness. These structures often lead to interesting new forms of socialization that would surely need some time to be uncovered.

If like me you’re into this sort of things, you may be intrigued by a french architecture firm called coloco which works on this concept. Régine pointed me to their Skeleton Observatory. It’s actually a summary of their exploration, about why the think this architectural typology is important and may play a role in the near future. It eventually lead them to describe projects about “inhabiting the skeletons”, i.e. the re-appropriation of abandoned and incomplete architectures. The skeleton becomes and “invitation à l’usage” (i.e. “an invitation to be used”). They even have their own France-based abandoned building to test their hypotheses.

Why do I blog this? cataloguing curious signals about new forms of architecture on a pure exploratory angle.

Knightsbridge construction

cycling behind a big construction truck

cycling behind a big construction truck

Camden Bus

Camden road construction

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socialism didn’t work, a case for something else!

socialism didn t work, a case for something else
Posted via Pixelpipe with my magic Google phone!