WORLD WORLD WORLD . COM

Bacterias are not dirty, they are cool!! Look how they gather!!!

And now viruses

Protein

Unicellular organism

http://asm-ref-editor.angelfire.com/ash_wiki/articles/h/Hibachi_FAQ_2_621f.html

Carbon monoxide (CO) enters the bloodstream through the lungs and attaches to hemoglobin (Hb), the body’s oxygen carrier, forming carboxyhemoglobin (COHb) and thereby reducing oxygen (O2) delivery to the body’s organs and tissues. High COHb concentrations are poisonous. Central nervous system (CNS) effects in individuals suffering acute CO poisoning cover a wide range, depending on severity of exposure: headache, dizziness, weakness, nausea, vomiting, disorientation, confusion, collapse,coma and death.

So easy, and so technical, to die. Thanks to Gerard Rallo, he should come up with some related design proposal soon about this, I will than complete this post… Stay alive Gerard !

Cool illustration in Wombles.com, with the title : ‘Fuck homelessness, squat!”

Don’t squat, be a nomad. Never get stuck with the system, always change.

I never know where is honnesty, but I deeply respect commitment.

I am very impresed by the work of the Iraqi artist Wafaa Bilal.

There is no single-way to solve a problem or cure a disease and repairing a catastrophy can only happen the catastrophy has happenned…

Now I have 2 comments :

- on the video the artist does not have a stain of paint on himself, after 6000 bullets, this is either, very lucky, or the physical computing interface was very very inacurate… What does it mean?

- We know it, technology has always offered more distance and more efficiency in violence and unfair war between the have and have-not… This work does a powerful demonstration of the idea, so… how to stop the violence? talking about it / re-enacting it or simply not talking and try to forget it, or offer an alternative, or take direct action? I am dangerous (song). Or are we voluntarily perpetuating the violence?

Is technology made for destroying humans or life in general? Will there ever be a human technology? Will there ever be a real life technology?

…

Wafaa Bilal’s childhood in Iraq was defined by the horrific rule of Saddam Hussein, two wars, a bloody uprising, and time spent interned in chaotic refugee camps in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. Bilal eventually made it to the U.S. to become a professor and a successful artist, but when his brother was killed at a U.S. checkpoint in 2005, he decided to use his art to confront those in the comfort zone with the realities of life in a conflict zone. Thus the creation and staging of “Domestic Tension,” an unsettling interactive performance piece: for one month, Bilal lived alone in a prison cell-sized room in the line of fire of a remote-controlled paintball gun and a camera that connected him to internet viewers around the world. Visitors to the gallery and a virtual audience that grew by the thousands could shoot at him 24 hours a day. The project received overwhelming worldwide attention, garnering the praise of the Chicago Tribune, which called it “one of the sharpest works of political art to be seen in a long time,” and Newsweek’s assessment “breathtaking.” It spawned provocative online debates and ultimately, Bilal was awarded the Chicago Tribune’s Artist of the Year Award.
Structured in two parallel narratives, the story of Bilal’s life journey and of his “Domestic Tension” experience, this first-person account is supplemented with comments on the history and current political situation in Iraq and the context of “Domestic Tension” within the art world, including interviews with art scholars such as Dean of the School of Art at Columbia University, Carol Becker, who also contributes the introduction. Shoot an Iraqi is equally pertinent reading for those who seek insight into the current conflict in Iraq, and for those fascinated by interactive art technologies and the ever-expanding world of online gaming.
Wafaa Bilal, a professor of Photography and Imaging at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, has exhibited his art worldwide and lectured extensively. He has been interviewed on NPR, the BBC, CNN, MSNBC and the History Channel. Visit his website, www.wafaabilal.com.

[source we-make-money-not-art]

“The Persistence of Vision” (listen to MP3) is the story of a drifter crossing America during a terrible depression who happens upon a Taos commune run by and for a community of blind-deaf people, the adult cohort of a decades-gone German measles epidemic. In the commune (”Keller”), the narrator discovers important, unsuspected truths about independence and interdependence, communication and community, and the power of hope and perseverance.

This story pulls off one of science fiction’s best tricks: exploring the fundamental question of whether disasters demand that you bug out, heading for the hills to wait out the disaster, or bug in, grabbing your go-bag and heading for your neighbors’ to see how you can help.

This is a timely reading — and not just because the economy is in free-fall. Technology is rupture — each new wave of technological change displaces and remakes us. Today’s technocratic winners are tomorrow’s superannuated losers. The future of human history will be about how we answer the bug in/bug out question. [From Boing Boing, thanks to Sascha Pohflepp]

An amazing german company, Festo, just imitating nature as a shortcut to “invention”…

The Baghdad Battery is the common name for a number of artifacts created in Mesopotamia, possibly during the Parthian or Sassanid period (the early centuries AD). These jars were probably discovered in 1936 in the village of Khuyut Rabbou’a, near Baghdad, Iraq. These artifacts came to wider attention in 1938 when Wilhelm König, the German director of the National Museum of Iraq, found the objects in the museum’s collections. In 1940 König published a paper speculating that they may have been galvanic cells, perhaps used for electroplating gold onto silver objects.[1] This interpretation continues to be considered as at least a hypothetical possibility. If correct, the artifacts would predate Alessandro Volta’s 1800 invention of the electrochemical cell by more than a millennium.

Building a “Baghdad Battery” - More DIY How To Projects

Where to look? In the past? Or in the future?

Now do you believe in time travel? Hehehe!

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 !

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…

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.