Thank you to all of culturge's loyal readers and followers. It's been a fun few years, but it's time to close up culturge's shop. For all of you out there still interested in following a filtered forum for art, culture and design, the conversation will continue at my new website: http://www.ianaldenrussell.com/writing/blog

I hope to see you there, and thanks again for all the comments, critiques and comraderie over the last few years.

All the best,

Ian Russell

We've been enjoying the spectacle of video-mapping for the last few years, with companies such as Nuformer have wowing us with stunning projections giving new life to old facades. On 9 October 2010, the past took a big step into the future (or perhaps just the present). Prague-based, The Macula performed an epic video-mapping spectacular as part of the 600th anniversary of Prague's Astronomical Clock, the Orloj (see below). Effecting a 10 minute tour through 600 years of Prague's history, the performance is a dramatic demonstration of the possibility for new forms of media to enliven and activate the sometimes dormant narratives embedded in the architectures around us.

History timecode for the video:
05:04 The Symbol of Bohemia and the Czech lands – The two tailed Lion bearing the crown of Charles IV as the Czech King and Holy Roman Emperor, uplifting Prague to be the jewel that it is today.

06:40 After much turmoil, the old town was the place where 27 Czech protestant leaders were executed in 1621 by the Catholic Ferdinand II.

07:23 The 12 apostles that come out every hour, 24/7 in all seasons.

08:15 Serious damage in 1945 from Prague Uprising by Germans.


Equipment: Two Christie 18K HD projectors - 5000×1200 resolution

It is almost cliche to talk about how the future is actually happening today. The accessibility of information from sources like TED and Pop Tech! about the cutting edge of technological innovation and the real world impact these shifts are going to have has given us the chance to not merely imagine the future but to see how our industrial complexes are preformating and predetermining it for us. Though occasionally a news story appears that shocks and awes such as this worrisome promotional news video for the Raytheon Sarcos XOS 2 robotic suit for US combat troops.



The cultural impact of the deployment of such suits in conflict scenarios where the US army is primarily engaged with non-robotics enabled combatants is indeed profound. While one can understand the importance of ensuring the safety of combat personnel, the widening of the human-technology gap in complex socio-cultural conflict scenarios is something that P.W. Singer has warned us of many times over. See:
Robots and the future of war: P.W. Singer


And an interesting article here about cyber warfare:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/politics/defence/8008520/Defence-Review-The-Services-have-a-fight-on-their-hands-but-who-is-the-biggest-enemy.html

We've had virtual choirs, countless bad cover versions of popular songs and opening credit sequences from nearly every 1980s children's programme that was ever produced... Though the fascination with the ability to syndicate one's individual AV perspective and persona has produced an amazing tool documenting and sharing the complexity and diversity of human creativity and achievement, somewhere amidst the social noise, the possibility of something more than a community of interest - a political engaged citizenry - has been drowned out.

Over the last year, though, a cry from across the Caucasus, the Urals and the Baltic has shown the ability for social media to empower a simple citizen in a corrupt system to raise their voice to the world and call for accountability. This is the story of a beat cop from the Black Sea who decided to take on Putin, and though landing himself in jail for a year on trumped up fraud charges, he inspired a whole society to bring their disparate voices of dissatisfaction and desire for change together. Watch the NYTimes' excellent documentary below. The montage of voices from across Russia in the middle, I find simply inspiring...

This is without doubt one of the most amazing graffiti videos I've ever seen. The Italian graffiti artist Blu's innovative approach to the medium of wall art challenges traditional understanding of the possibilities in the realm public art whether sanctioned or not. In this new work Big Bang Big Boom, not only does Blu challenge the limits of the wall by morphing his visuals into enlivened physical objects, he also has mobilised the medium for creative reflection on science and education, playfully exploring a version of evolution.

In this RSA Animate, radical sociologist David Harvey asks if it is time to look beyond capitalism towards a new social order that would allow us to live within a system that really could be responsible, just, and humane?

This is based on a lecture at the RSA (www.theRSA.org).

Just over  a year ago, we discussed the Juan Enriquez's argument for the identification of a new species of human - homo evolutis. Continuing our coverage and concern over the prostheticising of humanity,  especially since Roger Clark's recent re-articulation of 'Cyborg Rights', here are two notable new stories of the avant-garde of technological progress in human-machine interfaces:

Robot arm controlled by the mind
BBC - 12 May 2010

Prosthetic foot up for MacRobert Engineering Prize
BBC - 10 May 2010

As we're well into the first year of the second decade of the 21st century, we're putting some serious temporal distance between us and the nascent days of graphic user interface (GUI) culture. It's not surprising then to witness the recursive loop of nostalgic reworking and temporal mashup of bits (all 8 of them) of the aural and visual culture of our shared computing heritage.

Most striking (and the inspiration for this post) is the short film Pixels by Patrick Jean from April 2010 which depicts an onslaught of 8-bit graphics on New York. I particularly love the opening scene which provides a possible motive for their attack - the thoughtless discarding of their their mediated home, the analog, cathode-ray tube television.



Pixels has aptly spawned a whole array of remixes with some quality 8-bit music masters. A particular favourite of mine is the 8-bit dubstep mashup 'Humanoid Kill' by Bazooka.

In the genre of 8-bit music reawakening, Anamanaguchi takes the cake as the band that 'makes loud, fast music with a hacked NES from 1985'. There live shows also crank out some rather satisfying NEStalgic visuals (seen below)...



For graphic novel fans, there's always the classic 8-bit Theatre from Nuklear Power.

And any one not satisfied yet can watch the excellent review of pixel art by Simon Cottee just released this month. (thanks to Rudhraigh McGrath for pointing this one out)



Enjoy your media-nostalgic hit for the day.

------

JUST IN
Another gift tip-off from our friend Rudhraigh McGrath - the amazingly satisfying 'My Desk is 8-Bit' by Alex Varanese. Enjoy!

Just a few weeks ago, an intrepid photographer embarked on a valiant mission - to counter the overwhelming number of 'mediocre pictures of that volcano in Iceland that no one can pronounce the name of'. For a media that seems obsessed with stories of immense cataclysm and catastrophe, it does seem surprising that most of the images produced are not meant as more than factual documentation.



Sean Stiegemeier's endeavour to capture (or perhaps create) a compelling image of the eruption of the Eyjafjallajökull valcano in Iceland illustrates just how powerful the aesthetics of the sublime can be in generating affective images of our world and our place within it. (It also is an amazing demonstration of the Dynamic Perception Timelapse Dolly.)

The sublime, simply put, is the aesthetic of things which compel us and have the power to destroy us. It is an assertion of the place of humanity within the broader forces of the world. In European Romantic painting, the sublime is often represented by paintings of immense landscapes with tiny depictions of people dwarfed by the land and the sky's scale. In these paintings, it is the landscapes (and skyscapes) which are the central subjects, and humanity is left to be merely one component of the wider ecology of forces at play in the world.

The philosopher Edmund Burke in 1757 wrote on the fundamental difference between beauty and the sublime - noting that beauty is what is well-formed or pleasing to the eye whereas the sublime is that which compels us with its ability to destroy us. For Burke, the sublime was intimately tied up with terror, astonishment and admiration. Anyone who has had the experience of watching, first hand, an immense storm come in from the sea to the coast or view a tornado touch down will have a sense of the aesthetic and affective impact that Burke was exploring. Romantic painters of the 18th and 19th centuries were very skilled in evoking these affective responses through their work, and at times I wonder whether there is a similar skill at play today in the curation and design of news media - though admittedly perhaps without the intention of creating a visual trace of this design.

This contemporary aesthetic of the sublime in the media is perhaps somewhat sinister, in that it is not immediately visible. It is somewhat obfuscated, and perhaps intentionally. The overwhelming number of stories designed to compel readers and impress upon them the range of things at play in the world prepared to destroy them seem in a strange way Romantic and sublime. There are a lot of discussions of the use of the concept of 'terror' by governments and news media to manipulate and influence people, and given the evident dangerous impact of this discourse upon civil liberties and social cohesion, the possibility of a non-visual, subliminal sublime aesthetic at work becomes all the more compelling and sinister.

Though we may want to assert the radical difference between human-made terror through industrial or inter-personal or inter-group means and terror from the natural world, disasters such as the Deepwater Horizon oil spill point to a blurring of the boundaries between an assumed duality of natural and human-made worlds. The firm grounds upon which many have identified the bounds of human agency and the boundaries between humanity and the rest of the world are becoming increasingly slippery. Paralleling the rise in stories of terror are ethics of ecology and human engagement in the world. These ethical imperatives, irrespective of moral placement reveal the dominant subliminal sublime aesthetic at play in our media across all sections of the newspaper.

With this in mind, it is lucky that we have creators such as Stiegemeier who through their artistic skill can evoke these same affective and aesthetic relationships. These creators can compel us both to ponder our place in the world but also to consider what may be an absence in the media of such reflexive visualisations of aesthetic strategies - of the subliminal sublime.

3. 2 Unlimited - No Limit [moon project extended mix]
4. Captain Jack - Dream A Dream (Spacefrog Mix)

The street art stencils for The Home Project were completed this week on Clanbrassil Street in Dublin. Activating heritage, community, identity and public space, the powerwasher stencils will be in situ until the foot traffic of Clanbrassil Street erases them through the accumulation of new residues and traces. Why not have a walk down Clanbrassil Street and help build new relations as the work deteriorates.

The Home Project explores the concept of 'home' against the changing landscape of the past, present and future of the Clanbrassil Street area. The words for this project are taken from a series of creative writing workshops run by Ursula Rani Sarma with 10-12 year old students living in the Clanbrassil Street area.

In 2009, curator Ian Russell worked with Ursula to create a public art installation using extracts of the students writings about 'home'. A postcard was designed in collaboration with Zero-G (which can be seen here) and was distributed throughout Dublin, and in July 2009, a selection of statements about 'home' were chosen and stenciled onto both footpaths of Clanbrassil Street using a powerwasher and a lot of friendly help and support. See the final product here.

If you would like to learn more about the development of the project, there is an artist's statement available here: 'The Origins of The Home Project' by Ursula Rani Sarma.

Ursula's artist residency in the Clanbrassil Street area was part of the Placing Voices - Voicing Places Project which was funded by a Heritage Council of Ireland INSTAR 2008 Grant, administered by University College Dublin, Create and Dublin City Council.

It's the time of year again when our streets are plastered with faces of the ambitious will-to-power types vying for a spot in national and European politics. Of course, it's important that people know how their representatives are and are able to recognise them, but there is an uncomfortable ecological feeling seeing all the paper and card and board being lashed to poles around our cities only to be later binned - all for the sake of head shots and party titles.

Putting aside the politics, a team of eco-warriors have proposed a new use for the throngs of political posters that adorn almost every corner of Dublin. Inspired by Guerrilla Gardening, the team from Unitedminds.ie have been converting political posters into ready-made window boxes for gardens. Putting the residue of excessive politics to good use, Mick Veale, one of the agent provocateurs behind the campaign, has put together a tutorial for how you can go out and turn any politician you want green...

It's not quite 'Singing in the Rain', but the use of umbrellas in Tiananmen Square by under cover Chinese police to block out international media does have a feeling of choreography about it.

Below is a short video of BBC correspondent James Reynolds in a dance with plainclothes police just opposite the square.

The internet has been around since the late 1960s when scientific researchers at UCLA and SRI in Menlo Park, California created a computer network (ARPANET) to enable real-time information sharing from their experiments. Since then, the chaotic relations of various comptuer networks grew, developed and eventually coalesced into what we know now as the internet. Initially guided by the National Science Foundation's backbone infrastructural investment of the early 1980s, the internet later was opened to commercial development and exploitation in 1988.

Today, we interact with the internet as a form of digital commons or hyper-agora. Where once priority was given to the information sharing needs of government bodies and universities, now a myriad of pop culture icons have emerged from the bundles of wires, lines of code and chaos of mouse-clicks. Though we might question whether the internet is indeed 'free' or a 'commons' (see Timothy Luke's papers on 'cyberculture'), the growing list of cybercult icons such as Numa Numa, the Dramatic Chipmunk, Fail Blog or I Can Has Cheezburger testifies to the ability of human agency to coalesce into viral and dynamic communities of interest.

Increasingly the internet-based media communities such as YouTube is shaping the media at large. With many of the topics in Greg Rutter's Definitive List of 99 Things You Should Already Have Experienced on the Internet having appeared within the content of newsbroadcasts, late night talk shows and in print media. It may seem somewhat antithetical to propose a difinitive list for internet experiences, but as you read through Greg's list, it becomes clear that that cyber pop-culture though egalitarian in formulation does lend itself to hierarchies of importance/significance.

Are we departing from an the myth of an egalitarian information sharing commons? Perhaps such 'definitive lists' of popular internet culture are a symptom of the underlying structures which define access and order of internet content. Does the assigning of significance to internet media content raise the more pertinent issue of the linguistic relationship between signs and signifiers and the structure of knowledge and communication? Should we question not just the structures of our engagement with the internet but also the method of coding that strucutre? Might we call for a 'linguistic turn' in our understanding of internet code and information architecture in general? Or is it merely a utilitarian space for infotainment?