magnolius:one of the many astounding collages by Meg Hitchock made by cutting letters from various books, including the Koran and Rushdie’s “Satanic Verses”. Highly recommend checking the rest of the collection on her site, where you can also see the detailed versions of each piece.SPECIAL to the What It Is class—In my text drawings I deconstruct the word of God by cutting letters from sacred writings and rearranging them to form a passage from another holy book. I may cut letters from the Bible and reassemble them as a passage from the Koran, or use letters cut from the Torah to recreate an ancient Tantric text. The individual letters are glued to the paper in a continuous line of type, without spaces or punctuation, in order to discourage a literal reading of the text.What will your book look like on May 8, 2012?
When a reviewer starts explaining how the preparation of a quiche Lorraine at the restaurant he has visited differs from the way one prepared a true quiche Lorraine, I always want to interrupt. “But did you like it?” I want to shout. “Did it make you happy? Did you clean your plate?” … [Once] I was eating some homemade gazpacho and talking about how it differed from the more authentic gazpacho one got in Seville. The more I talked about the difference the faster I wolfed down the gazpacho - until I realized that one way what I was eating differed from authentic gazpacho was that it tasted better.
ah, for the golden age of comics, when murderous zombies could be the good guys and carry a strip for two years straight.
But who knew that Mr. Clean was a zombie? That puts a whole new spin on generations of commercials.
Oh. Maa. God. Things just got literally (maybe notliterally literally)beyond exciting here at Penguin Books UK, 80 Strand, London, England, with the news that Zadie Smith just delivered THE FINAL DRAFT OF NW, HER FIRST NOVEL FOR 7 YEARS!
If both Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman had been wearing Google glasses, with their visual fields streaming to the cloud and being recorded there, their awareness of this record might have discouraged aggression. And if not, at least we’d know for sure what happened.On the more worrisome side, Kashmi Hill of Forbes thinks Google glasses will “accelerate the arrival of the persistent and pervasive citizen surveillance state.” After all, the government will presumably have the same subpoena power over your recorded visual field that it has over other records. And even if you choose not to record your video stream, you’ll still enter lots of other people’s visual fields. Everyone’s glimpse of you will, for all you know, be available to posterity.
One thing that renders all this plausible is what a seamless extension it is of the past 20 years. From email to twitter to EZ Pass to ATM surveillance cams, more and more of our lives is on record–and the records are often out there somewhere, beyond our control.
Maybe, pre-digital modernity, with the vast anonymity it afforded urbanites, will eventually be seen as a temporary aberration. As Brin noted in The Transparent Society, people who live in small villages in traditional societies don’t have much privacy; pretty much everybody knows everybody else’s business–and that’s one thing that keeps people on good behavior. Google glasses, however bizarrely futuristic they seem now, could return us to a state of nature. I’m not sure I want to go.
A writer who attempts in the nineteenth century to rehabilitate the ancient legends of the were-wolf and the vampire has set himself a formidable task. Most of the delightful old supersitions of the past have an unhappy way of appearing limp and sickly in the glare of a later day, and in such a story as Dracula by Bram Stoker (Archibald Constable and Co, Svo, pp 390, 6s.), the reader must reluctantly acknowledge that the region of horrors has shifted its ground. Man is no longer in dread of the monstrous and the unnatural, and although Mr Stoker has tackled his gruesome subject with enthusiasm, the effect is more often grotesque than terrible. The Transylvanian site of Castle Dracula is skilfully chosen, and the picturesque region is well described. Count Dracula himself has been in his day a medieval noble, who, by reason of his “vampire” qualities is unable to die properly, but from century to century resuscitates his life of the “Un-Dead”, as the author terms it, by nightly draughts of blood from the throats of living victims, with the appalling consequence that those once so bitten must become vampires in their turn. The plot is too complicated for reproduction, but it says no little for the author’s powers that in spite of its absurdities the reader can follow the story with interest to the end. It is, however, an artistic mistake to fill a whole volume with horrors. A touch of the mysterious, the terrible, or the supernatural is infinitely more effective and credible.
Those of us working today in scholarly communications are surrounded by skeuomorphs on one side, truly new things on the other. We have the skeuomorph of Green open access, which attempts to take the materials of traditional publishing and bang it into a new form through self-archiving, but then we have the truly innovative PLoS ONE, which has no obvious or immediate forebear. (The flagship journals of the Public Library of Science, on the other hand, are full-blooded skeumorphisms, copying traditional publishing exactly and then adding a dash of open access.) We have scholars who print out articles before reading them, but we also have a growing number of APIs, data-mining services, and Big Data. The world is not one way or the other, at least not yet.What is missing, though, is an industry-wide commitment to think about new media as new media. Rather than contrast and compare it to print, we could be thinking about digital media’s unique properties. We should not be replacing print collections with digital ones; we should be superseding them.
Skeuomorphic Publishing: How to Fit a Square Peg Into a Round Hole « The Scholarly Kitchen
Via @jafurtado on Twitter.
What is the labour encoded in Instagram? It’s easy to see. Every “user” of Instagram is a worker. There are some people who produce photos — this is valuable, it means there is something for people to look it. There are some people who only produce comments or “likes,” the virtual society equivalent of apes picking lice off other apes. This is valuable, because people like recognition and are more likely to produce photos. All workers are also marketers — some highly effective and some not at all. And there’s a general intellect which has been developed, a kind of community expertise and teaching of this expertise to produce photographs which are good at producing the valuable, attractive likes and comments (i.e., photographs which are especially pretty and provocative), and a somewhat competitive culture to become a better marketer.
There you have it: a generalized economic theory of social networks.
(via buzz)
Listening Booth: The Alabama Shakes and MoreLately, it seems like everyone is talking about the Alabama Shakes, and with good reason—the young quartet (its members met in high school) celebrates timeless, down-home R.&B. and soul, and the bespectacled front woman Brittany Howard has a voice for the ages. Listen to “Hold On,” from their début album, “Boys & Girls”- Visit our Listening Booth to discover new artists and songs. This week: The Alabama Shakes, Amadou & Mariam, Emily Wells, Bassnectar, Curtis Salgado and Dayna Kurtz.
These are my people.