As brevity in fiction goes, who can top “For sale: baby shoes, never worn”? That much-referenced six-word story, often attributed to Ernest Hemingway, certainly packs an impressive amount of human drama into its short length. But what about other genres? What would a six-word science- fiction story look like? i09 crowdsourced countless such works in 2014: responses, which tended toward the eschatological, included “The Universe died. He did not,” “New world. Cryogenic failure. Seeds dead,” and “Finally sentient, it switched itself off.”
Not bad, but what would we get if we went to the professionals? Alas, Sir Arthur C. Clarke, prolific author of such respected sci-fi novels as 2001: A Space Odyssey and Rendezvous with Rama, passed away just five years before i09 issued its challenge. Still, we have an idea of the direction his entry might have gone in from of “siseneG,” a story story — a very short story indeed — Clarke sent in to Analog magazine in 1984:
And God said: DELETE lines One to Aleph. LOAD. RUN.
And the Universe ceased to exist.
Then he pondered for a few aeons, sighed, and added: ERASE.
It never had existed.
“This is the only short story I’ve written in ten years or so,” Clarke wrote in the accompanying note. “I think you’ll agree that they don’t come much shorter.” We now know that they can come somewhat shorter, at least 25 words shorter than “siseneG,” but surely we can all agree that Clarke set a high standard for scientific (or perhaps technological-existential) flash fiction decades before the coinage of the term. But then, we always knew the man had a knack for looking ahead.
Sarah Meyohas, “Red Speculation” (2014), included in Aperture’s 2015 ‘Summer Open: Black Mirror’ (image courtesy the artist)
This week, as the art world heads into August hibernation, it’s your last chance to catch a number of shows before they close. When you finish all that art viewing, shake the seriousness out at an electronic music dance party, a festival celebrating the black soul of Brooklyn, or a Ziggy Stardust–themed roller disco.
The Return of “City Maze”
When: Opens August 12, 5–8pm
Where: Wall Works (39 Bruckner Blvd, Mott Haven, The Bronx)
The second of two consecutive shows dedicated to the work of Fashion Moda (1978–1993), The Return of City Maze is a re-creation of one of the art space’s most popular installations: a cardboard maze installation by Jane Dickson and Crash (aka John Matos, founder of Wall Works), along with a host of other collaborators (including Daze and Judith Supine). As stated in the press release:
City Maze was a place to be entered and explored, undergone and added to like the city itself, a warehouse of possibilities. Designed to engage the local children who came to Fashion Moda to hang out, it was a safe place for kids to go wild, and they did everyday. For those who reflected on it, the Maze was a microcosm of the choices and confusion of the city, a rehearsal space in which to meet challenges and overcome obstacles, a place to leave your mark.
Unfamiliar with the original “City Maze” (1980)? Check out the 1981 Fashion Moda video below (featuring a rap by Fab Five Freddy). —Tiernan Morgan
Last Chance: Aperture ‘Summer Open’
When: Closes Thursday, August 13
Where: Aperture Gallery (547 West 27th Street, Chelsea, Manhattan)
This year’s annual open-call exhibitionat Aperture asks photographers to consider how their realities “echo the outlandish narratives of science fiction.” Chosen from over 500 submissions, the 24 projects represented this year reflect issues ranging from the ubiquity of technology in daily life to real estate development to capitalism and magic. The photographs show us that perhaps real life can be stranger than science fiction. —Arnav Adhikari
Kevin Sampson, “Fruit of the Poisonus Tree” (2015) at Andrew Edlin Gallery (photo by Benjamin Sutton for Hyperallergic) (click to enlarge)
Last Chance: Last Andrew Edlin Show in Chelsea
When: Closes Friday, August 14
Where: Andrew Edlin Gallery (134 Tenth Avenue, Chelsea, Manhattan)
Andrew Edlin’s space in Chelsea — and the Bellwether Gallery space before it — was always a little awkward: an entryway followed by a hallway, then the proper gallery (which is small). But by the sheer number of shows I’ve seen there, I’ve developed an admitted attachment to it, and Edlin’s final show there puts it one of its best uses. The exhibition features directly-on-the-wall murals by seven artists, including a gorgeously enigmatic installation by Saya Woolfalk up front that stops you in your tracks on the street. But it’s Kevin Sampson’s piece in the back that swiftly steals the show; dense, frenetic, and razor sharp, the work is the most stunningly potent piece of political art I’ve seen in a long time.
Roller Disco with Ziggy Stardust
When: Friday, August 14, 7:30–10pm ($18)
Where: Lefrak Center at Lakeside (171 East Drive, Prospect Park, Brooklyn)
A DJ-ed roller disco dance party every Friday in Prospect Park! Each one features a different theme, from ’70s glitter to ’80s glam, plus dazzling performers, kitschy contests, giveaways, and more. This Friday’s theme: David Bowie’s classic character Ziggy Stardust. Dress accordingly — prizes will be given out for those that sparkle the hardest. —Carolina Drake
Last Chance: Pussy Don’t Fail Me Now
When: Closes Friday, August 14
Where: Cindy Rucker Gallery (141 Attorney Street, Lower East Side, Manhattan)
This gem of a show features three artists who express their feminism in very different ways. Doreen Garner paints and embellishes found vessels — including an enema — so that they toe the line between beautifully blinged out and monstrous. Sophia Narrett turns the delicacies of embroidery and small-scale sculpture into blunt sexual fantasies. Kenya (Robinson) zeroes in on gender and race, dismantling the unending speeches — and by extension, the unending power — of the white man. The varied approaches make for a surprisingly thoughtful and thought-provoking interplay. These are all artists you’ll want to get to know now and keep an eye on in the future.
Installation view, ‘Pussy Don’t Fail Me Now’ at Cindy Rucker Gallery, with Doreen Garner’s “Magnum” (2015) hanging in the foreground and work by Kenya (Robinson) in the background (photo by the author for Hyperallergic)
MoCADA and the Soul of Brooklyn
When: Opens Saturday, August 15, 1–8pm
Where: MoCADA (Various locations throughout Brooklyn)
The sixth annual MoCADA Soul of Brooklyn Festival will start with an opening day at Herbert Von King Park and continue with a series of concerts — featuring Brooklyn’s The Jeff King Band, Bilal, and NoName Gypsy, to name a few; yoga sessions; workshops, including one by the intriguing Harriet’s Apothecary; a film screening from Black Radical Imagination; fashion shows; and more. It will close on Friday, August 21, with a party at Vodou Bar. If you’re at all interested in the culture of the African Diaspora in Brooklyn, this festival is for you. —Cihan Küçük
Warm Up at MoMA PS1
When: Saturday, August 15, 3–9pm ($18 advance/$20 day-of)
Where: MoMA PS1 (22-25 Jackson Avenue, Long Island City, Queens)
With its Warm Up series, MoMA PS1 continues to host some of the best electronic musicians from around the world. This week’s guests are Untold, Vessel, Ninos Du Brasil, Cut Hands, and French Fries b2b Bambounou. If you are into new currents in electronic music, don’t miss it. —CK
A Warm Up event at MoMA PS1 (image courtesy Charles Roussel and MoMA PS1)
Photosophy
When: Through Sunday, August 16
Where: Bronx Documentary Center (614 Courtland Avenue, South Bronx, Bronx)
At the Bronx Documentary Center all week, Iranian photographer Kimia Rahgozar is photographing visitors with a large-format camera and Polaroid film as part of her performance. A video camera nearby captures moments before, during, and after the portrait shooting, to show the process of capturing an image. Come get your photo taken and put on the wall. Rahgozar’s images feature moments in youth and parenthood, instances of quiet reflection. Her photographs came out of travels around Iran and abroad. —CD
* * *
With contributions byArnav Adhikari, Carolina Drake, Cihan Küçük, and Tiernan Morgan
Old post. I'm (for better or worse) back on. Trying to cope in isolation is far worse than being stuck under the censorious prudery regime...
I just ragequit Facebook.
I’m sick and fucking tired of being told that the way that I (and several hundred other people with whom I’m connected) use the tools made available to me (us) is the “wrong way” and then being punished for finding uses outside of, beyond, different than, whatever — not what the Mighty Powers That Be dictate as The One True Way To Use Facebook.
I’m done with it. Done with the 7-day, 14-day, 30-day, ever-longer forced exile from any USEFUL functionality. I’m done with being branded as a “spammer” and scolded for “harassment” and sent to go sit in the corner and read the “Community Guidelines” again, because obviously if I could just understand the the rules are the FOR MY OWN (as if…) GOOD then I’d be a good little girl and use the software the exact same way as the developers do!
I quit. I’ve deactivated all email notifications from that shithole. I’m about to take the horribly broken sorry excuse for a Facebook app off my phone. Right now, I really don’t even give a flying rat’s fuck-tail if this means I end up isolated and alone…
If you know me, and we’re already connected on Facebook — then you have my email address, and you have my cellphone number. Text messages work best to reach me, but email and voice calls will still make it through. If we’re not already connected there, you can still view my profile, and my instant messenger contact info is public… I don’t use IM terribly often, but it can’t hurt to try if you think we ought to be in touch. “sophia.not.loren” should be enough to get you where you’re going, if you really care enough to go out and look me up over there.
I’ve long since walked from MySpace. Looks like Facebook has hammered the last nail into the coffin as well.
A Washington Post reporter who was arrested at a restaurant last year while reporting on protests in Ferguson, Mo., has been charged in St. Louis County with trespassing and interfering with a police officer and ordered to appear in court.
Wesley Lowery, a reporter on The Post’s national desk, was detained in a McDonald’s while he was in Missouri covering demonstrations sparked by a white police officer fatally shooting an unarmed black 18-year-old.
I’m not one to place a great deal of confidence in our judicial system, but there’s no way this survives a First Amendment challenge. But the kind of authoritarians we’re dealing with just don’t care.
I am not surprised when, upon finishing a self-guided tour of the Museum of Death in New Orleans, I find myself privy to a pissing contest between the proprietors, JD and Scott, over which of them has the better necrophilia story. Not their own stories, but ones they’ve heard over the years working at the original Hollywood Museum of Death. Nor am I surprised when I see a row of jars containing fetal pigs, shanks confiscated from the Oklahoma State Penitentiary Death Row, and a shrunken human head. These are to be expected when one pays $15 to enter a French Quarter museum that sells a t-shirt printed with the illustrated faces of Charles Manson, Aileen Wournous, and John Wayne Gacy—in clown costumes.
What strikes me is not the necrophilia or the fetal pigs or the spoon designed for scooping out human brain matter, but rather the mundane. A kitschy greeting card featuring a typewriter and vase of roses with the words “Let’s Keep in Touch…” signed by “Jeff Dahmer.” Inside a glass display case, Aileen Wuornos’s bra and panties. White, slightly browned, from dirt or wear, the kind that tightens at your belly button, the kind you may have seen in your mother’s or grandmother’s laundry room, the kind that makes you forget about sex. The underwear is unsettling in the way that Dr. Kevorkian’s original Thanatron machine, a.k.a. suicide machine, is undeniably DIY, the wood and metal held together by the same screws and bolts found at your local Ace Hardware.
In the rear of the museum, I find myself sitting down on a velvet-covered church pew to watch a film reel of people meeting their ends, which the curators have decided to overlay with jovial ragtime music. This is Traces of Death, which is not to be confused with the better-known Faces of Death, a 1978 mondo film that consists primarily of reenactments of death.1Traces is the real thing. I watch as a crowd of people in some place and time stands in a circle around two decapitated bodies laid prone, the children in the group perhaps encountering death for the first time, as a firing squad takes aim and shoots, as bloated bodies float in some muddy body of water. We do not know where or when these videos were shot, who these people were, what wars or natural disasters led to their demise. The only orienting force, the motif across all of these videos, is death.
After the tour, I suggest to JD that it would be revealing to install a camera in the theater to capture viewers’ reactions to the film.
“You should see the guest book.”
He brings out a spiral-bound notebook and flips to a page featuring an undeniably well-wrought illustration of Charles Manson choking Hitler. The accompanying note commends the museum for providing excellent masturabatory fodder. He flips through the book, showing me other visitors’ shared sentiments.
“I’ve walked in on people hooking up back there. Some people stay an hour and half. Or more. The video just loops, you know.”
A place like this attracts a certain type of sexual deviant. But there are others who sit and watch those scenes out of some other curiosity.
Earlier this year, in his “On Photography” column, Teju Cole considered the videos of the murders of Walter Scott, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, and the ISIS beheadings:
I recognized the political importance of the videos I had seen, but it had also felt like an intrusion when I watched them: intruding on the grief of those for whom the deaths were much more significant, and intruding, too, on my own personal but unarticulated sense of right and wrong.
Traces offers little political significance to justify its viewing; in watching, you are not necessarily educating yourself on some historical moment by watching a man, alive, his limbs outstretched in bondage, have his hand cut off, his body falling limp at the apotheosis of physical pain.
And here’s the other issue, according to Cole. In Traces of Death, more so than in the politically charged videos of Walter Scott and James Foley, instead of honoring the individual who has passed, the character you are celebrating is Death itself. Cole writes: “when you see death mediated in this way, pinned down with such dramatic flair, the star is likely to be death itself and not the human who dies.”
Cole says this as if it were 100% problematic. But maybe stories in which Death is cast as protagonist should not be written off entirely as insensitive histrionics. What’s interesting about Traces of Death—and the Museum of Death generally—is how this character of Death intrudes upon the pedestrian. On one wall, an arrangement of black-and-white photos features bodies sprawled along car seats, falling from the benches of old trucks, the dented vehicles like movie props. My mind wanders to what the deceased woman once did in the totaled Chevy, the songs she sang driving her children to school, the summer that she and her husband made love in the backseat, shrouded by some Appalachian foliage. As Cole writes, these indicators of a life once lived are, perhaps, the real shock, and by that I mean jolting, a call to awakening: “This was not only the scene of a crime. It also made visible things that were not apparent in the video, the last view Scott saw, the exit from the lot, the unnerving quietness of the area, the banality of dying in a side lot off a side street in an unremarkable town.” Wake up, these videos seem to insist: death is as much a part of living as that postprandial drive through the country, the taste of her lips, the excitement at the pair of Hanes right out of the package.
“Have a nice life,” JD calls, as I walk out the door and back into the city.
***
1. The history of Faces of Death is rather interesting, for those not instinctively repelled by this type of thing. To create the movie, the film’s editor, Glenn Turner (“James Roy” in the credits) says the filmmakers first went to local news stations and bought boxes of footage shot by “ambulance drivers” and linked the scenes together to create a “documentary.” But Japanese financiers weren’t satisfied with their product, which showed only the aftermath of the crime scenes; they wanted the whole story, the beginning, middle and end of death. So they recreated the scenes, matching lighting and shaky filming styles, to produce reenactments of train accidents, police standoffs, etc.↩
Persian limestone architectural fragment from the 13th/14th century CE. Animal figures and hunting scenes are common decorative arts in Medieval Persia and Mesopotamia. The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL.
Think that Samsung's 2TB solid-state drives are pretty capacious? They're just the start of something bigger. The Korean tech giant has started manufacturing the first 256-gigabit (32GB) 3D vertical flash memory, doubling its previous capacity rec...
Over the coming months we’ll be releasing the names of our Generator lineup, one at a time. This is the first.
Our house band for the evening will be local street performers Tupper Ware Remix Party.
You might know them from their inception in Halifax, or have seen them on the corner of College and Bathurst.
If you’ve yet to hear about them, then you’re in for a treat. They are a stellar group of musicians, and we’re lucky to get a chance to introduce them to you.
Lex is a drug-sniffing police dog. His owner trained Lex by giving him a treat every time he alerted, whether or not Lex was right. Is that a good way to train drug-sniffing dogs? Maybe not for innocent people who get stripped searched when they are falsely identified as drug carriers, but it's great for police departments that use the dogs to enrich themselves with civil asset forfeitures.
The problem here is that invasive searches based on no more than a government official’s hunch is precisely what the Fourth Amendment is supposed to guard against. Unfortunately, the way the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled on this issue not only doesn’t account for the problem, but also has given police agencies a strong incentive to ensure that drug dogs aren’t trained to act independently of their handler’s suspicions. A dog prone to false alerts means more searches, which means more opportunities to find and seize cash and other lucre under asset forfeiture policies. In fact, a drug dog’s alert in and of itself is often cited as evidence of drug activity, even if no drugs are found, thus enabling police to seize cash, cars and other property from motorists. For example, I’ve interviewed dog trainers who have told me that drug dogs can be trained to alert only when there are measurable quantities of a drug — to ignore so-called “trace” or “remnant” alerts that aren’t cause for arrest. But these trainers say that police agencies don’t want dogs trained to ignore remnant odors, because any alert is an authorization for a more thorough search.
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You've probably seen "retweet to win" contests on Twitter, and maybe even won a t-shirt, concert tickets or marshmallows. But computer engineer Hunter Scott completely automated the idea and created a bot that entered every Twitter contest it could...
Just because you're aboard the International Space Station doesn't mean you can avoid eating your vegetables. NASA has revealed that its ISS crew will munch on space-grown veggies (specifically, the red romaine lettuce you see above) for the first...
On the surface, there isn’t anything wrong with people wanting to communicate with each other in a language they all understand. A global language certainly has its advantages…. In the face of fast-paced industrialized life, the diversity of the world’s languages, much like ecological diversity, is in peril.
What looks like an evolution of the desktop PC, nvidia have put together a package that can be used to develop Deep Learning coding (with a lot of processing power):
Deep learning
is one of the fastest-growing segments of the machine
learning/artificial intelligence field and a key area of innovation in
computing. With researchers creating new deep learning algorithms and
industries producing and collecting unprecedented amounts of data,
computational capability is the key to unlocking insights from data.
GPUs have brought tremendous value to deep learning research over the
past couple of years. In the pursuit of continuing innovation and
adopting deep learning for our own goals, NVIDIA engineers built the
world’s fastest deskside deep learning machine—DIGITS DevBox. We’re
making it easy to get started fast with our Dev Program, and even build
your own DevBox.
The long list of 40 designs, submitted as alternatives to New Zealand’s current national flag (all images via www.govt.nz)
New Zealand is considering new designs to potentially replace its national flag and today released an official long list of 40 contenders submitted by the public. Citizens have debated changing the banner, adopted in 1902, for decades, with advocates for alternatives arguing that the current design does not represent the independent country and its unique heritage: the Union Jack occupies its top-left quarter — a reminder of New Zealand’s roots as a British colony — and only the placement and color of the stars of the Southern Cross differentiate it from Australia’s flag. Last year Prime Minister John Key announced a referendum to decide whether or not to change the flag, and an open call for new designs received over 10,000 submissions.
Of the 40 finalists announced today by an official Flag Consideration Panel, only one features an altered rendition of the Union Jack. Most proposals incorporate nationally recognized motifs like the silver fern and the koru, suggesting the government’s dedication to a design that truly celebrates New Zealand’s national identity and heritage. The fern already appears on the country’s coat of arms and its one-dollar coin, not to mention the merchandise of many of itssportsteams; the spiral-shape koru, which is Māori for “loop,” celebrates its diverse population, of which nearly 15% identify as being part of the indigenous group.
“A potential new flag should unmistakably be from New Zealand and celebrate us as a progressive, inclusive nation that is connected to its environment, and has a sense of its past and a vision for its future,” the Panel wrote in a statement.
The designs on the long list are similar in subject, differing mostly in color and arrangement of the motifs, but the Panel did receive some potential pennants that, although truly unique, did not make the cut. Those decisions perhaps rested on the fact that the artists worked with Microsoft Paint, and badly at that — or maybe because sheep, singing eggs, and kiwis with laser-beam eyes aren’t sufficiently visionary or solemn icons to adorn a national flag.
In November, New Zealanders eligible to vote will rank the final four, Panel-selected designs. The country, however, will not immediately adopt the finalist; another public vote, slated for March 2016, will pit the winner against the current flag to determine whether most of the country is, in the end, satisfied with its century-old insignia.
“Unity Koru,” designed by Paul Densem from Wellington
“Manawa (Blue & Green),” designed by Otis Frizzell from Auckland
“Silver Fern (Red, White & Blue), designed by Kyle Lockwood from Wellington
“Huihui/Together,” designed by Sven Baker from Wellington
“Red Peak,” designed by Aaron Dustin from Wellington
As many of you TransGriot readers know, I have been tracking since the inception of my blog nearly a decade ago the murders of trans women of color and whether or not they have received justice in their cases.
I have been alarmed by the fact that we have already matched the number of trans women killed in the US in all of 2014 (12) in just 8 months, and this year still has 4 months left to go. I am also particularly concerned and incensed about the fact that the majority of trans women that have been murdered are not only trans women of color, but under age 30.
I am pleased to not only affix my signature to this (Signature #23), but also signal boost this We The People petition that started today. It seeks to get 100,000 people to sign on to this effort to get the federal government to investigate this unacceptable slaughter of trans women of color, of which far too many of them have been under 30 years of age.
We have to get the 100,000 signatures by September 10 to get a formal response from the White House on the requested action stated in the petition.
Here's the link to the petition and I hope you will join me in taking just a few moments of time out of your busy day to sign it.
If you do, thank you. I and my community deeply appreciate the support, and please share this news in your influence circles.
After seeing this elegant cubana on here a number of times, I decided to do a little research. I found her name, as well as backstory from The Sartorialist:
“This is my beautiful mother, Valeria Perojo Frias, born in Pinar del Rio, Cuba on March 23, 1926. This photograph was taken sometime in the mid to late 1940′s. I believe she was at a christening of a friend’s child in Havana. She was an amazing and inspirational woman – making her way to the US with my father by way of Miami in late 1959, and ending up in New York City two years later, where I was born and raised. She was always a fashionista and had that amazing aura that exuded beauty, charm and grace. And boy could she pose for a picture, eh? She always will be my very own personal style icon.”
Still from Jeremy Couillard’s “Belives in Reincarnation Hates Hugs” (looping video) (all photos by the author for Hyperallergic)
DETROIT — In the three-minute video titled, “Robocop Suffers a Glitch and Takes to the Forest to Come Up With Hollywood Movies About American Landscape Painters,” a robotic voice makes the following statement:
Bob Ross and Thomas Kinkade are brought back to life to make landscapes in computers for an alien civilization that creates simulations of other planets — and they team up to find out if life on Earth was ever real in the first place.
As summary statements go, this is possibly the best description for the aesthetics, ambition, and effect of Jeremy Couillard’s exhibit Believes in Reincarnation Hates Hugs at Youngworld. There are intense, animated tableaus and lush, digital landscapes that put the viewer in first-person perspective — I found myself remembering the graphic adventure game Myst, from the early ‘90s, when I sat in on the show’s eponymous video loop. The work here leverages some of the media platforms Couillard deployed for his installation, “Out of Body Experience Clinic,” at the Louis B. James Gallery earlier this year in New York, but tailored to the massive scale of the Youngworld gallery space. The “clinic” ushered viewers, one at a time, from a waiting room and into a darkened basement — an environment Youngworld Director of Programming and artist Ben Hall described as, “Not medically clean, but torture-chamber clean” — where viewers donned Occulus Rift glasses that guided them through a simulated, out-of-body experience.
The entry point to the show features a still from the main landscape depicted in ‘Believes in Reincarnation Hates Hugs’
Couillard has managed to flood the Youngworld scene with another psychically altering experience. The massive entryway roughly mimics the “waiting room” from the “Out of Body Experience Clinic,” with chairs on carpeted patches that face a large-scale banner featuring a panoramic still from the titular video loop. But once this banner — which cordons off the back end of the main gallery — is breached, attendees will encounter an otherworldly office setting with the familiar fixtures of cubicle partitions, desks, pre-fab chairs, and computer monitors creating three stations that run looping videos with content that is NSFW by virtue of sheer oddness. The “Robocop” video is the only one with dialogue (monologue, technically); the other two feature scenes that fall somewhere between precious moments and a furry convention. “Man and Mouse” lingers at close range while a person lovingly caresses the face of a human-sized rat. The other, “Lady and Penguin,” shows a joyful embrace between a woman and a child-sized penguin, captured at multiple angles and superimposed through fade cuts. In a separate, darkened room off the office gallery, a looping video bearing the show’s name runs at wall-size, like a short reel from the oddest drive-in movie you’ve ever seen.
Gallery visitors chat with Youngworld organizers, and interact with video stations
All videos are rendered in high-definition computer animation, the current mien of virtual reality. Couillard’s signature seems to be dense color, hypnotic, repetitive movements — hand gestures, or waving flowers in the forefront of a scene — and statements that initially seem non sequitur, but take on increasing significance the longer you stay, like a psychedelic drug kicking in. Whether it counts as an official altered state or not, after half an hour in Couillard’s environment, all things lost proportion. As Couillard puts it in his artist statement, “Simulation produces a state of detachment, allowing acceptance of neither the present nor the future … and consequently allows all histories and futures to be understood and felt without the presence of a body.” Emerging from the insular and carefully orchestrated space made by Youngworld and Jeremy Couillard, I found myself surprised to find life waiting on the outside. For a short span, at least, I had to wonder if life on Earth was “ever real, in the first place.”
#tbt that time i was raving about an all women shakespeare company and some fuckboy butted in with “i hate how you never hear about all men shakespeare productions” that has honestly been the highlight of my university career so far
The Return of “City Maze”
a.k.a. suicide machine, is undeniably DIY, the wood and metal held together by the same screws and bolts found at your local Ace Hardware.
Cole says this as if it were 100% problematic. But maybe stories in which Death is cast as protagonist should not be written off entirely as insensitive histrionics. What’s interesting about Traces of Death—and the Museum of Death generally—is how this character of Death intrudes upon the pedestrian. On one wall, an arrangement of black-and-white photos features bodies sprawled along car seats, falling from the benches of old trucks, the dented vehicles like movie props. My mind wanders to what the deceased woman once did in the totaled Chevy, the songs she sang driving her children to school, the summer that she and her husband made love in the backseat, shrouded by some Appalachian foliage. As Cole writes, these indicators of a life once lived are, perhaps, the real shock, and by that I mean jolting, a call to awakening: “This was not only the scene of a crime. It also made visible things that were not apparent in the video, the last view Scott saw, the exit from the lot, the unnerving quietness of the area, the banality of dying in a side lot off a side street in an unremarkable town.” Wake up, these videos seem to insist: death is as much a part of living as that postprandial drive through the country, the taste of her lips, the excitement at the pair of Hanes right out of the package.
Think that Samsung's 2TB solid-state drives are pretty capacious? They're just the start of something bigger. The Korean tech giant has started manufacturing the first 256-gigabit (32GB) 3D vertical flash memory, doubling its previous capacity rec...
You've probably seen "retweet to win" contests on Twitter, and maybe even won a t-shirt, concert tickets or marshmallows. But computer engineer Hunter Scott completely automated the idea and created a bot that entered every Twitter contest it could...
Just because you're aboard the International Space Station doesn't mean you can avoid eating your vegetables. NASA has revealed that its ISS crew will munch on space-grown veggies (specifically, the red romaine lettuce you see above) for the first...
As many of you TransGriot readers know, I have been tracking since the inception of my blog nearly a decade ago the murders of trans women of color and whether or not they have received justice in their cases.
