Bogotissimo!

At Japan’s Media Art Festival, the “Interactive Art” prize changed its name to “Entertainment”.

by W.N.P.Barbellion, serialized into blog form at Barbellionblog.

1. Ambition.
2. Reflections on Death.
3. Intellectual Curiosity.
4. Self Consciousness.
5. Self Introspection.
6. Zest of Living.

I wonder if any reviewer will bring out these points:
7. Humour.
8. Shamelessness.

My confessions are shameless. I confess, but do not repent. The fact is, my confessions are prompted, not by ethical motives, but intellectual. The confessions are to me the interesting records of a self-investigator.

If I live to read the review notices, I shall probably criticise them. I shall be criticising the criticisms of my life, putting the reviewers right, a long lean hand stretching out at them from the tomb. I shall play the part of boomerang, and ‘cop’ them one unexpectedly. There will be a newspaper discussion: Is Barbellion dead? And I shall answer by a letter to the Editor:

‘DEAR SIR,

‘Yes, I am dead. I killed myself off at the end of my book, because it was high time. Your reviewer is incorrect in saying I died of creeping paralysis. It was of another kindred but different disease.

‘P.S.—It may interest your readers to know that I am not yet buried.’

Or,

‘DEAR SIR,

‘There is an inaccuracy in your reviewer’s statement. I was not in the Secret Service. It should have been the Civil Service, of which I was a member up to within eighteen months of my decease.’

Or,

‘DEAR SIR,

‘I should be glad if you would correct the impression generated by one of your correspondents that Barbellion is the name of an evil spirit appearing on Walpurgis night. As a matter of fact, my forbears were simple folk — tallow chandlers in B——.’

via Tokyo Mango, via Table of Malcontents–Wired

Another critical element of interpersonal relationships in Japan is the below-the-belt PRANK. (No, not pantsing. That’s way too simple and benign.) Today, let me introduce you to two of the most popular variations, one of which is displayed in the Doritos bag on your right.

(…)

2. The Denki Amma. A commonly used wrestling move among Japanese schoolboys, the denki amma gives your opponent an ambiguous blend of pleasure and pain. One boy grabs the legs of the other, lifts his right foot, strategically places it on the other dude’s shaft, and then launches a series of rapid foot taps. Slightly painful, enormously submissive, and awkwardly erotic, the denki amma symbolizes the kind of male bonding that women and foreigners most likely will never fully understand.

organ-playing robot from the 1980s. via pink tentacle

WABOT-2, an intelligent humanoid keyboard player developed by Waseda University in the 1980s, was considered the most advanced robot of its time. In addition to camera eyes that could read musical notation and deft hands that could tap out tunes of average difficulty, WABOT-2 could listen to accompanying singers and adjust its tempo, as well as carry on basic conversation. The android demonstrated its musical skills at Expo ‘85 in Tsukuba, Japan with a performance of Kitaro’s new age classic “Silk Road.”

from the teeming void:

My favourite demonstration of what lies beyond this grammar is the evolvable hardware work of Adrian Thompson, in which circuit designs for programmable chips (field gate programmable arrays - as in the image above) are evolved using a genetic algorithm and tested in hardware for their performance in a particular task. It’s perhaps not surprising that successful circuits were evolved over many thousands of generations; but the fun part is that when analysed, these circuits were completely unlike any human-designed computing machine. In Kittler’s words they were “sheer hardware,” treating the chip as a “maximally connective” physical substrate rather than an abstracted set of discrete elements. Some chips drew on external influences, such as electromagnetic radiation, to achieve their evolved ends; so the chip is not formally isolated (but to quote Kittler again) “a physical device working amidst physical devices.”

Adrian Thompson’s thesis on the subject is available via Springer, for a price, but some interesting articles on the subject can be found online, such as.

(from wmmna)

gallery

Family standing on a bridge, looking into the future, pissing - 2001 (this one’s from a different website)

–

placing this here to remind myself to check later: http://sf0.org/.

from The Guardian

Saturday April 5: a day out in Kent visiting a farm, training

I miss meat and blood very much. Not vegetables because they are food for a woman. There is milk here but blood is better because it gives energy. English tea with sugar is good and we tried Coco Pops, but the nicest food is croissants.

I wanted to see your cows because they are very important to us. But these were small. The horses were like a big zebra with strange metal feet.

The weather here is strange. From a window it looks warm but outside it’s very cold. It is better when we’re running or in the shower. We heard about showers before, in a briefing about the country. It said be careful - when the shower is hot it is really hot, and when cold, really cold. This is true.

for sale in japan

I really hope this lifts off the ground. These people are working on a 3D plastic printer (it prints, you know, plastic and polymer stuff) made out of plastic, which could self-replicate - i.e., print another of itself. And they plan to have it cheap and under the GNU public license.

(This is where my bogometer rang, you can’t really use GPL for stuff other than software - and you’d expect press releases from such high-tech companies to be aware of that…)

again from we make money not art:

I’m so hard in love with modernmechanix. This blog catalogues cool retrofuturist stuff from old science and technology magazines. The archives are huge, and choke-full of cool stuff. I haven’t dug through a tenth of their stuff yet, but picked a few examples at random:

Second Life. In particular, Second Life-related art, which is clueless beyond relief. (It’s 2008, people. CATCH ON. Second Life should inspire retrofuturist nostalgia already.)

Videogame Pianist. The kid is actually likeable and all, but the entire playing-supermario-theme-blindfolded meme was kinda lame (there’s no secret in playing a piece blindfolded that does not require leaps larger than an octave.), and then he plays the Zelda soundtracks doubling everything as octaves and making faces and gestures that are already ridiculous in Lizst.

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one thing I like: this blog’s template automatically converts the title into CAPS LOCK. I LIKE CAPS LOCK.

(CNN) — A 31-year-old woman who lost part of her leg when she stepped on a land mine has won the unusual title of Miss Landmine Angola 2008.

via We Make Money, Not Art: Margret Eicher beautiful computer-aided Gobelin tapestries.

Erste Nacht, 270cm x 300cm

picture taken by the we-make-money-not-art girl.

Titanen, 208cm x 350cm. The enlarged picture at [DAM]Berlin isn’t working, which is a pity, I really liked this one.

I had seen this being linked around but waited for Snopes to confirm it. And it turns out it’s true, the video of the elephant painting its likeness.

check it at pink tentacle

Long ago in Japan, human illness was commonly believed to be the work of tiny malevolent creatures inside the body. Harikikigaki, a book of medical knowledge written in 1568 by a now-unknown resident of Osaka, introduces 63 of these creepy-crawlies and describes how to fight them with acupuncture and herbal remedies. (…)

Koseu (Kosho), a snake-like critter with a scruffy white beard, wears a hat that protects it from medicine. It likes to drink sweet sake and it can speak.

Kiukan (Gyukan) lives in the chest and acts up at meal time. This critter is difficult to get rid of, but acupuncture is an effective treatment.

Kishaku is a dark red beastie that causes its host to develop an unhealthy appetite for oily food. It can be stopped by eating tiger stomach.

The Future We Were Promised: Online exhibit on Arthur Radebaugh, futurist illustrator from the 50s and 60s.

the mail system of the future.

Unfortunately the gallery doesn’t include many of my favourite of his (from the series Closer Than You Think, in which he speculated on technology that would be available by the turn of the millennium). Later I’ll see if I can find them elsewhere.