I haven't actually tried it yet, but . . .

Dark, disturbing, with a haunting finish. This is why coffee was invented.



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Head-shot

Here's a subtle but impressive bit of future-tech that I can't help but suspect wields some "street use" potential:



(Thanks to Grinding.)

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Leisurespace

This proposal for a car showroom/leisure center by Manuelle Gautrand Architecture seems lifted from the luminously decadent universe of Second Life, where structures seem to exist on the margins of the possible. Perhaps the future of the psychedelic "trip" hinges on the transcendent potential of architecture, both real and virtual.

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Future shock

Case study: Electric shock therapy in China for internet 'addiction'

"I admit the internet can be quite alluring and sometimes I would use it all day, but if I had other things to do – like playing basketball – I wouldn't use it at all," he said.

"Then my mum saw the adverts on television. They demonised the internet and after watching them she believed I was sick and it was very serious."

He was given ECT for the first time when he resisted admission to the clinic.

"I can't remember how many times [they gave me shocks], but it must have been dozens. They would let me rest for a while then give me another. The session lasted about half an hour," he said.

This reads like a scene from "Brazil," had the world of Brazil had the Net.

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Link-dump #8

Smile Machines Scan and Rank Workers Daily

Do you really want to live forever?

"The Anthropocene": Are We Living in a New Geological Era? Experts Say "Yes"

Cyborg crickets could chirp at the smell of survivors

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Blogs that have caught my eye

In no particular order:

The New Post-literate: A Gallery Of Asemic Writing

K21st -- Essential 21st Century Knowledge

Core77

NOTCOT

Wild Rote

We Make Money Not Art

Oobject

Bioephemera

Environmental Graffiti

Urban Prankster

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Well, it's a start.

H+ has the whole story.

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Serious reading

Because it's not all science fiction and UFOs, you know.

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Alan Watts on dissolution

(Thanks to Wild Rote.)

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Link-dump #7

Steampunk Mechanical Cheetah

Human garbage can

The World's First Projectile Taser

Branislav Kropilak Architectural Photography

"Space Internet" to Link Worlds by 2011?

The Next Hacking Frontier: Your Brain?

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The steam-belching maw of progress

Robot land-steamers to consume all life on Earth as fuel

News has emerged of a milestone reached on the road towards a potentially world-changing piece of technology. We speak, of course, of US military plans to introduce roving steam-powered robots which would fuel themselves by harvesting everything alive and cramming it into their insatiable blazing furnaces.

The scheme is officially referred to as Energetically Autonomous Tactical Robot (EATR™) by those behind it. It will come as no surprise to Reg readers that the funding is from DARPA, the famous Pentagon warboffinry bureau. If you're a hammer, all the problems start to look like nails: if you're DARPA, all the solutions start to look like robots.

(Hat tip to @CabinetofWonder.)

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"The Nietzsche Family Circus"

The Nietzsche Family Circus pairs a randomized Family Circus cartoon with a randomized Friedrich Nietzsche quote.

The concept is so simple, yet so insidiously hysterical, that you'll wish you'd thought of it yourself. Give it a shot.

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Post-Singularity hamster ball

Spherical Robot 02 from Nils Völker on Vimeo.

(Found at Dvice.)

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The serenely apocalyptic world of Josh Keyes

Josh Keyes' paintings portray a mythic, jarringly plausible near-future where the excesses of the 21st century have begun to recede into a pastoral landscape, inevitably "repurposed" by a burgeoning animal population.

(Thanks to @PinkTentacle.)

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Alien writing!

Here's a helpful overview of arcane texts, some ostensibly extraterrestrial. Like crop glyphs, I find unknown alphabets aesthetically intriguing reminders of the overarching strangeness of reality in general. Note how some of the characters represented bear a general resemblance to entopic imagery, discussed here.

(Weirder yet, I learned of the site from none other than Bruce Sterling.)

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Link-dump #6

Posthuman Blues Blog Serves up "Women in Tubes" (Watch that meme awaken from its pulp-bound slumber!)

Circular Evidence: Crop Circles and High Strangeness in the UK

Scientists claim sperm 'first'

Score One For The Extraterrestrial Hypothesis

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Link-dump #5

Delicious Waste Liquids of the Future (1982)

Death Doesn't Lie

Tantalus Dinner by Ioli Sifakaki

A Sample of Synthetic Human Skin for Just 34 Euros

Shermer's Baloney Detection Kit

Virgin Galactic and the start of the Commercial Space Race

Primitive Living in Saijo, Hiroshima

One step closer to an artificial nerve cell

Physical reality of string theory demonstrated

Darpa's Handheld Nuclear Fusion Reactor

Futurist Visions of the Future

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"Peripetics"

(Thanks to Beyond the Beyond.)

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John Keel (1930-2009)

This morning I logged onto Twitter to discover that Fortean adventurer John Keel, author of "The Mothman Prophecies," died on July 3. Keel was ufology's own Man In Black, a genuine iconoclast who wedded scientific humility with ideas too strange even for the UFO community. (Keel has been a considerable influence on my own ideas about the "paranormal"; this blog is littered with references to his notion of the "electromagnetic superspectrum" from which seemingly occult forces materialize and vanish, adapting to our belief systems with such tenacity that few -- if any -- of us are ever the wiser.)

Fellow Keelians Greg Bishop and Nick Redfern offer their own remembrances here and here.

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Body-snatcher

Lots of portentous ideas at work here. I like the notion of having a nonlocal electronic persona watching my back -- assuming, of course, that its needs are my needs.

(Thanks to Sentient Developments.)

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The fallout shelter of the 21st century?

Extra Room from Bernd Hopfengaertner on Vimeo.

Learn more here.

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The eye of the beholder

Self-Portrait Machine

Jen Hui Liao's Self-Portrait Machine is a device that takes a picture of the sitter and draws it but with the model's help. The wrists of the individual are tied to the machine and it is his or her hands that are guided to draw the lines that will eventually form the portrait.

The project started with the observation that nearly everything that surrounds us has been created by machines. Our personal identities are represented by the products of the man-machine relationship. The Self-Portrait Machine encapsulates this man-machine relationship. By co-operating with the machine, a self-portrait is generated. It is self-drawn but from an external viewpoint through controlled movement and limited possibility. Our choice of how we are represented is limited to what the machine will allow.

(Via Grinding.)

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"The Cosmic Puppets"

This edition of Philip K. Dick's "The Cosmic Puppets" features a bona-fide tube-girl on the cover. (I've read the novel and don't remember any tube-girls figuring into the plot, but I digress . . .)

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Link-dump #4

Ant mega-colony takes over world

Neuromancer at 25: What It Got Right, What It Got Wrong

Stephen Hawking: "Humans Have Entered a New Stage of Evolution"

LRO's First Moon Images

20 Scary Old School Surgical Tools

Autonomobile by Mike + Maaike

Aurora Borealis From Outta Space

RoboGeisha trailer is awesome, includes weaponized tempura shrimp

Astronaut Fashion: The Modern Spacesuit

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It's the whiskers.

We can handle mechanical eyes, fingers and even claws. But forever-twitching whiskers, however necessary or helpful, are discomfitingly lifelike, casually erasing our preconceptions of "machine" and "organism" -- and something deep within the human psyche recoils from the resulting sense of dislocation, however slightly.



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Any cryptographers in the house?

I don't think crop formations are created by paranormal forces. However, examples such as this serve as profound examples why crop glyphs, like all genuine works of art, wield the capacity to stir us in unexpected ways. The recent glyphic offerings from Britain deserve to be marveled at.

More information here.

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The meme that wouldn't die

I was browsing vintage science fiction art today and found myself confronted with this:





That's right -- yet another tube-girl!

And while this isn't a "true" example of tube-girl art, it's damned close. (The woman in the illustration appears to be emerging from a vat of espresso.)

Now I'm wondering if I should expand my search from "Golden Age" pulps to more contemporary genre illustration . . .

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Moore-phology

GrowShelter: Living, Growing Shelter for Plants, Animals and People

Consisting of three spherical shells embedded with seeds, the habitat is designed to evolve with the seasons - starting the cycle in spring, the spheres are embedded in a mixture of earth/mud/seed, and as summer approaches, the plants will be in bloom and the embedded food in the mud will create a mini haven for local animals and birds. The earth should weather away by fall and winter, leaving the permanent shells ready to be packed again for spring.

I anticipate a future world where cities and countrysides alike teem with amalgamations of gourd-like bio-engineered homes. Pitted with entrances, perhaps they'll recall the biomorphic sculptural forms of Henry Moore: vast inhabitable artworks that change over time in a choreography of adaptation and whimsy.

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Link-dump #3

Public Utilities Group Confirms "Sewer Monster" Is Real, But Doesn't Know What It Is

On-Orbit Coffee Cup Design to Use in Spacecraft

Device Makes Radio Waves Travel Faster Than Light

The Mickey Mouse Mask

Force feedback controller allows you to "touch" CGI objects

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UFOs and the pursuit of happiness

So, have I really abandoned UFOs as an intellectual pursuit? Hardly -- although, in all fairness, I haven't indulged in the subject online recently.

Maybe I'm simply coming up for air before taking a deeper plunge into the abyss.

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Today's sketch

Update: To view a colorized version (by friend Mike Clelland), click here.

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The art of John Wentz

John Wentz's paintings occupy a realm defined by Big Science, transhuman alienation and jaundiced pop-mythology. Cryptic and cautionary, Wentz's visions of human relationships forged by the parameters of the 21st century compel us to reconcile the zeitgeist with our inner frontiers.

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Random sketch of the day

This drawing probably reflects the balmy weather more than it offers any insight into my state of mind. For an almost-abandoned doodle, I kind of like how this came out.

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Triptych #11

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The coolest art application on the Web?

You decide.

(Thanks to @RitaJKing.)

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Link-dump #2

Ultimate sidecar: man attaches full-sized car to his motorcycle

The Weirdest Object in the Solar System?

Past Climate Change Cannot Be Tied to Earth Passing Through Galactic Plane

Sex on a Drip: worth a flight to Singapore?

UFO seen over Michael Jackson's Neverland Ranch

Gallery: Domestic robots with a taste for flesh

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Alien pin

Here's a rambling "interview" with me showing off my new hand-crafted alien pin.








The pin prior to assembly.


(Thanks to Amuck.)

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Raquel Welch greets the New Age.

I couldn't be sure, but I think I glimpsed Daniel Pinchbeck at the end.

More Raquel Welch here.

(Thanks to Electric Children.)

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"Civilization"

Some great eye-candy here. Pay attention.

Civilization by Marco Brambilla from CRUSH on Vimeo.

Incidentally, CRUSH is behind two videos from R.E.M.'s latest album.

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My favorite Fortean story of the day

Wallabies get high in poppy fields, make crop circles

Wallabies are breaking into Tasmania's poppy fields and getting high.

The strange occurrence, revealed in a State Government Budget Estimates hearing, has also solved what some growers say has spurred a campfire legend about mysterious crop circles that appear in northern Tasmania's poppy paddocks.

In true X-Files-style, Attorney-General Lara Giddings said the drugged out wallabies had been found hopping around in circles squashing the poppies, creating the formations -- and hence solving the mystery.

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Flying saucers everywhere!

This record player doesn't actually exist yet, but word is the folks at Area 51 are hard at work making it a reality.





More information and photos here.





The seemingly physics-defying LP puts me in mind of that axle-less concept car (above), which I still contend was inspired by the "drone" fiasco.

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Little green men

I'm always on the lookout for images that might have helped to popularize/disseminate the appearance of the quintessential alien (as depicted in Spielberg's "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" and on the cover of Whitley Strieber's "Communion").

This charming cover art, dating from 1959, shows levitating humanoids not unlike the famed Hopkinsville goblins, who made their dramatic appearance just four years earlier.





Note the conspicuously Martian-looking terrain, a staple of 1950s science fiction. Somehow the notion of a desert planet, bereft of recognizably human structures, speaks to our innate sense of the "other."

Related: The Deep Politics of Hollywood: Close Encounters with the Pentagon.

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Travel notes

Pointillist memories of San Fransisco, its half-glimpsed streets, the antique neon of Haight-Ashbury as red and liquid as sangria. (Fresh-shaven scalp grudging against worn vinyl cushions as miles dissolve in a polished calligraphy of rivers and serpentine desert roads.)

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Link-dump #1

For whatever reasons, the following items caught my eye while Web-surfing today:

Swiss Glaciers Melting Faster Than Ever Before: Study

Monolab's Soaring Solar Rotterdam Tower

Mourning Objects by Anna Schwamborn

Ground Zero 1945: Pictures by Atomic Bomb Survivors

Work begins on world's deepest underground lab

Girl Dies by Electrocution While Twitting in Bathtub, Apocalypse Draws Nearer

Mathematically modelling phantom traffic jams

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Bot of the day

The question: Would you eat sushi fondled by a robot?

Pink Tentacle has more information here.

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