Friday Lovin': Animal Actors

Where are they now?

(This is funniest thing I've seen in a while.)

Sisyphus Family Vacation

(click for larger version)

Illustration Friday: Cars

Why? MCA!

Some people have too much time on their hands!

My Bad: Eco-Dubai

In an earlier posts I put down the growth in Dubai because of the unsustainability of the development. But recently I have come across some very interesting projects that use Dubai's abundant natural resources (mainly sunlight and wind).

Check this out. A very interesting project that incorporates solar panels and wind turbines. What's equally interesting is that there was concern for incorporating social spaces and using the design to reference middle eastern Islamic architecture and geometric patterns.

Intimate Pain

Renee Byer recently won a Pulitzer Prize for this incredibly heart-wrenching series of photographs for the Sacramento Bee.

The images remarkably steer clear of saccharin sentimentalism and reveal the intimate pain of a mother who must confront every parent's nightmare. There is a delicacy to the way Byer has handled the events and their representation. It is honest and not intrusive but yet brutally there-in-the-moment. Byer's work reminds me of Philip Jones Griffiths but without sweeping political undertones. The story is simply and powerfully life affirming.

Father and Daughter

From Videosift

Tuesday Lovin': An American Self-Portrait

Serious small multiples here.

A Failure of Imagination

Sometimes, it seems, we are consumed by visions of the future. I think this is a learned behavior as capitalism, at this point in time, seems obsessed with selling us a shinier, technologically enhanced version of ourselves. Techno-fetish lust abounds and the never ending cycle of new product introductions continues unabated. Everyday there are countless technological devices that bring to the mix unnecessary new features or styling.

There are moments, however, when the national (or global?) psyche bubbles up and we are forced to face our demons. Iraq is ever present as is global warming. Corruption, corporate greed, and the list goes on and on. We try desperately to hide in our personal mediascapes but we can't escape the real world.

This week there was an item that kept popping up. The Ministry of Defence in the UK released a report about future threats. The report outlines the use of such technologies as neutron, biological, and chemical weapons. More interesting is that it discusses social class imbalances and even raises the spectre of a Marxist revolution.

The meager descriptions of the report got me thinking about this clip regarding the movie, The Children of Men:



Slavoj Zizek is one of the great thinkers of our time and lays it out for you in black and white about how the real story in the film is the background or the situation. To me it is the nagging sense that everything in the techno-present isn't rosy and outside of our mediated bubble things are beginning to disintegrate.

But I am not really interested in what the film reveals as these fears we openly express everyday or, in the least, surround us in a subtle mediated hum.

The more interesting concern is that our governments are unable to envision a new world and instead prepare for the worst. Yet "the worst" that is "probability-based, rather than predictive" is actually the made-for-film simulacra/parable of what exists now.

It strikes me as wholly plausible that late capitalism, as Zizek reports, has run its course and instead of investing in new paradigms (that could do a hell of lot more to saving the planet, for instance) the vision lingers in a pitiful old-school utter villainization of alternative economic and social models.

This reveals that those in power are of a generation trained to be in their place (often narrowly defined, uncreative roles). They are so uncreative, in fact, that they can't even see that a real defense would be to attack the inequality and the existing system - not their country's own citizens. Needless to say, it is time for visionaries to put forth their imagined realities.

New Stuff

I know I have been negligent in keeping up with the posting but, hey, haven't you heard that blogging is, like, so 2005 and, for all intents and purposes, dead.

Anyway, with that said, I must say that I have updated the all my sites just to keep them tidy. Metasurface has been turned into a general homepage that will primarily host the links to academic writings (metasurface.net/deeper) and the two blogs - metasurface blog and parallel practice.

The blogs have moved to blogspot and I think by the end of the school my focus will be primarily on parallel practice.

Not that it matters. Metasurface is dead. Long live Metasurface.

Sunday Lovin': Famous Balloon Movies

Cartoon Brew has an interesting post about a animator who has used After Effects, a post-production effects editor and video compositing tool, to add balloons into well-known films. The results are very well done and very funny. I have added them all below:

Anniversary

My wife and I just celebrated our 11th wedding anniversary recently and it is hard to believe that during a sizable chunk of our married life the US has been at war in Iraq. My daughter is as old as the war and just celebrated her 4th birthday. (If the war was a child it'd be jumping on the couch, and telling potty jokes)

It is interesting to see how, beyond the daily potpourri of images of violence and political talking heads, we visualize the war, the costs of war, the other, and, really, how the visual becomes a playground where we think through all facets of our situation trying to make sense of nothing less than our political reality.

Here are two illustrations of that:

The Iraq Veterans Memorial is a video tribute to fallen soldiers in the vein of the Vietnam memorial or the AIDS quilt project.

Rageh Inside Iran is a BBC documentary that gives the viewer a very complex, nuanced view of Iranians.

UPDATE:

Additional videos to check out: Hometown Baghdad follows several young Iraqis as they struggle to survive in Baghdad.

Global Interior Design

My wife Lipi sends this one: Normal Room is social media/design culture taken to its breaking point. The premise of the site is this: upload pictures of your house to share it with a global audience.

That's it.

What results is, as Lipi describes, strangely fascinating. What I find interesting is that people make no attempts what-so-ever to clean or organize the rooms they are showing and a meta-reading of the whole experience of viewing several hundred pictures of various rooms in homes all over the world is that we, as citizens of that giant condominium we call planet Earth, pretty much all have really bad taste.

There are, of course, some anthropological investigations begging to be done. How, for instance, does the Irish family squeeze into that teeny bathroom, get the door closed, pull down their pants, and successfully navigate to the toilet without falling into the shower? Or what is wrong with the Brazilian kids? Why is their bedroom so frighteningly clean?

Billed as an inspirational interior design resource, Normal Rooms does little to inspire thoughts about design but instead is the internet equivalent of driving through the neighborhood on a winter's evening and peering the windows of your neighbors' homes.

If some of the web 2.0 has been about getting the average person to share their creative enterprises with an international crowd of like-minded people then I think it is important to note that what seems to matter to most is not cutting-edge aesthetics or the latest design fashion. It is, instead, comfort and the grind of everyday life.

And piles of books and magazines, apparently.