Totems

Totems is a photo project by Alain Delorme:

“Alain Delorme offers a very singular vision of China in the days leading to the World Expo in his new Totems series. This work is the result of two residencies in Shanghai, supported by the Ailing Foundation. It shows the photographer’s fascination for migrants’ pressures. Piles of products labeled “Made in China” are stacked up to produce quite unusual sculptures, symbols of the Chineses’ a ever increasing fetish withobjects.”

Com-pu-pu-pu-pu-pu-pu-pu-pu-pu-pu-puter

Mi-Sex‘s (New Zealand/Australian new wave rock band) promo-video for the hit single ‘Computer Games’. October 1979. I’m fascinated…

Jammed up tight by red traffic lights
Advance one level on green
These opportune commuters
They’re blasting on thier hooters
I fidget with the digit dots
Frustration rules out there
As the XU-1 connects the spot
But the matrix grid don’t care

[via 990000.tumblr.com]

You, the World and I

You, the World and I: new video work by Jon Rafman. A voice over essay about love, memory, photography, technology, and our experience of the world.

“In this modern day Orphean tale, an anonymous narrator also desperately searches for a lost love.  Rather than the charms of the lyre, contemporary technological tools, Google Street View and Google Earth, beckon as the pathway for our narrator to regain memories and recapture traces of his lost love. In the film, they are as captivating and enthralling as charming as any lyre in retrieving the other: at first they might seem an open retort to critics of new technology who bemoan the lack of the tangible presence of the other in our interactions on the Internet.” (full statement here).

[p.s. this is another work that will be shown in Maps and Legends, my forthcoming exhibition during FotoGrafia Festival. Come and have a look if you’re in Rome from September 23th to October 24th]

Augmented City

Augmented City, by Keiichi Matsuda (best vied with 3D glasses)
keiichimatsuda.com

“The architecture of the contemporary city is no longer simply about the physical space of buildings and landscape, more and more it is about the synthetic spaces created by the digital information that we collect, consume and organise; an immersive interface may become as much part of the world we inhabit as the buildings around us.
Augmented Reality (AR) is an emerging technology defined by its ability to overlay physical space with information. It is part of a paradigm shift that succeeds Virtual Reality; instead of disembodied occupation of virtual worlds, the physical and virtual are seen together as a contiguous, layered and dynamic whole. It may lead to a world where media is indistinguishable from ‘reality’. The spatial organisation of data has important implications for architecture, as we re-evaluate the city as an immersive human-computer interface.”

Adventures in Barbieland

Royksopp surreal promo video for the new album (out in September).

“We had a vision, and in this vision we saw ourselves as a sleeping hobo and an old man respectively. The following is a vivid depiction of some of the events that occurred during an intended stay in Barbieland. And remember, It’s a true story…”

[via no fat clips]

Multitasking

“Right now a torrent of moments is rushing past you that you will never, ever experience again. Isn’t it time that you reach out your arms and grab them before they slip away? As connectivity evolves into a human right, what you wear could affect how you see the past, what will happen in your future, and most crucially: how immediately you’re seizing the present. A global trend is in effect: read, record, repeat, plug in, log on, text up, tune in, drop out.”

on DIS magazine