turbo

Posted on Tuesday, 14th December 2010 by

TURRBO, a motion picture by Jarrett Lee Conaway

TURBO is a high adrenaline short film in the tradition of the Karate Kid and Tron. It tells the story of Hugo Park (Justin Chon, Twilight) a troubled youth whose only outlet for angst is a 4D fighting videogame called “Super Turbo Arena”. When Pharaoh King (Jocko Sims, Crash the Series), the Michael Jordan of cyber-sports, announces a tournament to determine who will join his pro-team, Hugo’s sets his eyes on the prize. But, Hugo isn’t the only gamer who wants fame and glory. If Hugo wants to win he’s going to have to beat Shamus (David Lehre, Epic Movie), the all time Turbo champ at the local Pandemonium arcade, and Ruse Kapri, a feisty prep girl that knows how to win. Realizing he can’t win on his skill alone, Hugo turns to his brother Tobias a former kick-boxer whose last match left him wheel-chair ridden. Together the two will mend old wounds and see if a washed up street fighter can teach a troubled teen how to become a virtual gladiator!

CONAWAY, JARRETT LEE. 2009. Turbo [motion picture]. Los Angeles: BFAM Studios.
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african roads

Posted on Tuesday, 14th December 2010 by

Motor roads, together with their rules and conventions for using them, are quite literally cultural constructions. In this sense, the road regime in large parts of the African continent is still under construction. Road-making and road use draw from North Atlantic models but observation of the African road makes clear that beyond the surface of adaptation to the North Atlantic model lie large spaces of creative reinterpretations and modifications …
    For an anthropological research project on roads, transport and traffic in Africa, we offer a position for one doctoral student (E13/2), funded initially for two years by the German Research Council (DFG), for conducting fieldwork in Northern Sudan and for dissertation writing.
    Applicants—preferably with knowledge of Arabic—should send their applications or inquiries to ↑Prof. Dr. Kurt Beck, Ethnologie[at]uni[minus]bayreuth[dot]de

For getting a taste of the flavour of this kind of ethnographic things, have a look at ↑anthroad, and—more general—for appropriation of technology, recycling, and creativity in Africa see ↑afrigadget, and/or read:

BECK, KURT. 2009. “↓The art of truck modding on the Nile (Sudan): An attempt to trace creativity [.pdf | 2.5 MB],” in The speed of change: Motor vehicles and people in Africa, 1890-2000 edited by Jan-Bart Gewald, Sabine Luning and Klaas van Walraven, pp. 151-173. Leiden, Boston: Brill.
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lego antikythera

Posted on Sunday, 12th December 2010 by

Antikythera mechanism in LEGO
Andrew Carol’s hobby is building complex machines using LEGO [note the design of the site, and where it's hosted]. After recreating Charles Babbage‘s difference engine, he now did the Antikythera mechanism. Have a look behind the scenes and watch the video at vimeo (in HD there, too), or at YouTube.

MARCHANT, JO. 2010. Mechanical inspiration. Nature 468: 496-498.
initially via tweet @ jimeh—lsfcil!
[btw, congrats for making it to the top 100 in just two months :-]
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primer

Posted on Thursday, 9th December 2010 by

Detail of the poster for Shane Carruth's movie 'Primer'
Believe it, or not, but Shane Carruth‘s Science-Fiction movie ‘Primer’ is the most succesful movie of all time. You thought Cameron’s ‘Avatar’ holds that rank? Not at all … have some figures: ‘Primer’ took 60 times more at the box office than the sum of its production costs (Budget: $7,000; Gross revenue: $424,760). In contrast, ‘Avatar’ did not even take 12 times more than its production budget (Budget: $237 million; Gross revenue: $2,779,404,183).
    Why I am telling you this? Not sure, but I guess it’s because I’ve only seen the movie once yet, and still have to think about it. My only advice so far: Go and watch, but don’t read any spoilers beforehand (they wouldn’t help you anyway).

CARRUTH, SHANE. 2004. Primer [motion picture]. New York City: TH!NKFilm.
‘Primer’ (as a follow up to la jetée) via email from Fab—tnx!
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stim-u-lax

Posted on Wednesday, 8th December 2010 by

Oster Stim-u-Lax Junior
Back in April this year we one night spotted the above pictured device in a Stuttgart shop window, of which we couldn’t make neither heads nor tails—of the device, not of the shop window, the latter was clear as glass. It wasn’t long before midnight, naturally the shop was closed and hence we couldn’t ask what the thing was. So we took a row of pictures and decided to track the thing down, which isn’t an easy matter if you have absolutely no clue about what it could be.
    Well, some days ago we were watching ‘M*A*S*H,’ season 2, episode 8, ‘The trial of Henry Blake.’ At 0:14:32 Margaret (Loretta Swit) has not yet noticed Pierce (Alan Alda) and McIntyre (Wayne Rogers) entering her tent, but still is giving Frank (Larry Linville) a good time, using a thing very close to the one out of that shop window …

A Model-3 Oster Stim-U-Lax
Heavens to Betsy—it’s a massage device! A ‘Stim-U-Lax’ by the Oster Company of Wisconsin, based on a patent for which James F. Doran of Danbury, Connecticut, applied in 1926. The patent (US001896351) was granted on 7th February 1933 to John C. Doran, executor of will of James F. Doran, deceased—probably father and son, or brothers. The patent specification begins thus:

This invention relates to vibrators and more particularly to vibrators adapted to be mounted upon the hand to impart to the hand a vibratory movement for massaging purposes.
    One of the objects of the invention is to provide a device of the above nature which is practical and highly efficient. Another object is to provide a device of above nature which is not bulky nor clumsy to handle and which is therefore convenient to use.

John F. Doran's patent for a vibrator from 1933

As it seems, the John Oster Manufacturing Company of Racine, Wisconsin, at the shores of lake Michigan, licenced the patent, and then produced the devices in question. The one we saw in the shop window is a ‘Stim-U-Lax Junior Model M-4 Standard Massage Instrument.’ The steampunk- and retro-SciFi-tech-crowd over at Budget Raygun has a series of detail pictures. Major Margaret Houlihan of course does not content herself with a consumer product like that, but goes for the real thing, the pro items. She uses a ‘Model-3 Oster Stim-U-Lax Massage Unit For Barbers.’

Model-3 Oster Stim-U-Lax Massage Unit For Barbers
Update:
Well, that’s what a working comments-function at a weblog is for—KerLeone read this article, somehow knew that he had seen the device before, some days later suddenly remembered, and promptly provided me with this black and white still picture from Terry Gilliam’s magnificent 1985 cyberpunk movie ‘Brazil’ (see the indepth-review at cyberpunkreview):

Jack Lint (Michael Palin) and Sam Lowry (Jonathan Pryce)
Sam Lowry (Jonathan Pryce, to the right) is welcomed by Jack Lint (Michael Palin) in the latter’s office at the Ministry of Information. Look what Jack wears on his hands! Just before Sam entered, Jack was massaging his temples with two Stim-U-Lax devices—we know that, because our old friend dopefish has put a clip of the scene in question for us on YouTube. Tnx! If anybody remembers to have seen a Stim-U-Lax somewhere else in a movie, please drop a line.

GILLIAM, TERRY. 1985. Brazil [motion picture]. Universal City, Century City: Universal Pictures, 20th Century Fox.
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resurrection

Posted on Tuesday, 7th December 2010 by

It was decided before it happened. Never would I have left him 4 dead. Nobody is left behind—that’s a maxime. Furthermore there still were signs of life deep within, he had been a faithful comrade for almost five years, and I had built him myself.
    Last night, when I switched on my big machine, the LEDs on the optical drives began to flicker. Nothing else. Both screens remained blank. Flat black, nothing of the grey appearing when a TV-set is tuned to a dead channel.
    Not even the BIOS came up.
    Ladies and Gentlemen, I tell ya!
    So I opened the case and unplugged both optical drives. Maybe one of them, or both, were the perpetrators. ‘Cause of the LED signals I had the vain hope that matters were that simple. But nothing, the drives were innocent. Second try was unplugging the reset-switch from the mainboard. A lesser known source for system failure, but sometimes it happens. But not this time, and fears of more serious issues arose.
    Of course there are back-ups of everything, I am not a complete fool. Well, back-ups of almost everything. Currently I am working on a manuscript for a book on cyberanthropology. All associated files exist in quintuple fashion on different machines and storage media. But just on Sunday I had worked on it for a prolongued time, up to late at night. Before I went to bed I thought of backing up, but surrendered to the impulse to hit the pillow immediately. And I am far behind schedule with the book anyhow. My publisher is at my heels and stepping on my toes at the same time. Rightfully so, confessed.
    The next three hours I spent well inside the machine, at least up to the elbows. The comforting thing was, that the green LED on the mainboard was on, and that it sent its beep-signals loud and clear. There was life, therefore hope, and he tried to communicate with me. So clearing the CMOS was the next option. Nothing. Removing and replacing the RAM, trying out different configurations. Nothing. Removing and replacing the HDDs, even the primary one, so that at least the BIOS could come up. Soundcard out and in again. Everything in vain. Finally I hit on the graphics cards.
    Just some weeks ago Hawk reminded via chat, while we were playing QL, or was it BF2?, that I was a lucky guy … after I had told him the temperature my graphics cards were running on. There are two of them, ATI cards connected to form a CrossFire system. I removed both, and reinserted the former secondary into the primary slot. Suddenly it was like I had submerged my machine into one of R’as al Ghul’s Lazarus pits. BIOS came up and prompted me to reenter basic data, then the OS loaded, everything as it was before, no loss of data whatsoever.
    Perfect resurrection.
    Now, Hawk, what’s the state-of-the-art when it comes to graphics cards … what exactly do I have to give myself as a Xmas present this year? And if we’re already at it—what’s the highest end CPU fitting on an AM2 socket? Who’s the current leader in RAM? Still Corsair? I mean, it was a traumatic incident for both of us, my machine and me. And I guess he now deserves some new parts for his new life.

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la jetée

Posted on Saturday, 4th December 2010 by

La jetée

La jetée (English: The Jetty or The Pier) (1962) is a 28-minute black and white science fiction film by Chris Marker. Constructed almost entirely from still photos, it tells the story of a post-nuclear war experiment in time travel.

It is an absolute future noir cyberpunk masterpiece and sets its creator Chris Marker (aka Christian François Bouche-Villeneuve, *1921) on par with Andrei Tarkovsky. Film-noir elements are abound, including e.g. the voice-over narrator. The decisive plot-twist is the same as in a short story by almost forgotten German writer Alexander Moritz Frey [in German]—in the collection ‘Dunkle Gänge’ [Dark Passages] (1913), I think, have to look it up. But I won’t give the twist away and spoil the movie for you—go and watch it on YouTube. The strategies of storytelling in ‘La Jetée,’ like in its spectacular remake ’12 Monkeys’ (Gilliam 1995), is reminiscent of Thomas Pynchon, another big influence on the 1980s cyberpunk movement. Interestingly enough only three years after ‘La jetée’, in 1965, another future noir cyberpunk movie from France came to the cinemas: Jean-Luc Godard‘s ‘Alphaville.’ French artists are not to be underestimated or even neglected, when it comes to cyberpunk. Think of the comics / graphic novels / sequential art / bandes dessinée of e.g. Jean ‘Moebius’ Giraud and the whole scene of ‘Les Humanoïdes Associés.’

GILLIAM, TERRY. 1995. 12 Monkeys [motion picture]. Universal City: Universal Pictures.
GODARD, JEAN-LUC. 1965. Alphaville: Une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution (Alphaville: A Strange Adventure of Lemmy Caution) [motion picture]. Paris: Athos Films.
MARKER, CHRIS. 1962. La jetée [motion picture]. Paris: Argos Films.
‘La jetée’ initially via entry @ rufposten—tnx!
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lovecraftian tintin

Posted on Friday, 3rd December 2010 by

Lovecraftian Tintin
Artist Murray Groat has created four wonderfully atmospheric Hergé meets Lovecraft covers for Adventures of Tintin albums that sadly will never be. There of course is a vast tradition of homage-à-Tintin covers, often linked to current affairs, like Zartosht Soltani’s Tintin in Tehran from 2002, and many more, but I haven’t yet seen Tintin associated with Lovecraft’s universe.

via entry @ infocult
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stuxnet

Posted on Thursday, 2nd December 2010 by

There is a brilliant article by Ed Barnes at FoxNews: ‘Mystery surrounds cyber missile that crippled Iran’s nuclear weapons ambitions.’ When I first read it, at the least when a third into the text, I would have thought it to be fiction, hadn’t I heard about ‘Stuxnet‘ before … and Wikipedia’s entry on it cites all in all 82 sources. It seems to me, that Barnes is a fan of William Gibson’s writing, that’s the one thing. The other thing is, that nobody can deny anymore that we are living in a cyberpunked world. Have two quotes, the first one from Barnes’ article, the second one from Gibson’s 1982 short story ‘Burning Chrome.’

But as the extent of the worm’s capabilities is being understood, its genius and complexity has created another perplexing question: Who did it?
Speculation on the worm’s origin initially focused on hackers or even companies trying to disrupt competitors. But as engineers tore apart the virus they learned not only the depth of the code, its complex targeting mechanism, (despite infecting more than 100,000 computers it has only done damage at Natanz,) the enormous amount of work that went into it—Microsoft estimated that it consumed 10,000 man days of labor—and about what the worm knew, the clues narrowed the number of players that have the capabilities to create it to a handful.
“This is what nation-states build, if their only other option would be to go to war,” Joseph Wouk, an Israeli security expert wrote.
[Eric] Byres is more certain. “It is a military weapon,” he said. (Barnes 2010)

Then Cyrillic alphanumerics started reeling down the monitor, twisting themselves into English halfway down. There were a lot of gaps, where the lexicon ran up against specialized military acronyms in the readout I’d bought from my man in Colorado, but it did give me some idea of what I’d bought from the Finn.
I felt like a punk who’d gone out to buy a switch-blade and come home with a small neutron bomb.
Screwed again, I thought. What good’s a neutron bomb in a streetfight? The thing under the dust cover was right out of my league. I didn’t even know where to unload it, where to look for a buyer. Someone had, but he was dead, someone with a Porsche watch and a fake Belgian passport, but I’d never tried to move in those circles. The Finn’s muggers from the ‘burbs had knocked over someone who had some highly arcane connections.
The program in the jeweler’s vise was a Russian military icebreaker, a killer-virus program. (Gibson 1987 [1982]: 179)

GIBSON, WILLIAM FORD. 1987 [1982]. “Burning Chrome,” in Burning Chrome by William Ford Gibson, pp. 186-191. New York: Ace Books, Penguin. First published in Omni July 1982: 72-107.
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cybernetic bias

Posted on Thursday, 2nd December 2010 by

The objectivity and integrity of contemporary science faces many threats. A cause of particular concern is the growing competition for research funding and academic positions, which, combined with an increasing use of bibliometric parameters to evaluate careers (e.g. number of publications and the impact factor of the journals they appeared in), pressures scientists into continuously producing “publishable” results. (Fanelli 2010: Introduction)

Such begins Daniele Fanelli his 2010 article on the negative consequences of the ‘publish or perish’ policy—since quite some decades running wild within academia. But since when exactly? My educated guess is: since the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the universities and the ‘academic world system’ as a whole were restructured and shaped according to the principles of cybernetics. This now may well sound like my own bias for suspecting cybernetics to lurk behind every corner. Luckily in recent years historians of science and knowledge have taken up the issue of the history of cybernetics and its impact. For a comprehensive historical study, focussing on the case of the Federal Republic of Germany, see Philipp Aumann’s book ‘Mode und Methode’ ['Fashion and method'] published 2009, and for a concrete study of cybernetics’ influence on the universities, their structures and management, see David Gugerli’s article ‘Die Kybernetisierung der Hochschule’ (2008) ['The cybernetification of higher education']. Aumann has brought the meaning of cybernetics wonderfully to the point—in my mind indispensable for historical and anthropological understanding:

Kybernetik war in der idealtypischen Annahme ihrer Ganzheit genauso wie in ihren historischen Manifestationen in der Wissenschaft und in der Öffentlichkeit zunächst eine Form des Denkens—und zwar des mathematisierenden Denkens und des Denkens in Systemen. (Aumann 2009: 449)

[Cybernetics in the ideal conception of its overarching entireness, as well as in its historical manifestations in the sciences, academia, and the public, first of all was a mode of thought—of mathematizing thought and of thinking in systems. (my translation—put the blame on me)]

Quite obviously the belief in bibliometrics, impact factor, and quantified evaluation in general is a manifestation of that very mode of thought. And matchingly the ‘Science Citation Index’ and with it the concept of the ‘impact factor’ was created in 1963 by Eugene Garfield, and the word ‘bibliometrics’ itself was introduced by Alan Pritchard in 1969—everything during the heyday of cybernetics, the ‘long 1960s.’ Of course there were forerunners to bibliometrics, at least dating back to 1913, but the long 1960s can be seen as a Foucaultian rupture in regard to the impact of cybernetics. During this decade cybernetics became a discursive formation, no more restricted to the confines of academia and scientific discourse, but permeating many dimensions of society, and for sure all aspects of the nation states’ ‘apparati’ on both sides of the Iron Curtain.

AUMANN, PHILIPP. 2009. Mode und Methode: Die Kybernetik in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland. Göttingen: Wallstein.
FANELLI, DANIELE. 2010. Do pressures to publish increase scientists’ bias? An empirical support from US states data. PLoS ONE 5(4): e10271.
GUGERLI, DAVID. 2008. “Kybernetisierung der Hochschule: Zur Genese des universitären Managements,” in Die Transformation des Humanen: Beiträge zur Kulturgeschichte der Kybernetik edited by Michael Hagner and Erich Hörl, pp. 414-439. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
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