An interview with Nic Clear from the Ballardian

Here is an interview with architect/theorist/educator/etc Nic Clear concerning ‘The Near Future’, the issue of Architectural Design guest-edited by Nic. The interview covers a number of topics including the relationship of J. G. Ballard’s work to architecture. On the Ballardian site are included videos made by some of Nic’s students (www.ballardian .com, this is a very good resource for anyone interested in Ballard). We here have replaced the videos with images of some of the more ridiculous projects proposed in Dubai… the oasis of idiocy.

For example this classic:

“A journey. A saga. A legend. The World is today’s great development epic. An engineering odyssey to create an island paradise of sea, sand and sky, a destination has arrived that allows investors to chart their own course and make the world their own”… a vision realized… an ecosystem eliminated

In recognition of the sophistication of Ballard’s architectural analysis, a raft of discourse has been produced in recent times from within both academic and pop-cultural realms. This takes the form of tributes, analyses, ‘reimaginings’ and course syllabuses. In the influential architecture blog BLDGBLOG, for example, Geoff Manaugh sounds the note:

We have more to learn from the fiction of J.G. Ballard … than we do from Le Corbusier. The good city form of tomorrow is a refugee camp built by Brown & Root; the world’s largest architectural client is the U.S. Department of Defense. More people now live in overseas military camps than in houses designed by Mies van der Rohe — yet we study Mies van der Rohe.

UGH!

 

Fem-bot’s my love machine

Perfect couple … Le Trung with Aiko

 

A BOFFIN too busy to find real love has INVENTED his idea of the perfect woman – a female ROBOT.

Inventor Le Trung, 33, created Aiko, said to be “in her 20s” with a stunning 32, 23, 33 figure, shiny hair and delicate features.

She even remembers his favourite drink and does simple cleaning and household tasks.

Depressed Robots Electrify The Japanese

A PLAY with a difference has opened in Japan – it’s cast is half robot, half human.

The theatrical production stars a pair of Mitsubishi’s ‘Wakamura’ robots alongside two human actors.

 

The robots play two depressed household servants who work for a young couple.

But the robots grow tired of their mundane lifestyle and long to break free and see the world

The 20-minute piece titled Hataraku Watashi (I, Worker) was written by Japanese playwright Oriza Hirata and opened this week at Osaka University.

The robots cannot use facial movements to express emotions so instead tilt their heads and make sounds.

The first night of the play received rave reviews.

“It was very surprising,” said one guest.

“You could see the robots thinking about how to respond – you could swear they were feeling emotion.”

Sarah Palin can’t stop fucking

 

Sarah Palin: Operation “Castration”
Jacques-Alain Miller
translated by Jake Bellone with James Curley-Egan

 

The choice of Sarah Palin is a sign of the times. In politics, the feminine enunciation is hence called to dominate. But be careful! It’s no longer about women who play elbows, modeling themselves on the men. We are entering an era of postfeminist women, women who, without bargaining, are ready to kill the political men. The transition was perfectly visible during Hillary’s campaign: she began playing the commander in chief and, since that didn’t work, what did she do? She sent a subliminal message, one that said something like: “Obama? He’s got nothing in the pants.” And she immediately took it back, but it was too late. Sarah Palin is not only picking up where she left off but, being younger by fifteen years, she is otherwise ferocious, slinging feminine sarcasm like a natural; she overtly castrates her male adversaries (and with such frank jubilation!) and their only recourse is to remain silent: they have no idea how to attack a woman who uses her femininity to ridicule them and reduce them to impotence. For the moment, a woman who plays the “castration” card is invincible.

Noam Chomsky on the economic meltdown

 

Anti-democratic nature of US capitalism is being exposed

NOAM CHOMSKY

Fri, Oct 10, 2008

Bretton Woods was the system of global financial management set up at the end of the second World War to ensure the interests of capital did not smother wider social concerns in post-war democracies. It was hated by the US neoliberals – the very people who created the banking crisis writes Noam Chomsky

THE SIMULTANEOUS unfolding of the US presidential campaign and unravelling of the financial markets presents one of those occasions where the political and economic systems starkly reveal their nature.

Passion about the campaign may not be universally shared but almost everybody can feel the anxiety from the foreclosure of a million homes, and concerns about jobs, savings and healthcare at risk.

The initial Bush proposals to deal with the crisis so reeked of totalitarianism that they were quickly modified. Under intense lobbyist pressure, they were reshaped as “a clear win for the largest institutions in the system . . . a way of dumping assets without having to fail or close”, as described by James Rickards, who negotiated the federal bailout for the hedge fund Long Term Capital Management in 1998, reminding us that we are treading familiar turf. The immediate origins of the current meltdown lie in the collapse of the housing bubble supervised by Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, which sustained the struggling economy through the Bush years by debt-based consumer spending along with borrowing from abroad. But the roots are deeper. In part they lie in the triumph of financial liberalisation in the past 30 years – that is, freeing the markets as much as possible from government regulation.

EXTINCTION

 

                                                      The beautiful Baiji, now extinct.

October 6, 2008
AFP 

Half the world’s mammals are declining in population and more than a third probably face extinction, said an update Monday of the “Red List,” the most respected inventory of biodiversity.

A comprehensive survey of mammals included in the annual report by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), which covers more than 44,000 animal and plant species, shows that a quarter of the planet’s 5,487 known mammals are clearly at risk of disappearing forever.

Matt Taibbi: “Mad Dog Palin”

 

Mad Dog Palin By Matt Taibbi, RollingStone.com Posted on September 27, 2008, Printed on September 29, 2008 http://www.alternet.org/story/100551/ I’m standing outside the XCEL ENERGY CENTER in St. Paul Minnesota Sarah Palin has just finished her speech to the Republican National Convention, accepting the party’s nomination for vice president. If I hadn’t quit my two-packs-a-day habit earlier this year, I’d be chain-smoking now. So the only thing left is to stand mute against the fit-for-a-cheap-dog-kennel crowd-control fencing you see everywhere at these idiotic conventions and gnaw on weird new feelings of shock and anarchist rage as one would a rawhide chew toy.

Goldman Sachs Socialism

      

by WILLIAM GREIDER

 

September 23, 2008

 

Wall Street put a gun to the head of the politicians and said, Give us the money–right now–or take the blame for whatever follows. The audacity of Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson’s bailout proposal is reflected in what it refuses to say: no explanations of how the bailout will work, no demands on the bankers in exchange for the public’s money. The Treasury’s opaque, three-page summary of plan includes this chilling statement:

Homeland Security Detects Terrorist Threats by Reading Your Mind

 

Tuesday , September 23, 2008

By Allison Barrie     

Baggage searches are SOOOOOO early-21st century. Homeland Security is now testing the next generation of security screening — a body scanner that can read your mind.

Most preventive screening looks for explosives or metals that pose a threat. But a new system called MALINTENT turns the old school approach on its head. This Orwellian-sounding machine detects the person — not the device — set to wreak havoc and terror.

Annoying Vision of The Future

                     More evidence that we got problems.

                     

 

                              Now this is more like it.

Catastrophic Global Warming Provides Amazing New Design Challenges For Architects …Or… Wingnut Makes Drawings Of Floating Concentration Camps

 

   

 A Floating Ecopolis for Ecological Refugees    

 

Jun 13, 2008

It’s common knowledge that the planet is warming, ice caps are melting, and water levels are rising. The international scientific community predicts that a temperature elevation of 1°C will lead to a water rise of 1 meter, resulting in massive land loss and the displacement of millions of people world wide. Vincent Callebaut, a visionary Belgian architect, is responding to this inevitability with his proposal LILYPAD, A Floating Ecopolis for Ecological Refugees.

Future wars ‘to be fought with mind drugs’

Future wars could see opponents attacking each other’s minds, according to a report for the US military. (?)!

Baby Rat Brains Removed… Put Into Robots.

 

	A ‘Frankenrobot’ with a biological brain   Aug 13 03:25 PM US/Eastern Meet Gordon, probably the world’s first robot controlled exclusively by living brain tissue.Stitched together from cultured rat neurons, Gordon’s primitive grey matter was designed at the University of Reading by scientists who unveiled the neuron-powered machine on Wednesday.    Their groundbreaking experiments explore the vanishing boundary between natural and artificial intelligence, and could shed light on the fundamental building blocks of memory and learning, one of the lead researchers told AFP.

Job Stealing Robots

Which one is the robot?

 

Thank heavens somebody finally came up with an entertaining and modern replacement for those boring old priests that used to preside over these crazy, antique, performance art spectacles. You know, the ones where couples legalize their love with a contract from the state. Look at the expressiveness of the red emoter lights hovering in the midst of its shiny, black plastic, empathy displacement screen.

I wonder what other tricks it can perform? 

The Banality of Evil

What a way to start the day…the screeching of your Dalek-ian alarm clock accompanied by the smell of sizzling pig corpse, just roll over and shove that scrap of roasted flesh into your crusty morning-breath maw. It only makes sense that such an infernal and stupid device should crafted with a complete lack of artistry by some half-assed carnivore dimwits being ironic.

 

Pre-bacon existence

 

This is a really great book.       Pleasurable Kingdom | by Jonathan Balcombe

An Excerpt Also read a Sample Chapter PDF (MacMillan Science) A group of hippopotamuses rests motionless in the cool of an African freshwater spring. Schools of tiny fish have gathered round their flanks and feet, nibbling at parasites and sloughing skin. The hippos, far from passive participants, splay their toes, gape open their mouths and spread their legs to assist the fish in their cleaning services. Five thousand miles away, in a Montreal lab, an iguana ventures away from her warm perch to retrieve a gourmet tidbit from a frigid corner of her terrarium, ignoring the dull, processed reptile chow just beneath her perch. It’s a reptilian version of shunning the fruit bowl and dashing out for doughnuts on a wintry night. And in Bowling Green, Ohio, a pair of young rats utter ultrasonic squeaks as they chase a hand to be tickled. Rats accustomed to being petted also approach a hand, but not nearly so quickly, nor with as many squeaks as rats trained to expect a tickle.

Caring for our elders…the new fashioned way!

 

“Here comes a robot called uBOT-5 developed by a group of researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst to take care of the elderly people, in place of a human medical care giver. This robot has been designed similar to the human anatomy with the sense of vision and touch. This robot can intimate the Baby Boomers, the time for taking medicines and when to do grocery shopping.

uBOT-5 has the ability to track the movement of the elders, sense and intimate the remote medical technician if they fall down or if no movement is recognized from the old people. The robot has also been designed to converse with the elders so that they would not feel lonely.

The uBOT-5 also has the ability to recognize outsiders or parcels blocking its path. In fact, it can lift about 2.2 pounds and carry to another place, the researchers say. The uBOT-5 carries a Web cam, a microphone, and a touch-sensitive LCD display so that it acts as interface for communicating with the outside world.”

 

“Boy, how awesome is it going to be when I am being touched, watched, and reminded to take drugs by this charmer!”

“Who needs people when you have this adorable automaton for interfacing with the outside world.”

“I can’t wait until I am old and can no longer take care of myself so I can have a 24/7 surveillance drone buzzing around my domicile keeping an eye on me so nothing unexpected (death?) disrupts my expensive prescription drug regiment…”

 

“what could possibly go wrong?”

 

 

From the nation that has brought us the butter pen, umbrella tube, and eye-drop funnels comes a lovely old person washing machine, just throw your dirty and troublesome wrinkle-bag in this gizmo, set the appropriate wash cycle and hit the start button, in just a jiffy you have one sparkling clean elder. The future looks bright and clean for these technophile old farts.

 

The folks around here are eagerly looking forward to a future with absolutely no human contact. Here is an image of woman sexually interfacing with a lover (client?) using communications technology and remotely  controlled, robotic, sex-machines… With those flexible lighting solutions and the variety of camera angles provided by the documentary film crew, it is just like being there and operating the machines in person… now that is hot.

Jane Jetson eroticized… a womp bomma a lu mop, balomp bam boom!

 

Technology

 

by John Zerzan

Tech-nol-o-gy n. According to Webster’s: industrial or applied science. In reality: the ensemble of division of labor/production/industrialism and its impact on us and on nature. Technology is the sum of mediations between us and the natural world and the sum of those separations mediating us from each other. it is all the drudgery and toxicity required to produce and reproduce the stage of hyper-alienation we live in. It is the texture and the form of domination at any given stage of hierarchy and commodification.

Diogenes the Cynic

LIFE OF DIOGENES

---

DIOGENES was a native of Sinope, the son of Tresius, a money-changer. And Diocles says that he was forced to flee from his native city, as his father kept the public bank there, and had adulterated the coinage.

Void Manufacturing finds itself in an insane set of circumstances -OR- Cult organization becomes trapped in a political nightmare brought about by spectral alien force committed to mind control (all taking place in a disastrously organized urban space seemingly created to induce lunacy).

 …It seems that a sub class of humans, known as “Ruling Elites” have legalized a set of advantageous strategic positions referred to commonly as “national values.”