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Pixels in Design, Urban Camoflauge

The front-runner on the trend has got to be Spanish wunderkind Cristian Zuzunaga, who first riveted international audiences with his masters thesis at Royal College of Art, a collaboration with fellow student Peter Smith.

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A great run down on pixels in design: clothing, furniture, housewares.

Urban Camoflauge

Imagine clothing embeded with tiny lcd's that film your surroundings then blend you seemlessly into the background.

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Pixel Porn

taking virtual porn, online porn, and online dating concepts to the next level (of fetish)

courtesy of super talented and super disturbed photographer JeanYves Lemoigne

Photomontage in Radical Architecture

Top: Altar for the Temple of the Spirit (Sketch for the creation of an altar at the Institute of Kinetics) 1969-70 by Lev Nussberg and Natalia Prokuratov. Image courtesy of Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, the State University of New Jersey.

Radical young architects in the 1960s were as adept with the airbrush and the scalpel as with the conventional tools and techniques of the drawing board, writes David Crowley. Publicity-seeking design groups – with names like rock bands – demonstrated their credentials as visionaries by creating arresting images of modern life. Archigram in Britain and Haus-Rucker-Co in Austria and Dvizhenie (‘Movement’) in the Soviet Union were brilliant manipulators of the image. In their hands, the technique of photomontage – hitherto little more than an occasional practice amongst modern architects and one far more closely associated with caricature and unreality – was thoroughly renewed.

Montage allowed, perhaps more than any other medium, entirely new architectural scales to be visualised. Mechanical elements were blown up to city-size proportions, landscapes dwarfed by domestic objects, and components wrenched from their familiar settings and turned into enigmatic monuments of modernity. These were not blueprints for future structures but attempts to ‘activate the imagination’ of the viewer. What – these images asked – might the future look like in an age of electronic communications networks and lightweight and floating plastic structures?

Above: Superstudio: New, New York, from the Continuous Monument series, 1969. Image courtesy of Deutsches Architekturmuseum.

These futuristic images were often laced with irony, an effect amplified by the techniques of montage. This was most clear perhaps in one of the most chilling images of Utopia of the era. Italian architects Superstudio proposed a Monumento Continuo (‘Continuous Monument’) – a massive linear structure, described as ‘an Architectural Model for Total Urbanisation’, which appeared to span the entire globe – in a series of virtuoso photomontages. In some images it locked familiar landscapes, such as New York City’s skyscrapers, in its freezing grip; in others it sliced through deserts and mountains. With its mute, grid-like mirrored surface, this suggested infinite capacity for extension and, as such, an escape from romantic ideas about place. Uniting the globe, the Continuous Monument appeared to be egalitarian. Yet its ordering effects were troublingly dictatorial. Accused of authoritarianism, Superstudio’s response was to claim irony: the Continuous Monument exaggerated the concept of a technological utopia to the point of absurdity. If irony could not be produced with bricks and concrete, the conventional materials of architecture, it certainly could be delivered through the media fragments combined in these remarkable montages.

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Urban Light Art

Architectural light graffiti comes in many forms that all share one common feature: the effects are there one second and gone the next. The only record of these curious performance arts comes in the form of photographs and videos. 

"LED Light Throwies"

Hacking, hacking, and more hacking

_{EMP Electromagnetic Pulse Device, Magnetic Stripe Reader Writer, Smartcard Reader Writer, Lock Picks, Satellite and Television Signals.}

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More Abandoned: Some incredible locations in Asia

Abandoned buildings, properties and places take on remarkably different aesthetic character and are treated differently from one culture to the next - particularly in Asian nations where beliefs about the cultural role of architecture or the whims of a dictator can vary greatly. From South Korea to North Korea, Cambodia to Thailand and Azerbaijan to Hong Kong here are seven amazing oriental and subcontinental abandonments from the Near East to the Far East, from skyscraper hotels and pod cities to shopping malls and amusement parks and everything in between.

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Abandoned Buildings in Classic Films

Have you ever wondered what really happened to that mall in The Blues Brothers or where Tarkovsky filmed those jarring and surrealistic scenes in Stalker? While many urban abandonments are left alone or the occasional subject of urban exploration, some remarkable buildings and complexes have become famous (or infamous) after being used as film sets for cult classics or contemporary major motion pictures. Here are five films that made use of deserted buildings ranging from suburban malls and insane asylums to an unfinished nuclear reactor.

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3D Projections Rising in Use

Kate Moss Hologram from the Alexander McQueen Show Paris 2006

"The Grid:" Internet 10,000 times faster.

by Jonathan Leake

THE internet could soon be made obsolete. The scientists who pioneered it have now built a lightning-fast replacement capable of downloading entire feature films within seconds.

At speeds about 10,000 times faster than a typical broadband connection, “the grid” will be able to send the entire Rolling Stones back catalogue from Britain to Japan in less than two seconds.

The latest spin-off from Cern, the particle physics centre that created the web, the grid could also provide the kind of power needed to transmit holographic images; allow instant online gaming with hundreds of thousands of players; and offer high-definition video telephony for the price of a local call.

David Britton, professor of physics at Glasgow University and a leading figure in the grid project, believes grid technologies could “revolutionise” society. “With this kind of computing power, future generations will have the ability to collaborate and communicate in ways older people like me cannot even imagine,” he said.

Full article here 

Another one here

Are Religions Virtual Worlds?

by Merci

Right now I’m reading about player behavior in MMOs. I keep thinking how similar those player behaviors and game worlds are to the fantastical real-world-overlays we know as religions. Both imbue players with feeling of elevated direction.

Religions and MMOs give believers/players a lot in exchange for their subscription. Believers get a realm to achieve in that doesn’t necessarily affect what most people hold to be the real world. Recurrent personalities exist at the same time as the believers, but persist regardless of the life span of any one believer. Your grandmother's Jesus is your Jesus. The NPC you met last week during a quest will be there two months from now when you sign up a secondary character. And lastly, religions and virtual worlds both contain objectives that can be broken down into steps for the believer. Religions almost always require believers to do at least one thing, even if it's only to take an NPC into their heart. That action is not much different, and frankly, takes much less time, than solving riddles, collecting items, or grinding XP.

On a daily basis, religions exist mostly as information overlays on the everyday lives of people that subscribe to them. Believers translate the information they receive from the 3D graphical world into strategic information which determines their action in that world. This action-to-strategic-decision chain can be as ephemeral a believer getting a feeling after prayer that a problem has been resolved by that prayer. The believer may continue in the world without needing to confront the problem through any other action, secure in the knowledge that ‘something has been done.’ What other human activity offers this kind of achievement?

Players communicate, often on a daily basis, with other human beings that are participating in their personal instantiation of the experience. But religions can be pretty different from each other, or at least they contain varying teachings and characters. So are religions just shards of the same virtualspiritual world that humans have concocted? If you’ve ever seen the “all religions have a Golden Rule" posters (“Do unto others as you would have others do unto you,” et cetera) then you’ve seen that the underlying values of nearly all religions are the same.

Players also communicate with the personalities directly tied into the fiction of the world. Saints, gods, buddhas - or NPCs? Though a very High Level of NPC is ususally barred from communicating with the believer, until a certain “level” has been reach, at some point the believer will go to heaven, reach nirvana, or ascend. Or does the believer just level up?

Religions even have their power gamers. I think of John Donne as a religious power gamer. He left the Catholic church for the Anglican church. It might be more that he left one guild for another, seemingly more powerful, guild. His poetry, in which he pleads, demands, and then cajoles with an unmoving non-player character seems as efficient a strategy as any in a world in which your turns are very limited... And he wasn’t even a self-fashioned god or prophet. Aren’t self-fashioned prophets and saints just demanding more agency in the game world? It is called god mode, after all.

Here I am not positing that virtual worlds are religions, but rather that religions are virtual worlds

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