feral intelligence

record on the bones

admin — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 04:11:37 +0000

during the 40s and 50s, access to western music was severely restricted in eastern europe. enterprising music lovers began using wax disk cutters to record the bootlegged sounds of elvis, the beatles, thelonius monk, and john coltrane onto sheets of discarded xray film. called roentgenizdat, the dual-purpose medium allowed deprived fans to “record on the bones.” the authorities were not amused. at least seven individuals suspected of recording or distributing the bone records were tossed into gulags. collectors particularly prize government-created recordings that greeted the unsuspecting music fan with high-volume threats: “you want rock and roll? fuck you, anti-soviet slime!”

józsef hajdú, a photographer and archivist with the hungarian postal museum in budapest, has gathered a number of these haunting images.

architecture predating agriculture?

zorca — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 20:13:06 +0000

recent archeological evidence points to a large-scale architectural wonder constructed 6000 years before stonehenge. the turkish site, gobekli tepe, is situated at the northen tip of the the fertile crescent and boasts dramatic rings of giant stone slabs not unlike those at the much more recent stonehenge. evidence suggests that the builders were well-organized hunter gatherers who had not yet begun to cultivate crops or create settlements. given that the 11,000 year-old massive complex required the coordinated efforts of hundreds of individuals to complete, gobekli tepe goes a long way toward suggesting that architecture, in fact, predates agriculture.

ravens figure it out

zorca — Sat, 21 Oct 2006 00:59:36 +0000

among bird enthusiasts, ravens have long been touted as the smartest of birds. there are a variety of proofs offered, but few are as compelling as this video of japanese ravens who’ve learned to crack many a hard nut through observation and trial-and-error. this raven video, found on the always rewarding ursi’s blog, is narrated by none other than sir david attenborough.

beauteous periodic table

zorca — Fri, 08 Sep 2006 20:08:47 +0000

it’s geeky, but i love having a periodic table of the elements around for reference. there’s something about the order and logic that’s reassuring in this messy world. theodore gray spent years collecting images of each of the elements and has put together a truly gorgeous poster, showcasing each in all its photographic glory. hardcopies aren’t free, they range from $8 (10″x20″) to $45 (27″x53″), but i may just have to order one. reality checks are more important than ever.

ball’s eye photos

admin — Wed, 12 Jul 2006 22:36:57 +0000

i miss pinball. there is something about the jewel-like colors and the clanging sounds and the fact that you actually have to apply body english to rack up a decent score. so many quarters sacrificed. so little to show for it. other than fond reminisces, of course.

for others with a similar bent, photographer kevin tiell has uploaded some gorgeous photos, all taken from the ball’s eye view. check ‘em out.

ancient blatherations

zorca — Tue, 27 Jun 2006 20:31:04 +0000

haha. an old friend, tom jennings, sent a link last nite to a kinda feral something i put together in 1998 for a challenge on the nettime mailing list. the idea was to take a long list of ‘technoblather’ terms and knit them into one narrative. i made it my personal challenge to use as few other words as possible. The entry read:

The crepuscular cowboy blatherations of the crypto-fascist left and the neo-fascist right are just so much penguin dust. Face it. Complex political- cultural articulations are no more than an ideological cyberspasm. Dildonics in a drool cup!

One can invoke the multi-theater warfare and technorealistic-monotheism of Islamic fundamentalism or bemoan the pre-industrial living conditions of information debilitated third-world economies like the Zapatista internationals, but a transnational civil society spouting factoids about local specificities is no longer going to garner broad international consensus. That’s intellectually insane.

What is crystal clear is that cultural and behavioral permissivity (garbage lifestyles) of the subaltern classes leads to deterritorialization and a fundamental phase shift of global proportions. The dominant order may have relied on multinational corporations and the intermediate stratum of consumer-product distribution to impose appropriate cultural forms in the past, but today, raw domination rests with the bandwidth-intensive information-and-service economy.

Ongoing network-based discussions among the new transnational military- economic order would like to suggest that this represents a global hegemony of neoliberalism, or at best a center-left hegemony, but in truth, these circuits of international information exchange will almost certainly harbinger a hegemonic dissolution so fraught with structural unemployment and resource-extraction that the worldmind will boggle.

Our new overlords will be obscenely rich information managers, assisted by their lapdogs, the aesthetic technicians. Relying on the technoid wonders of computer-based art and insidious new information-processing technologies, they will feed us information enriched mental plutonium and we will call it manna. May the gods forgive us.

are they awake?

zorca — Tue, 20 Jun 2006 07:55:00 +0000

there’s something viscerally satisfying about the simplicity of the DaylightMap site. clean lines and quick response echo its google map roots. bookmark it and you’ll never call paris before dawn again. (unless you’re drunk dialling, of course.) time-travelers will appreciate that you can enter any date and any time and see which arcs of the globe were/will be in sun and which in the dark. stalkers will find the bookmarking tool handy — you can not only quickly check to see if saved locales are dark or light, you’re shown sunrise and sunset times, along with length of day.

ever get those posthuman blues?

zorca — Mon, 19 Jun 2006 05:01:48 +0000

if so, might wanna pop on over to the posthuman blues blog and see if something there doesn’t cheer you up. the brainchild of mac tonnies, it’s a grabbag of links and pithy blurbs, each a little more curious than the last. right now, there are pointers to NASA shuttle schedules, naked babe book promotion (replete with kafka references), bruce sterling’s cyberpunk reading list, the sacred teat of gaea, astrobiological imperatives, steven hawking’s call for space colonies, possible prehistoric human record of a super nova, cheap drinking water from the ocean, and an article about how coffee makes you more open-minded. check it out. i know i will be.

terri nelson’s doppelganger

zorca — Tue, 06 Jun 2006 17:32:55 +0000

terri nelson works with mercury studios, a portland, oregon comics studio. it used to be that when you searched on “terri nelson mercury” her name would come up first. meanwhile, a mr. terry nelson has joined the firm of mercury/fleishman-hillard. now it wouldn’t have bothered terri nelson that another’s name now tops hers own for certain google searches, but this other terry nelson, this usurper, if you will, was bush-cheney’s former political director and would like to claim credit for the election of his clients. in response to a press release by his new firm announcing his hiring, ms. terri nelson issued her own press release. it’s well worth a read. just for the record, mr. terry nelson is now working to support john mccain’s political efforts.

what is ‘old?’

admin — Wed, 10 May 2006 00:16:45 +0000

if you do a search on ‘oldest living human,’ you find many contenders from many nations. few come close to cruz hernandez. a resident of san agustin, el salvador, senora hernandez was born in 1878 and today is her 128th birthday. a midwife her entire life, she didn’t retire until four years ago. the mother of thirteen children and grandmother of 60, she lives with her 80-year-old daughter, patrona. when asked the secret to her long life a few years ago, she responded that she never bathes during the new moon. also, she recommends beer and meat.