little people / black and white future (?)
From the blog of Lebbeus Woods comes an entry entitled "Utopia Redux" which features a series of images by Cooper Union student Daniel Meriador. They depict a strange and silent technological architecture of humankind, juxtaposed, or floating whimsically, against degraded or hostile-seeming landscapes. Using photo-montage, the images are disarmingly simple, and almost iconographic. The typical elements of classic science fiction →
What New Worlds look like
Across Plastic Futures, we have often discussed what the future looks like (or, more precisely, how it is imagined and depicted). In Plastic Futures 1, for instance, we noticed that images of the future (often sci-fi) quite often involve grandiose scenes of enormity in which people become minute figures. So, in Plastic Futures 2 with the next group of participants, →
Crown Casino: ‘A snarling, digitised mutilation’
“The consumer society is a kind of soft police state. We think we have choice, but everything is compulsory. We have to keep buying or we fail as citizens. Consumerism creates huge unconscious needs that only fascism can satisfy. If anything, fascism is the form that consumerism takes when it opts for elective madness.” -- J.G. Ballard, Kingdom Come (2006). "But →
More on architecture, sci-fi and the virtual.
A sort of reply to Nicholas's post on the Lucas Arts: Fracture terra-forming computer game. There's been a lot of talk about how much video games and cinema (especially science fiction) have influenced wider design culture. With advancements in our ability to represent 'reality' digitally, the games and animation industry has also influenced the development of many of the →
“the slippage of contemporary life into sci-fi”
In yet another onto-it post (from 2006) by Geoff Manaugh on his BLDGBLOG he throws up some enticing potentials about future aeroplanes printed out of plastic and the imagined potential of bio-printing. But where it gets really interesting for me, is where he starts to discuss how contemporary life is slipping into sci-fi, and "Science-fiction and social realism will become one →
The Last Question
Trecia's last post reminded me that I've been meaning to share with you a short story by Isaac Asimov called "The Last Question" that I read when I was a kid. It seems pretty dated in many ways (it was written in 1956) but there is an underlying theme in it that has stuck with me. I've always thought of →