We’re Solarpunk because the only other options are denial or despair. —Adam Flynn1 By now, dystopia may have become a luxury genre. Indulging in miserable future scenarios is not something everyone has time for.

In 2006 a man walked into an internet cafe in Kassel, Germany, and shot dead Halit Yozgat, a 21-year-old member of the Turkish-German family who owned it. It was the ninth in a series of racist killings by neo-Nazis, the motivation for which the police persistently refused to admit.

Scientists have already shown that termites build their mounds in a unique way involving "bio-cementation", a process where grains of soil are fused together into small balls with moisture, saliva and excretion.

To colonize Mars, researchers are developing a new kind of concrete that doesn't require water and is more than twice as strong. Concrete has been critical to the colonization of our own planet.

Imagine constructing a building with no blueprints or architects, and no inkling of what the finished edifice should look like. It sounds like a recipe for disaster, and yet that’s what ants and termites do all the time—and the results speak for themselves.

The First Zombie-Proof House: via: all-thats-interesting:

Somehow, ritual drunk-conversation concerning team captains for the apocalypse has become a major part of the lives of 20-somethings. Having been matured in the Grandaddy-crowned masterpiece film (put “A.M. 180” on and forget that you have a job) 28 Days Later and the best-selling Zombie Survival Guide, we’re all a little too ready to deal with the 2012 of our dreams.

(Michel Foucault, 1967)

The great obsession of the nineteenth century was, as we know, history: with its themes of development and of suspension, of crisis, and cycle, themes of the ever-accumulating past, with its great preponderance of dead men and the menacing glaciation of the world. The nineteenth century found its essential mythological resources in the second principle of thermaldynamics- The present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space. We are in the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed. We are at a moment. I believe, when our experience of the world is less that of a long life developing through time than that of a network that connects points and intersects with its own skein. One could perhaps say that certain ideological conflicts animating present-day polemics oppose the pious descendents of time and the determined inhabitants of space.

The notion of SHEARING LAYERS is one of the centerpieces of Brand's How Buildings Learn [Brand 1994]. Brand, in turn synthesized his ideas from a variety of sources, including British designer Frank Duffy, and ecologist R. V. O'Neill. Brand, Page 13

Brand quotes Duffy as saying: "Our basic argument is that there isn't any such thing as a building. A building properly conceived is several layers of longevity of built components".

Brand distilled Duffy's proposed layers into these six: Site, Structure, Skin, Services, Space Plan, and Stuff. Site is geographical setting. Structure is the load bearing elements, such as the foundation and skeleton. Skin is the exterior surface, such as siding and windows. Services are the circulatory and nervous systems of a building, such as its heating plant, wiring, and plumbing. The Space Plan includes walls, flooring, and ceilings. Stuff includes lamps, chairs, appliances, bulletin boards, and paintings.

These layers change at different rates. Site,

The structure of the film is that of a heist movie, but if the film were to be slotted into a genre, that genre would have to be science fiction. Personally, I would say it’s cyberpunk. But it’s a strange kind of cyberpunk where the emphasis is less on technology and more on the film-noir mood and transcendental possibilities of the genre.

In fact, technology in Inception is notable by its absence. There is a piece of hardware to enable the central premise of the film, but it’s of no more importance than the hardware used in Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind—the last great science fiction film to cover similar territory.

Both films also avoid making any reference to specific dates. We assume that the narrative plays out in the very near future but we’re never explicitly told that. It strikes me that both films are attempting to place the action in a kind of continuous present.

Inception is particularly adept at avoiding anything that would date the film. Nothing dates a story qu

At the age of 17 he began dissecting corpses from the church graveyard. Between the years 1508 and 1512 he painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome. Michelangelo Buonarroti—known by his first name the world over as the singular artistic genius, sculptor and architect—was also an anatomist, a secret he concealed by destroying almost all of his anatomical sketches and notes. Now, 500 years after he drew them, his hidden anatomical illustrations have been found—painted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, cleverly concealed from the eyes of Pope Julius II and countless religious worshipers, historians, and art lovers for centuries—inside the body of God.

In 1990, physician Frank Meshberger published a paper in the Journal of the American Medical Association deciphering Michelangelo’s imagery with the stunning recognition that the depiction in God Creating Adam in the central panel on the ceiling was a perfect anatomical illustration of the human brain in cross section.

By drawing a diagram, a ground plan of a house, a street plan to the location of a site, or a topographic map, one draws a "logical two dimensional picture." A "logical picture" differs from a natural or realistic picture in that it rarely looks like the thing it stands for. It is a two dimensional analogy or metaphor - A is Z.

The Non-Site (an indoor earthwork)* is a three dimensional logical picture that is abstract, yet it represents an actual site in N.J. (The Pine Barrens Plains). It is by this dimensional metaphor that one site can represent another site which does not resemble it - this The Non-Site. To understand this language of sites is to appreciate the metaphor between the syntactical construct and the complex of ideas, letting the former function as a three dimensional picture which doesn't look like a picture. "Expressive art" avoids the problem of logic; therefore it is not truly abstract. A logical intuition can develop in an entirely "new sense of metaphor" free of na

PLANNING IS SOMETHING that people learned from God. The lesson might be said to have begun with the prescriptions God laid out for His earthly habitation among the Israelites: the Tabernacle that housed Him in the desert, and then the Temple that was His residence in Jerusalem. The dimensions of these structures were dictated by a divine blueprint. The Temple gave birth to a city, and from it emerged a civilization. We are descendants of this tradition, irrespective of such trivialities as whether one identifies as a “believer.”

Among the defining attributes of now are ever tinier gadgets, ever shorter attention spans, and the privileging of marketplace values above all. Life is manically parceled into financial quarters, three-minute YouTube videos, 140-character tweets. In my pocket is a phone/computer/camera/video recorder/TV/stereo system half the size of a pack of Marlboros. And what about pursuing knowledge purely for its own sake, without any real thought of, um, monetizing it? Cute.

And so in our hyper-capitalist flibbertigibbet day and age, the new Large Hadron Collider, buried about 330 feet beneath the Swiss-French border, near Geneva, is a bizarre outlier.

The L.H.C., which operates under the auspices of the European Organization for Nuclear Research, known by its French acronym, cern, is an almost unimaginably long-term project. It was conceived a quarter-century ago, was given the green light in 1994, and has been under construction for the last 13 years, the product of tens of millions of man-hours. It’s also gargantuan: a circular tunnel 17 miles around, punctuated by shopping-mall-size subterranean caverns and fitted out with more than $9 billion worth of steel and pipe and cable more reminiscent of Jules Verne than Steve Jobs.

The believe-it-or-not superlatives are so extreme and Tom Swiftian they make you smile. The L.H.C. is not merely the world’s largest particle accelerator but the largest machine ever built. At the center of just one of the four main experimental stations installed around its circumference, and not even the biggest of the four, is a magnet that generates a magnetic field 100,000 times as strong as Earth’s. And because the super-conducting, super-colliding guts of the collider must be cooled by 120 tons of liquid helium, inside the machine it’s one degree colder than outer space, thus making the L.H.C. the coldest place in the universe.

Art is imitation only to the extent to which it is objective expression, far removed from psychology. There may have been a time long ago when this expressive quality of the objective world generally was perceived by the human sensory apparatus. It no longer is. Expression nowadays lives on only in art. Through expression art can keep at a distance the moment of being-for-other which is always threatening to engulf it. Art is thus able to speak in itself. This is the realization through mimesis. Art's expression is the antithesis of 'expressing something.' Mimesis is the ideal of art, not some practical method or subjective attitude aimed at expressive values. What the artist contributes to expression is his ability to mimic, which sets free in him the expressed substance." [1]

Adorno's critique of mimesis proposes a method of dialectical reflection which goes against the grain of the positivistic tendency of modern consciousness, which has a tendency to substitute means for ends. "Ar

At first glance, the central premise of the Hayward’s summer show seems to court too eagerly the tedious controversy around neuroaesthetics. "Walking in My Mind" aims to "transform the gallery’s unique spaces into a giant brain by bringing together large-scale installations that explore the workings of the mind in different ways ... while at the same time inviting visitors to explore their own thought processes." It’s potentially a clunky conceit, and it risks the sort of interdisciplinary pratfalls that have made for such bathetic reading in recent attempts to bring together art and brain science. It’s as yet unclear exactly what, if anything, is to be gained from the neurologist Semir Zeki’s assertion that artists "are unknowingly exploiting the organization of the brain"; nor does John Onians’s book Neuroarthistory (2007) really convince with its claim that art critics like Ruskin and Pater were actually neurologists in disguise all along. Fortunately, Stephanie Rosenthal, the Haywa

Welcome to the Atlas Obscura, a compendium of this age's wonders, curiosities, and esoterica. The Atlas Obscura is a collaborative project with the goal of cataloguing all of the singular, eccentric, bizarre, fantastical, and strange out-of-the-way places that get left out of traditional travel guidebooks and are ignored by the average tourist. If you're looking for miniature cities, glass flowers, books bound in human skin, gigantic flaming holes in the ground, phallological museums, bone churches, balancing pagodas, or homes built entirely out of paper, the Atlas Obscura is where you'll find them.

How architectural and design choices are mediated and ultimately over-ruled by user choice, reflexion, repetition and desire.

Game developers are unconstrained in their designs for the enemy. Such designers will be punished with poor sales, not death in the gulag, if their designs for the overlord are unpopular. They could go anywhere with the homes of evildoers: halls of electric fluorescence, palaces carved from corduroy, suburban back yards.

And yet, in spite of this freedom, most videogame designers choose to make a definite connection to familiar – or real-world – architecture. Perhaps they think that the evil lair must emanate evil. There's surely no room for ambiguity with videogame evildoers: the gamer needs to know that it's okay to aim for hi-score vengeance.

Conveniently, evil already has a visual language. Put another way: I have seen the face of evil, and it is a caricature of gothic construction. There's barely a necromancer in existence whose dark citadel doesn't in some way reflect real-world Romanian landmarks, such as Hunyad or Bran Castle. The visual theme of these games is so heavily dep

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