prosthetic knowledge

Stealth Wear by Adam Harvey 

Fashion exhibition of wearable anti-thermal imaging clothing to protect detection from airborne surveillance technology:

Building off previous work with CV Dazzle, camouflage from face detection, Privacy Mode continues to explore the aesthetics of privacy and the potential for fashion to challenge authoritarian surveillance. Presented by PRIMITIVE at TANK MAGAZINE HQ will be a suite of new designs, made in collaboration with NYC fashion designer Johanna Bloomfield, that tackle some of the most pressing and sophisticated forms of surveillance today. Including:

The anti-drone hoodie and anti-drone scarf: garments designed to thwart thermal imaging, a technology used widely by UAVs.

The XX-shirt: a x-ray shielding print in the shape of a heart, that protects your heart from x-ray radiation

And the Off Pocket: an anti-phone accessory that allows you to instantly zero out your phone’s signal

Accompanying each project will be videos and tests revealing the process behind each technology and counter technology.

More Here and Here

Nick Clegg Looking Algorithmically Sad

Remix of a Tumblr meme blog, with images of the UK Deputy Prime Minister run through facial and emotional recognition software.

More Here

Taliban Hands by Joseph DeLappe 

Sculpture based on 3D data from the Game ‘Medal Of Honor’, employing the hands of a Taliban fighter from the game. Note, the top image is a 3D printed version made this year, below are two hand made versions created for an exhibition last year.

The hands of a Taliban fighter, as depicted in the controversial Medal of Honor (Electronic Arts) shooter game. These sculptures were created through a complex process of 3D data extraction from the game for physical construction adapting Pepakura Designer for use with white corrugated plastic. These pieces were created while on residency in China in 2011 for a show at the Where Where Exhibition Space, Beijing.

More Here

UK Prime Minister David Cameron, and London Mayor Boris Johnson, caught dancing during the Spice Girl’s performance at the London 2012 closing ceremony.

[Better source here]

Turbo Sculpture 

A case study of 21st Century Postmodernism by Aleksandra Domanović.

Video photo essay with commentary looks at the after-effects of the wars in former Yugoslavia in relation to public art, where sculptures of world-famous celebrities and pop culture icons were constructed as opposed to local relevant figures.

Turbo Sculpture 2012 from A.D. on Vimeo.

From Space Studios:

The Political and economic turmoil of the early 1990s Yugoslavia rendered the society compliant enough for the concept of ‘turbo culture’ to gain momentum. With all its exaggerations, inordinateness and random amalgamations of both local and global ornamentation, turbo eventually became a prefix for social and media phenomena of the war and post-war period. As a result terms such as turbo politics, turbo television, turbo architecture and turbo urbanism developed…

- excerpt from Turbo Sculpture, Aleksandra Domanović, 2011

‘Turbo sculpture’ is an epiphenomenon of turbo culture. It refers to the depiction of popular non-national media celebrities in public sculpture projects across the former Yugoslavian nations. In recent years turbo sculpture monuments of Bruce Lee (Mostar, 2005), Rocky Balboa (Žitište, 2007), Johnny Weissmuller / Tarzan (Međa, 2007), Bob Marley (Banatski Sokolac, 2007) and Tupac Shakur (Belgrade, forthcoming) have been unveiled.

It is commonly argued that the rejection of the traditional regional/political context of civic monuments (leading to the turbo sculpture age) is a condition of the post-traumatic recalibration of identity and ideology that occurred following the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s.

The video (embedded above) is an updated version from the previous 2010 version.

Dachshund U.N. by Bennett Miller 

Playful art performance piece for the Fierce art festival, where a set resembling the United Nations features dogs as international representatives. From this is tomorrow:

“Italy’s checking out where the action’s at,” chuckled one voice in the crowd. “France is rather yappy,” observed another. The square outside Ikon Gallery in Birmingham was agog with obvious but irresistible gags yesterday as Australian artist Bennett Miller broke the first rule of theatre working with 47 dachshunds in a live art meets architectural installation experiment.

For Dachshund UN Miller had built a large scale model of the famous United Nations office in Geneva, Switzerland. Where normally one would expect to see the great and the good of international politics battling it out for the benefit of the world community, we instead saw a kaleidoscope of West Midlands based sausage dogs. Dachshunds of every shape, size and colour fussed about behind tiny dachshund sized microphones and miniature country name plates.

The set was cleverly designed so that doting owners hovered below remaining clear of the audience’s view but very much in sight to the dogs. Clear of the audience’s view in the loosest sense - hands popped up here and there, heads even, when little Fido needed a spot of reassurance or encouragement to face the cameras rather than showing them his arse as China was wont to do. And when dogs became uncomfortable or fidgety they were moved. The notably oversized United States popped up in Pakistan at one point. In such a scenario the symbolism of the inadvertent was bountiful.

Image from a great (long) post on Adam Curtis’ blog about the history of ‘Think Tanks’ in Britain

Above is an image of Reg Calvert and his wife:

Reg is really the hero of this whole story. He was a bucaneering kind of pop promoter and entrepreneur that emerged in the music business in the 1950s and 60s. He was a working class boy who had gone into the music business in the late 50s as it morphed from rock and roll to pop. He had set up his own school to create new stars in a derelict mansion near Rugby. He called it “The School of Rock n Roll”. Here is a picture of Reg surrounded by his shock troops who were going to assault the charts - one of them was his answer to Elvis Presley - called “Eddie Sex”. Another one was called “Buddy Britten”.

Then Reg found David Sutch - renamed him Screaming Lord Sutch - and created a star. Reg persuaded Sutch to stand as a candidate in the byelection in 1963 that had resulted because of the scandal of the War minister John Profumo - which involved prostitutes and spies, and Sutch became a national figure … He is a strange hybrid of early American garage-band sound crossed with Victorian music hall.

Reg then wanted to set up a pirate radio station, which he did successfully, to the annoyance of Major Oliver Smedley, who was intrinsic in setting up Radio Caroline. What is interesting is that Radio Caroline was believed to be part of the free-spirited phase of the sixties, but the reality wasn’t so:

Radio Caroline was an immediate success. In the media mythology of the 1960s it is seen as part of the rebellious counterculture. In reality it had been deliberately created by the New Right - as a part of their counter-revolution.

The counter revolution was the dissuasion of the Keynes economic ideas and socialist / state intervention and control, and moving towards the ideas of Hayek. More true, though, was that the ideas were re-interpreted to create a power structure that focused on the interests of those in the private sector. Setting up a pirate radio station was really a middle-finger salute to the establishment.

Major Oliver Smedley didn’t like this competition - so he did what all good free-marketeers do. He created a monopoly.

He went to Reg and persuaded him to amalgamate with Radio Caroline - and become part of the pirate network. In return Smedley promised to give Reg a brand new transmitter - which would be much more powerful.

But then things went wrong.

Smedley, with a team, sabotaged the rival station, bringing it to close.

But Reg Calvert was furious. The next evening he drove down from London to Oliver Smedley’s cottage outside a small village in Essex. He got there at about 11pm and started hammering and banging on the door. Major Smedley’s secretary opened the door and Reg burst in.

Smedley then shot Reg Calvert with a shotgun, and Reg died immediately.

This part is just a chapter of the full story Curtis presents, and it is facinating. It includes many pieces of BBC archive material.

Recommended (if you have the time) - link here

Interview with Jimmy Carter from The Guardian (UK)

Very interesting (long read) - I’ve taken a clip from it below and made my own emphasis. Its amazing a POTUS made the effort for peace at all …

 … Jimmy Carter is to Republicans what George W Bush is to Democrats: their very names make their enemies foam at the mouth. And the reassessment is working both ways. For years Carter was considered a failure because he was a single-term president, because he was perceived as weak, and because he refused to take action against America’s newly minted enemy, Iran. But, at this distance, the three great achievements of that single term seem even more of an achievement today: he forced through the Camp David Accords, one of only two peace treaties that Israel has ever signed, isolating Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin at Camp David for 13 days until he gradually wore them down; he also forced through the Panama Canal Treaty, a deeply unpopular move that returned the canal to Panama, but which prevented, many believe, a difficult and nasty war in Latin America; and he brought in an energy policy that saw him reduce America’s dependency on imported oil by half. He was mocked – three decades before global warming became a fashionable concern – for walking around the White House, turning down the thermostats.

What he’s most proud of, though, is that he didn’t fire a single shot. Didn’t kill a single person. Didn’t lead his country into a war – legal or illegal. “We kept our country at peace. We never went to war. We never dropped a bomb. We never fired a bullet. But still we achieved our international goals. We brought peace to other people, including Egypt and Israel. We normalised relations with China, which had been non-existent for 30-something years. We brought peace between US and most of the countries in Latin America because of the Panama Canal Treaty. We formed a working relationship with the Soviet Union.”

It’s the simple fact of not going to war that, given what came next, should be recognised. “In the last 50 years now, more than that,” he says, “that’s almost a unique achievement.” He was bitterly opposed to both Iraq wars. “Iraq was just a terrible mistake. I thought so in Iraq 1, and I was against it in Iraq 2.” And it’s not just George W Bush who has blood on his hands, he says, but Tony Blair too: “I don’t know what went on in private meetings when Tony Blair agreed to it. But had Bush not gotten that tacit support from Blair, I don’t know if the course of history might have been different.”

Full interview here

UPDATED - Put all the fullsize images in this Flickr set

Surreal Reproductions of News International Report

In the UK news, some developments have happened in the on-going investigation by parliament in relation to the conduct of News International and its employees.

Released today on the UK Parliament’s website is a 102 page document (in pdf form) which features a response to questions asked by committee members from News International. In relation to question 2 is a Code Of Conduct brochure, which is obviosuly reproduced by photocopier.

Its interesting coming across these image of a bizarre relationship of images to statements, the sort of thing Barbara Kruger is famous for, plus some irony. Add the black and white reproductive quality and dithering and you have a weird aesthetic effect.

Direct link to the document can be found here

(NB - Sorry if the visual quality is not great on some of these - obviously must have had images resized)

Surreal Reproductions of News International Report

In the UK news, some developments have happened in the on-going investigation by parliament in relation to the conduct of News International and its employees.

Released today on the UK Parliament’s website is a 102 page document (in pdf form) which features a response to questions asked by committee members from News International. In relation to question 2 is a Code Of Conduct brochure, which is obviosuly reproduced by photocopier.

Its interesting coming across these image of a bizarre relationship of images to statements, the sort of thing Barbara Kruger is famous for, plus some irony. Add the black and white reproductive quality and dithering and you have a weird aesthetic effect.

Direct link to the document can be found here

(NB - Sorry if the visual quality is not great on some of these - obviously must have had images resized)

UPDATED - Put all the fullsize images in this Flickr set

pixelpolitics:

PM uses graffiti backdrop…

Faux sincerity +5