{technology} – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 794

Green Castle (1975) by Roger Dean.

• Roger Dean’s first book, Views, was published 50 years ago this month. The book sold 60,000 copies in its initial run, and was reprinted twice the following year. This extraordinary success gave Dean and his associates at the newly-formed Dragon’s Dream the resources to publish a line of art books by other imaginative artists such as Chris Foss, Ian Miller and Syd Mead. Without Views there wouldn’t have been a Dragon’s Dream, and without Dragon’s Dream there wouldn’t have been Paper Tiger, a publishing house launched by Roger Dean, Martyn Dean and Hubert Schaafsma in 1976. All this activity made a huge impression on me at the time, with books that provided a showcase for artists whose work would otherwise only be seen on the covers of paperbacks or vinyl records.

• At Alan Moore World: 3 novels and The Great When, an extract from a new video interview in which Alan talks about three of the books that have influenced his novels.

• At the BFI: “Dead of Night: 80 years on, Ealing’s anthology horror is still a waking nightmare,” says Edward Parnell.

…Drexler’s vision of nanotechnology was a chimera. It was like the philosophers’ stone of the alchemists: magic dressed in the science of its time, by means of which almost anything becomes possible. I call these oneiric technologies: they do not and quite probably cannot exist, but they fulfil a deep-rooted dream, or a nightmare, or both.

These are not simply technologies of the future that we don’t yet have the means to realise, like the super-advanced technologies that Arthur C Clarke said we would be unable to distinguish from magic. Rather, oneiric technology takes a wish (or a terror) and clothes it in what looks like scientific raiment so that the uninitiated onlooker, and perhaps the dreamer, can no longer tell it apart from what is genuinely on the verge of the possible. Perpetual motion is one of the oldest oneiric technologies, although only since the 19th century have we known why it won’t work (this knowledge doesn’t discourage modern attempts, for example by allegedly exploiting the ‘quantum vacuum’); anti-gravity shielding is probably another.

Philip Ball on unrealistic prognostications in science, from nanotechnology to artificial intelligence

• New music: Rún by Rún; Other Sides Of Nowhere by Underwater Sleep Orchestra; I Believe In You by Ladytron.

• At Dennis Cooper’s it’s Curtis Harrington‘s Day.

• Steven Heller’s font of the month is Ritualist.

• A View From Her Room (1982) by Weekend | A Private View (1982) by Bill Nelson | Aerial View (2014) by Jon Hassell

Weekend links 773

The Tower of Babel from Turris Babel (1679) by Athanasius Kircher, showing how wide the Tower would have to be at its base to reach the Moon.

• The week’s literary resurrection: Penguin announced Shadow Ticket, a new novel by Thomas Pynchon. “Hicks McTaggart, a one-time strikebreaker turned private eye, thinks he’s found job security until he gets sent out on what should be a routine case, locating and bringing back the heiress of a Wisconsin cheese fortune who’s taken a mind to go wandering…”

• The week’s musical resurrection: Stereolab announced Instant Holograms On Metal Film, their first new album since Not Music in 2010. Aerial Troubles is the new single with a video which has prompted complaints in the comments about the use of AI treatments for the visuals.

• At Public Domain Review: Modern Babylon: Ziggurat Skyscrapers and Hugh Ferriss’ Retrofuturism, a long read by Eva Miller. Previously: The Metropolis of Tomorrow by Hugh Ferriss.

• This week in the Bumper Book of Magic: Ben Wickey is selling some of the original art from his Lives of the Great Enchanters pages.

• At Wormwoodiana: The Golden Age of Second-Hand Bookshops is now. Mark Valentine explains.

• “Alvin Lucier is still making music four years after his death – thanks to an artificial brain.”

• At Colossal: Hundreds of fantastic creatures inhabit a sprawling universe by Vorja Sánchez.

• Coming soon from Radiance Films: A blu-ray disc of Essential Polish Animation.

• Pattern design and illustration by Gail Myerscough.

• Steven Heller’s font of the month is Homage Script.

• New music: Sabi by Odalie.

• RIP Max Romeo.

• Babylon (1968) by Dr John | War In A Babylon It Sipple Out Deh (1976) by Max Romeo | Babylonian Tower (1982) by Minimal Compact

Emitter: The Fluid Art Colour Machine

Roman De Giuli’s Emitter is a machine for producing and modulating paint drips whose smeared patterns are recorded with a high-definition video camera. This is another niche enthusiasm which YouTube has been encouraging of late: short videos of intense colours or patterns filmed in 4K or higher. De Giuli goes to more trouble than most when creating his vivid smears, on a technical level anyway. Beyond a certain point you have to start doing more with your colour splashes than stitching the best bits together with a house soundtrack. Looking at the YT comments reveals a horde of happy viewers so I’m evidently I’m not the ideal audience, especially when my CMYK-attuned eyes scream “Out of gamut!” whenever they encounter very intense RGB colour combinations. You can see more Emitter videos at De Giuli’s YT channel. (Via MetaFilter.)

Weekend links 768

The Mona Lisa as it looks run through the Random Pixelate setting in Glitch Lab.

• “We don’t have enough Dada in this world of too much data. Something is needed to break-through the over-curated simulacrum that is the online world in order to let in a bit of non-artificial light. One way to make a break is through the deliberate cultivation of the glitch.” Justin Patrick Moore on circuit-bending, glitch music and Surrealist composition.

• The seventh installment of Smoky Man’s exploration of The Bumper Book of Magic has been posted (in Italian) at (quasi). There’s an extract in English at Alan Moore World.

• New music: Remember The Clouds by Philippe Deschamp, and Requiem For The Ontario Science Centre by Tony Price.

• Michael Brooke offers suggestions for where to begin with Polish film director Wojciech Has

• At Printmag: A new book shares the artistic odyssey of Iranian designer Farshid Mesghali.

• The Letraset Graphic Materials Handbook for the year 1987.

• Steven Heller’s font of the month is Cubo.

• Yet more Polish film posters.

• A cat’s eye view of Japan.

• RIP Roy Ayers.

• Glitch (1993) by Moody Boyz | Glitch (1994) by Autechre | Glitch (2011) by Brian Eno And The Words Of Rick Holland

Weekend links 767

East Totem West head shop poster, from DJ Food‘s latest delve into the psychedelic poster auctions.

• The week in science-fiction illustration: Joachim Boaz on Rodger B. MacGowan’s “approachable New Wave art”; and Andrew Liptak talks to Adam Rowe about Rowe’s Worlds Beyond Time: Sci-Fi Art of the 1970s.

• At The Wire: Philip Brophy sets out his intentions for the return of his long running column on film music.

• At Public Domain Review: Gustatory Wisdom: Bruegel the Elder’s Twelve Proverbs (1558).

Though the project’s genesis predated Roeg’s involvement, Cammell said that his codirector “needled” him: “He provoked me, made me focus more and more clearly on what I was trying to say.” It was Roeg’s visual sensibility, Cammell graciously admitted, that “mobilized” and “improved” his own concepts. It’s appropriate that the movie concerns two men who become fully realized only in meeting and merging with each other. Turner, said Cammell, “believes himself to be at the end of his creative life. He’s a man in despair. And then destiny brings him his mirror image, Chas, the man in whom he sees what he was and what he could be again.”

Roeg and Cammell were hardly in despair in 1968; both were novices in the foothills of their own artistry. It is not fanciful, though, to see in their collaboration something like the same lightning connection that forms between Turner and Chas. Cammell said that he set out “to make a transcendental movie.” In achieving that goal, he stretched and challenged not just himself but cinema too. Even as Performance closed the lid definitively on the sixties, it opened the door to a radical new way of making films.

Ryan Gilbey on Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg’s Performance

• At A Year In The Country: Broadcast and Pathways Through Otherworldly Villages.

• “Pilot is an elegant and expressive display serif,” says Kim Tidwell.

• Winners of the 2025 World Nature Photography Awards.

• New music: Forgotten Worlds by Rodrigo Passannanti.

• Janus Rose presents her Digital Packrat Manifesto.

• RIP Jamie Muir and Gene Hackman.

• Pilots Of Purple Twilight (1981) by Tangerine Dream | Pilots (2000) by Goldfrapp | I’m With The Pilots (2001) by Ladytron