Copying these from the notebook before I lose it.  I want to come back to a bunch of these: one of them led to a long Twitter conversation between Deb Chachra, Eleanor Saitta and myself that I need to return to soon.  So, anyway.  Jottings for the outboard memory.

Notes I worked from:

*  What is the legal status of the weather?

*  Are we in fact tending to imagine a city-state?  A city that borders on a closed and self-sufficient (resilient) energy state?  Singapore rather than Brussels?

*  Sonic architecture – footfall energy harvest – road energy harvest

*  Repurposed ambient urban drones

*  The ethics of machine reportage

*  The lessons of archaeo-acoustics – can cities be designed for sound?

*  acoustic mirrors in architecture

*  Buildings that breathe

Notes from things Simon, Rachel and Bruce said:

*  Futurism as radical reductionism

*  Capital as simplification – human life happens in the friction

*  To be an ecological human means understanding our bacterial nature

*  Dematerialised Urbanism

*  Predator Lidar

*  Cities as habitats that domesticate the human

*  Architecture forces solutions on materials

*  It costs $1000 to grow three inches’ worth of tissue culture

[top image cropped from a bad iPhone shot of one of Rachel’s slides]

Fire is materialised time.

—  Hegel (via rossignol)

criminalwisdom:

Tank Mask

‘Masks like this one were worn by British crews in tanks during the First World War. The leather mask is shaped to fit around the eyes and nose and the chain mail was used to protect against splinters from explosions as the tank came under fire. Life inside these primitive vehicles would have been extremely uncomfortable as well as dangerous.’ ~Protective face mask, United Kingdom, 1917-1918)

Via A London Salmagundi.

In which I grab mostly visual posts and pieces off Tumblr and other places and stuff them in my online notebook. All text below is by the linked authors.

* paperbits:

Z Axis Extender Kit for Makerbot Cupcake by Zydac – Thingiverse

Here we have a hardware upgrade that significantly modifies the capabilities of an open-source robotic 3D printer. Which is designed to be printed on that printer. And is uploaded to a social-software site for sharing fabricatable designs, forking them, and resubmitting improvements.

Let’s say that again: this is a downloadable hardware upgrade for an affordable robot that can fabricate its own components.Which I am linking to, because it’s been shared on a kind of Flickr for fabricatable objects.

* kateoplis:

The Hindenburg flying over Manhattan in 1936 or 1937. It burned and crashed in May 1937 at Lakehurst, NJ.

NYT: Streetscapes: The Empire State Building=

* cassandramelena:

(Taken with instagram at Tybee)

* hammersley:

* melisaki:

Christian falangist; Beirut, Lebanon 1978

photo by Raymond Depardon for Magnum

* xplanes:

more of the George White Ornithopter, 1928
(via Paul Dunlop, from the personal collection of Tim White – the inventor’s grandson)

* “Printed patent drawing for a flying machine invented by W. F. Quimby, 1869”
(via Public Domain Images Online) (Xplanes)

* aluxuryproblem:

* kateoplis:

Hong Kong

* laphamsquarterly:

In 1820 a little-known architect named Thomas Wilson proposed a plan for “a metropolitan cemetery on a scale commensurate with the necessities of the largest city in the world, embracing prospectively the demands of centuries,sufficiently capacious to receive five million of the dead, where they may repose in perfect security, without interfering with the comfort, the health, the business, the property, or the pursuits of the living.” What he proposed, in short, was a massive pyramid, its base covering eighteen acres and its height well above that of St. Peter’s Cathedral-a metropolitan sepulcher,a skyscraper for the dead.

Kjell Henriksen Observatory in Norway byVincent Fournier

Untitled – Collage on wood -Dash Snow

FORGIVENESS SoapbyCharles Krafft, soap and porcelain (via Ms Wurzel Tod)

(Kristamas Klousch, frequently linked here before: this image has special resonance for something I’m working on)

(as does this famous image of Maya Deren)

(and I’ll throw this in for the two people in the world who haven’t yet seen it, and so I can assemble my thoughts)

(and also, to some extent, Leyland Kirby/The Caretaker is implicated)

THE CARETAKER – von restorff effect by leylandkirby

(from the final Alexander McQueen collection)

* Feeding Fingers: "Fireflies Make Us Sick" Dir. Steven Lapcevic

* Doll’s Mask by Alice Anderson

*

* (source unknown)

* Jon Lebkowsky’s notes on TED xUT include:

Bruce Sterling: Nonprofit idea that is worth spreading: Design Fiction. Becoming chic in the design world. Has a lot to do with lower coordination costs. Has dropped people across disciplines into each other’s laps. Design Fiction = Has dropped people across disciplines into each other’s laps. Most products of human genius are never real objects, anyway. Designers and fiction writers are up to date with storyboards, user observation studies, scientific experiments, brainstorming. Everybody who’s involved has a different idea about what design fiction is. Recommendations who to follow. FIrst, @bruces. Then Branco Lukic. Dunn and Ravey, critical design, Royal College of Art. BERG, an experience design company in London, have an onboard sci fi writer, Warren Ellis. Julian Bleecker, guru of Near Future Laboratory.Make diegetic prototypes,actual objects, commonly electronic, to make political point. Jake Dunagan, Institute of the Future. Into immersive futurist experiences: future shock therapy.Design fiction has to be scripted, thought up. Not standard futurism. Social intervention or activism.

* Criminal Wisdom:

*

*

*

* I love the idea that Owen Hatherley’s writing a new book called A GUIDE TO THE NEW RUINS OF GREAT BRITAIN

* local people trying to build a realtime "social GPS" map of Southend — more internet-to-hyperlocal

*

* http://www.iamamiwhoami.com/ continues to fascinate – there’s something here worth mining out

* The directorial brand. Who could do this/get away with this today?

*

Delia Derbyshire:

And, yes, I DID already know who Delia Derbyshire was. Sometimes when I post things on here, people have a habit of thinking it’s the first time I’ve heard of whatever I’ve posted. Whereas, sometimes, I’ve been reminded of something, or need to gather material for consideration, and want to collect it all in one place.

Fairly sure I’m going to be writing something involving Derbyshire and her work in the near future.

* in comics, digital is the elephant in the room this year. By the end of the year there will be a small pile of new-gen tablet computers. And, if not Longbox, then probably two or three other places at minimum where you can buy comics in one way or another. And a handful of pirate sites that become tablet(s)-friendly. Digital comics sales are all about this simple question – the threat of cannibalising the bricks-and-mortar comics store network, against a digital system that can reach all the places where comics stores simply don’t exist.

* everyone I’ve spoken to this month has said essentially the same thing, no matter what medium they work in: “It’s the IP, stupid”

* I almost wish I were in the network TV business. When a medium chokes and stutters, all kinds of interesting opportunities emerge from the interstices.

* plaintext still wins.

* "Attention scarcity"

* Rimel Neffati:

* "Vlubä":

* why porting graphic novels to the Kindle makes sense: a million people (or whatever) have Kindles, will want to use their Kindles because they paid a lot of money for them, and therefore need stuff to put on their Kindles. Platform-locked audience: eventually people will start reading outside their immediate interests just to keep using the thing they paid through the nose for

* Suzanne Gerber (longtime readers will remember "Miss Wurzel Tod") trying to set up an art/design space in London

So here I am, asking you, fellow (preferably East) London creative/artist/designer/utopian to join forces with me and share a space for creative endeavours with me.

* note to self: remember to try hooking this up to Posterous.

* why is post-by-mail on (non-hosted?) WordPress such a fuckaround? Why isn’t blogging getting easier? (Answer: it is, if you’re using Tumblr.) Why is it still such an ugly, fiddly process? In essence, it’s no more elegant than the early days of moblogging.

I guess I haven’t done this in a while, and people are starting to ask again, so:

For people wanting to send me to their sites, wanting to email stuff or tell me about new music or send me tips or whatever, I’ve set up a Gmail account that I’ll check once every day or two: warrenellis [-at-] gmail com. This isn’t, I stress, my main email account, and it’s not for asking me when some comic’s coming out (there’s a FAQ for that). Always interested in new music, new art, new connections, new madness etc.

If you need to contact me about writing for print or web, please contact my agent Lydia Wills using the link in the righthand menu bar.

If you need to contact me about anything involving film, tv, games or other things that move, please contact my agent Angela Cheng Caplan using the link in the righthand menu bar.

If you (for god knows what reason) wanted to send me something physical, the best solution right now would probably be to send to my literary agency in New York City.

Warren Ellis
c/o Lydia Wills
Paradigm
360 Park Avenue South
16th floor
New York
New York 10010

I don’t have a solution for people living closer to me as yet. I stop in on my message board Whitechapel several times a day. I leave Twitter on most of the day. I still have an undead MySpace account — I keep it open because I look for music there.

The inevitable pre-release post about the Apple Tablet, or iSlate or iPad or whatever they end up calling it. I’ve mostly been holding fire until I see what the damn thing actually is, but a couple of thoughts:

* The CALL OF DUTY iPhone game app — which is free — is a 22MB download. 3G speeds are good here, I had it in no time. Literally, I called it in over the air, noticed it starting to download, and then, bang, it was loaded. A .cbz Comic Book Reader file is usually around 15MB. I could yank that down at, say, Whispernet-type delivery time.

* Here’s a thing: the Kindle has a per-page filesize cap. 64K. Comics on the Kindle are a fascinating challenge. In broad terms, the Kindle can’t do comics unless they’re black and white and the linework can survive being smashed down to 64K per Kindle-page. (Which doesn’t have to be the same as comics-page, you can still break the whole thing down into a string of individual panels, but:)

* I’ve seen several iPhone-adapted comics, and didn’t like them too much. Unless a comic is written in a very specific way, calling comics out panel-by-panel clips out important informational strata like page design and page breaks. I mean, a baby’s still a baby after it goes through a process like that, but I think you’d still like it better if it came with the arms and legs it originally possessed. Obviously, a tablet is going to fix that, and you’re going to get pages in something similar to their intended scale.

* It’s going to be all about the price, and to a slightly lesser extent about the data plan. Over here in the benighted UK, the best iPhone data plan available to me came with a cap of 1GB/month. That breaks down to, what, 30 meg a day? I imagine I’d get a concerned phonecall from my telecom provider if I was ripping 30 meg out of the air on a daily basis.

* Years ago, I said that I thought an iTunes for comics would be an interesting idea. And then there was Longbox, a still largely-unveiled ’iTunes for comics’ solution. There are strong rumours that Longbox may arrive preloaded on the Apple Moses Tablet. I have my doubts about that, but: the intent has always been that Longbox would be able to read .cbz files.

* Two .cbz files a day would tap out my data plan.

* If Longbox or something similar is preloaded? And the device isn’t too costly, and the local bandwidth is good and the data plan is all-you-can-eat? I wouldn’t want to be a comics store in San Francisco, know what I mean?

* In Britain, a six-hundred-dollar item is inevitably, criminally, a six-hundred-pound item. When it comes to tech, with the related import taxes and other bullshit, you’re always looking at a dollar-pound parity. It’d be funny if Britain was the last bastion of the print comics market because no-one in this recessionary hole could afford the new magic from over the water.

(as ever, this is Notebook: not fully baked, not even close)

* experimental/avant-garde/art/scene/movement newspapers/broadsides/freesheets/one-sheets – often hyperlocal due to distribution issues (stuffing & sending envelopes is a non-trivial pain in the arse), sometimes hyperlocal by design –

– if you’re giving them away, or charging a token amount for the pleasure/privilege of holding the print object and thereby paying the print bill —

– surely a printer-ready ghost of that object could live on archive.org under a CC license that preserves your authorship(s)/curation and otherwise allows the thing to instantiate anywhere some interested person/nutter would like it to?

(none of which is a new idea, but the archive.org bit just popped into my head, as did the idea of someone with fifteen minutes’ access to a newspaper printer yanking down the InDesign (or whatever) file of PAPER SCIENCE and banging off 1500 copies for free distrib at (say) Toronto Comic Arts Festival)

Alexander McQueen, Autumn 2010 collection:

Ann Demeulemeester, Spring 2010 collection:

It’s the faces.

Both images from Fashionphilos

* "reputation economy" is a particularly ’00s thing to be thinking about, but it’s been on my mind tonight.

* reputation economy is the "but" in "he/she’s a dick, but…" Look at the shit Cory gets on and around BoingBoing when he posts about his work; and yet the material he hunts down and brings to the table there buys him (reputation) (indulgence) (kudos)

* and in turn, when Cory/Xeni/operator directs the attention of the people at the table to something Cory/Xeni/operator deems worthwile, their (reputation) sends eyes and ears along that line to the something

* "hunting" and "table" are metaphors speaking to a pre-reputation-economy space: this is in fact still the era of The Feudal Internet, and "reputation economy" does not express in a manner as civilised as the term might suggest. It expresses as Clout.

clout (klout)

Not a subtle thing. But it’s what gets the job done in a Feudal Internet where money = access and no-one wants you to read news on a freesheet in the street anymore.

* (it’s called "notebook," not "reasoned, polished and fully-baked discourse")

(Catherine Kennedy)

(Jessica McCourt)

(via Xplanes)

(Unknown Haitian student photographer, Young Haitian Documentary Photography Group, 2007, via Siege)

(from JUDEX, 1963)