May 16th, 2012 | comics talk
CASANOVA, one of my very favourite comics, reaches the end of its third volume on June 20. After the cut, please enjoy a preview of CASANOVA: AVARITIA #4 by Matt Fraction and Gabriel Ba. And then go and buy all the books if you haven’t already and then squat by your comics store or iPad like a stoned gibbon with a sore bum until this wonderful comic is released. Begin.
May 16th, 2012 | guest informant
I asked designer, writer and researcher Justin Pickard to write to you about whatever was interesting him currently… a few months ago. Today, he came back to me with an entire document, entitled A GONZO FUTURIST MANIFESTO. You will find the link to that document, a free PDF, at the end of what follows. But he called out the following section as being a nice central piece to run, and I agree. So Justin Pickard presents to you:
In 1991, Bruce Sterling gave a speech in San Jose. Extolling the strengths and virtues of the power weirdo, he urged the audience to avoid the spring-loaded bear-trap of mediocrity:
You don’t get there by acculturating. Don’t become a well-rounded person. Well rounded people are smooth and dull. Become a thoroughly spiky person. Grow spikes from every angle. Stick in their throats like a puffer fish.
(Sterling, 1991)
With an idiosyncratic outlook and skill set, the power weirdo — and its subset, the gonzo futurist — is particularly well-placed to deal with a turbulent decade. With an eye on the road ahead, she can meet or dodge situations as they arise, charting a clear course through the VUCA battlefields of a turboparalytic world. One thing we can say: in 5-10 years time, ours will be a world of ubiquitous computing (in some form). When sensors are everyone, and the ‘big data’ of the post-normal threatens to bury us all in a torrent of noise, finely tuned sense-making capabilities may prove to be your greatest asset. For futurist Scott Smith, ‘warehousing massive amounts of data is simply an exercise in hoarding if we can’t see, contextualize, and use the patterns in the noise.’ (Smith, 2011) The pattern analyst is less likely to find her job outsourced or automated, but, to effectively lever the patterns in the noise, we have to be able distinguish between real patterns and the faces in the clouds.
We need pattern recognition. Pattern Recognition. The protagonist of William Gibson’s 2003 novel of the same name, Cayce Pollard, though something of a ‘self-facilitating media node’, provides a model for the gonzo futurist. For Cayce, the lived experience of 9/11 flipped a switch somewhere, hyper-sensitising her to the aesthetics of corporate branding. By the time the story begins, she’s found a niche as a coolhunter and creative consultant, exploiting her body’s physical, pre-cognitive reaction to logos (the bad ones induce nausea and panic).
Dorotea removes an eleven-inch square of art board from the envelope. Holding it at the upper corners, between the tips of perfectly manicured forefingers, she displays it to Cayce. (…) There is a drawing there, a sort of scribble in thick black Japanese brush, a medium she knows to be the in-house hallmark of Herr Heinzi himself. To Cayce, it most resembles a syncopated sperm, as rendered by the American underground cartoonist Rick Griffin, circa 1967. She knows almost immediately that it does not, by the opaque standards of her inner radar, work. She has no way of knowing how she knows.
(Gibson, 2003)
Though Cayce’s ‘base’ of domain-specific knowledge is both wide and deep — note the reference to Rick Griffin — she has no way of knowing how she knows. She’s aware of an ‘inner radar,’ but, as something separate from her conscious mind, has no idea how it works. Though Cayce leverages her capacities as a source of income, her role of sensitive-slash-coolhunter is more bodily disposition than career. Unpicking the details and implications of Gibson’s novel, literary theorist Lauren Berlant describes how Cayce’s disposition allows her ‘to ride the wave of the moment, to make her situation what it is, a thing to live through, be embedded in, and feel out’. Sounds a bit gonzo, doesn’t it?
Lacking Cayce’s near-supernatural capabilities, our gonzo futurist needs a prosthetic substitute; some kind of cognitive aikido. This would be a general framework that would allow her to easily grok the dynamics of the post-normal world, and identify the key sites and tipping points for action. To my knowledge, the closest currently existing equivalent is the OODA loop. Originally devised by US military strategist John Boyd, the OODA loop is a rolling heuristic cycle, a structure for those who need to make quick decisions under pressure. OODA. Observe, orient, decide, act.
The gonzo futurist is a super-empowered hopeful individual. She may have been a ‘graduate with no future’ (Mason, 2011), or the victim of public sector cuts, but has since grieved and moved on. She plays, tests, and play tests; making the best of the tools and technologies at her disposal. Comfortable calling on (and being called on by) her friends, peers, and tribe, her sense-making skills are social and connected. Her thinking may, occasionally, ‘be located inside the brains of other people.’ (Wheeler, 2011)
The gonzo futurist is a ‘deep generalist’ (Cascio, 2011) and ‘analytical polyglot’ (Smith, 2011). She has an ‘almost supernatural awareness of impacts and implications … [is] ready to adapt when necessary, building long-lasting systems when possible.’ (Cascio, 2011) Like Cayce Pollard, she is a ‘woman of affect, not of feeling (…) [an] empress of the amygdala.’ (Berlant)
The gonzo futurist is resilient. She works smart, not hard. She has one eye on the ‘adjacent possible’, switches codes, and contributes to the commons. She may be privileged, but has no time for competition, alpha male dick-waving, or beggar-thy-neighbour. Her success does not come at your expense.
Bombarded by stimuli, the gonzo futurist is an OODA cyborg. Observe, orient, decide, act.
Justin Pickard is a self-described ‘gonzo futurist’, freelance researcher, and associate at London-based design practice Superflux. You can find him on Twitter @justinpickard.
May 16th, 2012 | events
Matt Staggs interviewed me for The Disinfo Podcast, and now it’s online.
(Using, I have to note, a photo of me that must be 12 years old, complete with now-shaven head-hair.)
I haven’t been interviewed over the phone for, frankly, years, and I’m terrible at it. I can’t even bring myself to listen to this. But you know, feel free to listen in and cringe for me.
May 16th, 2012 | closedown, music
What is the sound of being locked in a box, being transported to a bleak riverside, being gently slid into the river, sinking to the bottom and then being slowly enfolded by cold black waters, closing your eyes, opening them again some endless time later, realising you are conscious but not breathing, finding yourself in a stark, denuded landscape, alone, blasted by ice-razor winds, crawling into a solitary dark stone hovel on the moorland for shelter, being grabbed from behind, thrown into a box, being locked in the box, being transported to a bleak riverside, being gently slid into the river, sinking to the bottom and then being slowly enfolded by cold black waters and then closing your eyes?
It is the sound of Disemballerina’s “Sundowning.” Good night.
May 16th, 2012 | brainjuice
May 15th, 2012 | researchmaterial
Conan! What Is Best In Life is a long-standing warrenellis dot com tradition. You should not view Conan! posts if you or your workplace are squeamish, as some of them are… probably not what is best in life. You can see lots of Conan! posts here.
May 15th, 2012 | comics talk
Farel Dalrymple is producing some wonderful work in this first chapter of what you might describe as a "stream of unconsciousness" comic, IT WILL ALL HURT at Study Group. It seems to be an exercise in capturing the shifting settings and embodiments of dream reality, and it works (for me) almost eerily well. Even though he has a shelf of awards by now, Dalrymple still seems to me to be under-read and low-profile in the medium. He’s one of those creators that people should be talking about every day. I know he’s working on a book for First Second right now, and he recently changed gears to produce a fine illustration job for an issue of PROPHET.
IT WILL ALL HURT will be adding new sections every Friday, I believe.
May 15th, 2012 | comics talk
From his Flickr. His new graphic novel is SHARKNIFE DOUBLE Z. There’s a preview of it here. I dimly recall writing a quote for its back cover.
May 15th, 2012 | closedown, music
Some proper witched-out space music for the overnight. I fully expect this to trigger dreams of ghost women on gently collapsing space stations, morphine moondust meditation and the soft but insistent refusal to open doors. Sleep well, when you sleep.
G’night.
May 15th, 2012 | brainjuice
May 14th, 2012 | music, researchmaterial
Via Found Objects, it would seem our comrades at The Soulless Party are up to something haunty and dischronal. The decontextualised footage in the last half of the piece does work with the music to genuinely odd effect.
May 14th, 2012 | microlog
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You didn’t see the cover for my next novel, GUN MACHINE, yet? Really?
Click here for massively embiggened version. |
May 14th, 2012 | researchmaterial
So I’d been wondering what happened to the mooted revival of NEW WORLDS magazine, entitled in this iteration MICHAEL MOORCOCK’S NEW WORLDS. (Previously commented on here, a little over a year ago.) It’s been due… a few times. And I knew they’d shed at least one staff member due to “artistic differences.” So I went to their Facebook page, which appears to be the only public source of information, and found the below, posted on April 17th:
So here we are, post Easter con and still no New Worlds. Why is this? I hear those of you who still care cry, well the simple answer (and the one that happens to be the truth) is, that we were having some difficulties with the codec for the videos we wish/need to include with the site. This we have now been assured is behind us and we should soon be happy! I do have to give out a BIG thanks to those who have been creating, what is, a quite a complex site completely for free. As a salve to our heavy consciences we do plan on releasing issue 2 within a month or so of issue 1 (provided we generate enough sales from 1 to pay our authors) So we should be on course to publish 4 in the year! Please bear with us this was a much bigger programing job than we imagined. Best
Roger
I left a message, asking if they really are hosting their own video content.
Publishing a magazine is hard, whether on paper or online. But it would seem to me that if you’re handcoding your own video players rather than stuffing your content into Vimeo and letting them do the work, you’re over-coding and making life harder than it really needs to be.
Given that the dedicated website remains static and mostly empty… well, I’m the last guy in the creative industry who should be commenting on things that are “late,” but this would seem to have joined the corpsepile of attempts to continue NEW WORLDS.
Maybe they should have just mounted the whole thing on a Tumblr and had done with it.
May 14th, 2012 | researchmaterial
In Star Trek lore, the first Starship Enterprise will be built by the year 2245. But today, an engineer has proposed — and outlined in meticulous detail – building a full-sized, ion-powered version of the Enterprise complete with 1G of gravity on board, and says it could be done with current technology, within 20 years.
Someone using the fills-you-with-confidence name of “BTE Dan” is in fact hellbent on making an interplanetary service vehicle. All he needs is 0.27% of American GDP and a few spare nuclear reactors.
buildtheenterprise.org seems to be having some downtime today, but PhysOrg talked to him at the first link about his plans for a machine that could reach Mars in ninety days. It’s quite interesting, really, insofar as he’s probably right about most of the technological knowledge and expertise already being in place. (Most: I suspect that some of the things he wants onboard just couldn’t happen within twenty years of today, and sticking a megawatt laser on the front is just boy’s-toys.)
The two real kickers that he thinks he’s solved however, are these – a full Earth gravity onboard and constant acceleration.
Obvious area of fascination: taking a fictional object and attempting to make it real as a historic feat of mega-engineering. Something that started out as a plastic model on a stick in a tv studio becoming the most expensive single object of all time. And the kind of perverse, idee-fixe-bound imagination that takes a fictional spaceship that could travel the galaxy and make it a real spaceship that can do local tours of the solar system.
Still. BTE Dan isn’t frothing at the mouth, and it’s kind of a charming idea, in its way. Worth a look.
May 14th, 2012 | stuff2012
| The new record by Hildur Gudnadottir is remarkable. It was recorded as a single live performance, with no post-production tampering – all the sound treatment happened in-performance.
Imagine a space between Zoe Keating’s driftier experiments and Julianna Barwick’s surreal single-voice choruses. It’s an incredibly beautiful, weightless piece of music that develops less like a composition and more like a weather system. I’ve listened to it a few times a day for a few days, and am still finding new cloud formations in it. |
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Among many other places, it can be purchased from the label. |
May 14th, 2012 | comics talk
Rafael Grampa’s been producing some fine covers lately, but, for my money, none finer than this piece for Brian Wood & Kristian Donaldson’s new comics project at Dark Horse, THE MASSIVE. Colours by Dave Stewart.
Grampa’s Flickrstream is here.
May 14th, 2012 | brainjuice
May 13th, 2012 | daybook
Molly Crabapple sent me this out of the blue this evening.
Regular broadcasting resumes on Monday.
May 13th, 2012 | brainjuice
May 12th, 2012 | closedown
I leave you for the weekend with this: a short film written and directed by Javier Grillo-Marxuach (LOST, THE MIDDLEMAN) and featuring Amber Benson and Adam Busch (BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER). G’night.
WARREN ELLIS
