Furtherfield have published my review of the “Digital Pioneers” show at the V&A –

Embracing cliche, and alphabetically –

Good –

Demize – Maleficent (Nine Inch Nails fronted by Danielle Dax rather than Trent Reznor)
Divided – Theoretical Girl (well-observed superior chamber folk )
Djin – Queen Adreena (Heavy and scary, sometimes too much so but worth it anyway)
Flattery Not Included – Mister B The Gentleman Rhymer (sharp, witty chap-hop fun)
From An Ancient Star – Belbury Poly (irresistible mid-life-crisis nostalgia electronica)
Here She Comes A-Tumblin’ – Birdeatsbaby (excellent contemporary cabaret)
Lungs – Florence and the Machine (ignore the soi disant radical music press backlash)
More Mature Escapades in Hi-FI – Furny (surprisingly affecting mash-up satire)
Primary Colours – The Horrors (fun even when you remember the source of the pastiche)
33 – Esben And The Witch (Good post-Goth)

Bad –

Defiance – Lahannya (the industrial version of Ben Elton’s “We Will Rock You”)
Hands – Little Boots (technically competent but aesthetically and affectively vacuous)
Quicksilver – The Cruxshadows (bad Eurodisco is not the future of Goth)
Sunn O’s album (Not heard it, but a million middle-aged music journos can’t be right)
To Lose My Life – White Lies (want to be Joy Division? Work at the Job Centre)
XX – The XX (Remedial Pixies with Doctor Avalanche on drums and no song structure)

What did I miss?

Gah Punk!

Back in the day I found the name “cyberpunk” utterly cringeworthy. But William Gibson’s sprawl trilogy did do what punk did, which was to aesthetically critique socio-economic conditions through art. Gibson’s Reagonomic future seen through the eyes of those that it chews up and spits out is in its attitude recognisably punk.

Colourful Aesthetic Resistance Not Dreary Doctrinal Compliance

Steampunk has a BBC4-documentary bourgeois tweeness to it, but it’s important that the neccessary corrective to this doesn’t go too far in the other direction. Steampunk isnot and cannot be pre-or anti-industrial without becoming aesthetically and politically incoherent. Luddism is not the model. Rather in steampunk the technology of industry has gone out into society rather than sucking society into it. It adorns the individual rather than the individual adorning it. It is in the mapping from this fantasy to our peak oil techno-social reality that Steampunk’s critical value lies. Trying to make it more literally and doctirnally political would destroy that criticality.

Touched By The Hand Of…

Steampunk is a natural complement to Goth. Both are an ironic romantic stance using the aesthetic resources of historic iconography, whether haunted castles or satanic mills. Both involve dressing up and acting out without taking yourself too seriously. And both are an aesthetic resistance to the totalising schemes of society and its opponents. Like Adorno’s critical autonomy of art, youth culture is critical to the extent that it is not literally political. Goth and Steampunk exemplify this. Not Verne or Stoker, but Verne *and* Sotker!

Beware The Seductive Aesthetics of Fascism

Some of the Dieselpunk blog posts and photos of costumes I’ve seen recently have started flirting with the aesthetics of mid-20th-century European design. One of the dangers of looking at that time and place from the outside is that people will homogenise it. Which given the division between free and totalitarian states that characterises the period would be a terrible mistake. The machinery and fashion of the fascist states were so aesthetically striking because of what they had to conceal ethically. Don’t make your boots too shiny.

Infinite Jest is a train-wreck of a novel but quite deliberately so. The problem is that it is also a train-wreck of a consciousness-raising gesamtkunstwerk generated as a negative form by the narrative narcolepsy of that novel.

Its attempt at giving the reader an imaginative lifeworld to render beyond the novel, the same as, you know, any other novel, by self-consciously not actually doing that is trivial and grating. It

The problems of colour psychology for advertising –

http://www.brandingstrategyinsider.com/2008/06/color-psycholog.html

Machine learning algorithm gallery –

http://home.comcast.net/~tom.fawcett/public_html/ML-gallery/pages/index.html

Popularity algorithms –

http://blog.linkibol.com/post/How-to-Build-a-Popularity-Algorithm-You-can-be-Proud-of.aspx

A Twitter trend prediction market –

http://pretweeting.com/

Experimental aesthetics –

http://www.ucl.ac.uk/medical-education/other-studies/aesthetics

A study of colour names, created using AMT –

http://blog.doloreslabs.com/2008/03/where-does-blue-end-and-red-begin/

I reviewed David Galenson’s self-refuting marketarian art history on this blog last year. Galenson had an earlier book applying statistical methods to art history, comparing early and late blossoming artistic innovators. You can find an exert of a review here. The claims of amazing new discoveries phrased in incoherent terms along with accusations of rejection by the mainstream fit the definition of crank science. Crank aesthetics possibly? There’s a discussion of the book on the Two Blowhardsblog, along with links to more reviews, here. Two Blowhards reviews another book that applies statistics to the artistic canon here, just as critically.

It is easy to do non-crank statistical art history (I’ve provided some examples on this blog recently). The most important step is to phrase the theory you are testing in the language and using the concepts of art history rather than in vague and irrelevant terms from breathless tabloid business reporting like “innovation” or “value”. Asking how turquoise the derivatives market is won’t get you published in the Wall Street Journal. Not because it’s too daring an idea, or the establishment is closing its ranks, or because of a lack of imagination on the part of anyone else but because as a combination of aesthetics and economics it is incoherent.

I’ve been looking for examples of offensive (as in attacking) military use of aesthetics. Dazzle ships and pop music torture are all I can find so far. The IDF’s use of Situationist theory comes close.

In literature there are examples such as the hypnomats Jerry Cornelius’s father built into his fake Le Corbusier Chateau in “The Final Programme” by Michale Moorcock or the free-will-destroyingly addictive entertainment of “Infinite Jest” by David Foster Wallace.

I think I’m relieved that I can’t find more real-life examples, but I’d be interested to hear if anybody knows of any more.

Substrates

Copier Paper (archival quality), A3 and A4
A4 and A5 hardback wire bound sketchbooks, various.
Moleskine sketchbooks, small and large

Pens and Pencils

Sanford china pencils (black, red, blue)
Col-erase pencils (blue, red)
Sanford Mirado Black Warrior HB graphite pencils
Sharpies, various black.
Letraset Tria markers (black and two cool greys)
Staedtler propeller pencils and lead holder, 2B

Caran d’Ache conte pencils and Carres (black 2B equivalent) for life drawing.

Software

Inkscape
Gimp
SBCL
Emacs
Fedora GNU/Linux

Law

The GNU GPL
CC-BY-SA

Until I move them to a local gallery, here’s a flicker set of scans of illustrations from the old (pre-1923) National Encylopaedia –

http://www.flickr.com/photos/rheaplex/sets/72157614306272022/

http://www.google.com/insights/search/#q=blue