© 2010 Julian. All rights reserved.
As Fabien has mentioned and due to his participation in curating the event, the laboratory’s Apparatus for Capturing Other Points of View will be exhibited at HABITAR. It’ snice to have this project reconsidered in an art & technology context. … Continue reading
© 2010 Julian. All rights reserved.
…well, it was a short week in the studio and more time spent pondering how to build out the new Laboratory / Man Lodge. Plans and actions. There was good conversations around the main project in the Studio — which basically … Continue reading
A recent post by @bruces sent me into a squirrel hole this morning, smoking out this NANOYOU project and its various techniques for helping people —particularly young people it seems, which is to say..the future — what the heck nanotech … Continue reading
© 2010 Julian. All rights reserved.
A suggestive and left-to-the-readers scrap of net-archeology found at http://desi-fi.posterous.com/earth-to-luna — a title card for a design fiction film? By Design Fiction Pictures? Lovely.
© 2010 Julian. All rights reserved.
Good to my habits, I’m nearly a week behind weeknotes. No matter — they are more notes-to-self than anything else. Last week — the one that ended on Friday the 21st — was a week of busy-bodying some knowledge for a … Continue reading
© 2010 Julian. All rights reserved.
@chriswoebken spied this one — an art film by Marjolijn Dijkman (NL, if you couldn’t guess) called Wandering Through the Future in which the artist takes 70 science fiction films and uses them to explore how they imagine the future. In … Continue reading
© 2010 Julian. All rights reserved.
Just came across this one, via @bruces over on <a href="“>Beyond the Beyond — a series of *design fancies created by Matt Brown which appear to be cleverly fictionalized designers to go along with these designers design fictions. Wonderfully inventive and I could see this sort of thing being quite therapeutic for normal, factual designers. You know — either imagine a colleague, or take a piss on the designer jackhole.
The image above is a book done by this designer — with two editions, one particularly rare.
Kurt Manchild was an author and inventor born in Jackson, MO in 1952.
From a fairly young age Manchild found that he had ridiculously vivid dreams of finished inventions. He spent his teenage years thinking that dreams like this were normal. It wasn’t until the ’72 National Sleep Science Association (N.S.S.A.) convention that he found out his dreams were unique. He spent the next few years talking with bartenders, clergymen, and designers about his deep sleep brainstorms and formed a whole new philosophy. Armed with this knowledge he wrote his first and only book, Silent Brainstorm: Ten Dreams That Every Designer Should Have at Least Once a Week. In the book he describes ways to trick your brain into certain dreams. He writes about the “Garage Sale Dream” where you go to a garage sale and see new products and then wake up and draw them. He also writes a lot about “Museum Dreams” where you would go to a design museum and it would be filled with amazing stuff that again, you would draw out upon waking. His book was a best seller in most of Europe and was available in two editions. The black version is semi-rare.
Why do I blog this? A very intriguing way of constituting an imaginary, design fiction concept. The strength of the imaginary thing — the design fiction — is elevated by the story surrounding it — it’s *backstory or moment of production, including the designer with a personality and a home town and so on. It’s a bit of an intriguing special effect of a sort that I should add to my modest catalog of design fiction genre conventions. Nice work.
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© 2010 Julian. All rights reserved.
A relevant short essay by Piers D. Britton in theThe Routledge Companion to Science Fiction underscores some of the loose principles (loose, because they aren’t quite principles — more a swirl of useful insights) the Laboratory has been gathering around the … Continue reading
© 2010 Julian. All rights reserved.
Well, the house is proving a persistent but not at all unwelcome distraction from blogging stuff, but that’s okay. Managing to set up even a M*A*S*H*-like *Man Lodge was mitigated by, like..unpacking scores of boxes containing mostly books, old disk … Continue reading
© 2010 Julian. All rights reserved.
((Via Unhappy Hipsters. The photo caption is: It was far more satisfying to relive their romance via iPhoto slideshow.)) The Unhappy Hipster site has the tag line “It’s Lonely In The Modern World” dryly shifting design toward self-mocking irony. Perhaps … Continue reading
© 2010 Julian. All rights reserved.
So, I just have to say — academic architects? Wow..what a surly bunch.
© 2010 Julian. All rights reserved.
This sounds like fun. May 6, 2010, 7pm Experimental Digital Arts at UCLA. iotaCenter’s mission is to inspire both new and existing artists in a historically dispersed and constantly changing technological environment. The theme for our next iotaSalon is THE … Continue reading