PERSONAL: the last loot from london

And this morning marks the arrival of my last Amazon order, goddamnit, Plane tickets bought, countdown is now officially on, boxing at 90%, deadline in 5 hours for something amazing.


SUPPORT THIS ARTIST: Neon Shudder

Neon+Shudder+neonshudderbandcamp

neon shudder is the project of jhm, an east coast us artist looking to express cyberpunk and electronic themes in their music. only in its infant stages, neon shudder is set to release the “signal.run” ep as of 1.31.13 via bandcamp.com

more info + music @ neonshudder.bandcamp.com

Neon+Shudder+jhm

Monsieur JHM of Neon Shudder sent me a few links to see how I like his EPs - and indeed I do, analog approximations of nullsweat jacks and chromeburns. If the notion "every thought has a sound" is as valid as I think it is, Neon Shudder's another strong contestant in keeping the vast and infinite gridine alive.

Go support this dude.


planetdamage: lifesign, 2013 august

UPDATE: So yeah, it really might be 2013 and not 2012. That just explains the whole London limbo phenomenon in greater detail. Thanks, @honeymooncroon, appreciate the reality check :)

Relocating to Budapest from London in... two days? Two weeks? It was great and eventful and eye-opening in loads of ways, met lovely and amazing people and most of my recollections of events, realizations and cultural deep structure diving are just too weird to describe. But I'm waving goodbye to all of it and moving onwards. Even this relocation is temporary, everything is. (So, umm, is temporariness temporary? there's a black loop to entangle.) Most of the stuff (apart from The Original Sinred) that I need to get moved is books, a whole lot of them, most of them coming from Magma Books, Forbidden Planet and Oxfams scattered throughout North London. And I'm afraid I'll have to order a few more before I'm really leaving, like Assimilate: A Critical History of Industrial Music, Ministry: The Lost Gospels According to Al Jourgensen and Concrete, Bulletproof, Invisible and Fried: My Life as a Revolting Cock. Great title, by the way.

Camera 360

Camera 360

As for everything else: the Damage Report translation is a lumbering beast but it's coming - no release dates yet, though. That book might need a decent overhaul and that requires some time. Also: whatever I've said about The Dose so far will not happen - the deal we've done this January got defaulted horridly. All the concepts and ideas that were grown during the production period will be shifted to a new project. There are a couple of infographics and publication ideas along the way - watch this space for more.

Camera 360

Camera 360

If I'm not dead, detained, desecrated or abducted to a higher dimension, I'll see you guys in September. Until that - expect the occasional info fragments and links. Wish I could reveal more but I just can't yet. Have a great summer or whatever else you're having in August/September. Damage out.


IDN V20N3: The Music Graphic Issue

When the music has to stop — or does it?
Recorded music has always been packaged, from the very earliest days when wax cylinders came in cardboard tubes, and has therefore always involved designers. In the palmy days of vinyl LPs with sometimes stunning cover art and often erudite liner notes, the presentation was almost as important as the product.

But with the industry morphing so rapidly into the field of digital-download delivery, where do the graphics come in now? This is a burning question for all those working in the area of visually representing music. To see what their answers are, read this feature story, which solicits the views of seven specialist music designers.

More spreads for IdN issue v20n3 at magspreads.net.
More info here.
Buy it here.


REMEMBER ME: Live Action Trailer

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9tCK1TAtu0M

The latest Live Action trailer for Remember Me gives us a reflective and somber look into the final thoughts of Antoine, the Founder of Memorize, and shows Nilin being taken to the Bastille where she will wake at the beginning of the game.

The postcard of cyberpunk adventure games, I guess. REMEMBER ME coloured the world we've only seen in monochrome in RENAISSANCE (below), giving us a glimpse in how style will feel like in the future when it matures just a little.. and took out all opportunities of world exploration, meticulously driving us through a landscape of cognitive dissonance gutters and high style mass mind control. There's a review brewing... watch this and check back often.


Goth Icons As Superheroes

Wow, this has been hiding in the Bookmarks folder for an amazingly long time. Originally appearing as Post-Punk/New Wave Icons As Superheroes on IO9.. missing Andrew Eldritch as Doctor Doom or Carl McCoy as Preacher...


BLADE RUNNER: Pris on the 30th anniversary

pris-710

PRIS / Bastien Lecouffe Deharme
Created for the 30th anniversary of Blade Runner.
(via roman-noir.com)


CONTROLLER: Chinese arthouse Akira

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nu8NBUppyzA

A girl that can control everything perpetrates her own rescue by taking control of her boyfriend.


BOOKMARKS FOR 2013-08-03: the world's tallest slum, South African EDM, chemicals in rich people's bodies & Second Reality

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1p9jlQUW0k

Welcome to the world's tallest slum: poverty-ridden Venezuela's Tower of David. Squatters took over this very unfinished 45-story skyscraper in the early 1990s, and they've been there ever since. The tower was originally intended to be a symbol of Caracas' bright financial future, complete with a rooftop helipad, but construction stopped because of a banking crisis and the sudden death of the tower's namesake, David Brillembourg.

  • Rich People Are Full of Different Chemicals Than Poor People: People from higher socioeconomic status showed higher levels of mercury, arsenic and benzophenone-3. Researchers think that the first two come from higher consumption of shellfish and seafood, whereas the benzophenone-3 likely comes from sunscreen. The chemical profiles of people from lower socioeconomic status are completely different. Their bodies are full of lead, cadmium and different types of plastics. These chemicals could come from cigarette smoke but likely come from poor diet.
  • A Guide to South African EDM: It may have taken outrageous Zef rappers Ninja and Yo-landi Vi$$er of Die Antwoord to first make the world sit up and take notice, but more and more South African music is making its way into international ears – and, as it turns out, their EDM scene is blowing up at the moment, too, particularly in Cape Town.
  • Second Reality: Source code and data of Second Reality by Future Crew in 1993. This release is made to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the demo.

AKIRA out of producer hell with Jaume Collet-Serra

jaume-collet-serra-akira-director

Jaume Collet-Serra is in discussions to return to the “Akira” directors chair, signing on to helm Warner Bros. adaptation of the popular anime pic. The helmer left in early 2012 after production stalled.

[...]

In early 2012, the studio shut down pre-production so that fixes could be made to the script, including tightening the budget from its original $90 million range. At the time, Collet-Serra was in such high demand coming off the recent success of the Liam Neeson action pic “Unknown,” that he decided to leave instead of waiting for the changes to be made so that he could pursue other projects.

[...]

WB acquired the potential tentpole project for a seven-figure sum from Japanese manga publisher Kodansha in 2008. Set in New Manhattan, the cyberpunk sci-fi epic follows the leader of a biker gang who must save his friend, discovered with potentially destructive psychokinetic abilities, from government medical experiments.

Appian Way’s Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Davisson Killoran are producing with Mad Chance’s Andrew Lazar. Katsuhiro Otomo, who wrote and directed the 1988 Japanese anime pic of the same name, will exec produce. (more at variety)

Well, all 80s/90s cyberpunk source materials are knee-deep in production hell, so I wouldn't exactly get my hopes up.. Neuromancer, The Diamond Age, Ghost in the Shell, Idoru, Battle Angel Alita, Akira... and to be honest, I'm definitely not surprised at all. Many of those materials are so thick and dense with ideas (that could spin off entire books, series and franchises on their own) - many of which dripped into mainstream movies and books and our daily lives -, that production crews, producers, directors and screenwriters would need to machete many of them off and re-lace them with new ideas and the steady and deliberate moronization of the audience would not allow that to happen. Books are still the best drug to turn to if you want to get away. Or a pen and a paper. Don't trust your tablets. Trust your grey meat, pen and papers.


THOUSANDTH STREET: get a glimpse into Blade Runner done the French way

http://vimeo.com/69375721

Tip your hat to P://D regular reader and contributor Riplakoidase who's just sent me a great find: Montpellier-based special FX/3D company ArtFX hides a few gold nuggets in their reference pool, one of them being a short teaser entitled Thousandth Street. Wouldn't necessarily call it a short film as it's a situation without a solution and so much without any sort of closure that it hurts a lot, almost physically.

Great work on a blue-tinted Blade Runner feel (do I hear well that there are samples of the Blade Runner Voigt-Kampff examination scene?) AND SHUT UP EVERYONE YOU CAN'T HAVE A BAD MOVIE WITH SO MUCH RAIN EVEN THE MEASURE OF PRECIPITATION ALONE SETS THE BASELINE FOR A CYBERPUNK MOVIE and the soundtrack is nothing short of fuckingamazing - Perturbator made a great job nudging the overall ambiance towards classic Vangelis and turning to stompy 80's-infused techno for the outro.

NOTES:
1, That hamburger looks... odd. Transmetropolitan odd.
2, The first time you see the cop in his car, does he strike you as a twin brother of Trent Reznor?
3, Great ideas about UI/UX... why the slow response rate, though, is it lagging?

Also, here's a Making Of video. Don't stop.

http://vimeo.com/69374303


TRACKS ON REPEAT: Front 242 - Headhunter (live in Budapest)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nhl8bwzu3RE

You can't really avoid or unhear Headhunter by Front 242 if you're into cyberpunk, futurepresent or the electronic underground. This version comes to you from Budapest, live, not so direct but an amazing vibe there. You're welcome.


POSTHUMAN: cyberpunk short, almost Aeon Flux

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qC2liU3cFR8

Colliculi Productions' new cyberpunk short is a gorgeously cheeky melting pot with MTV Liquid Television (all the Aeon Flux ambiance, oldschool, obviously), Scooby Doo (far-fetched, maybe, but look at the protagonists in a team and try extrapolating to a darker, grittier feel of team dynamics in a dark and gritty world), Elfenlied (come on, that's gore all the way!)... and some more. Consistent and coherent, PostHuman's gotten quite a few awards and nominations (read the list in the description) and we're all looking forward for more shorts like these. Or OVAs. Or series. Or movies. Note: I can't help but wonder: if the future has remote control surveillance bees, why aren't security systems retrofitted for such intrusions? Nevermind. Go watch this now.

Set in an adrenalized future of espionage, assassins, and out of control super science, PostHuman follows a genius hacker and his dog as they help an enigmatic young woman to free the remaining test subject of a black ops ESP test lab.


RUBIX: Folding Cities Like Origami Silk

http://vimeo.com/68214079

“The aim of the rubix project was to develop an animation that described a conceptual tool for deploying these malleable virtual environments that could be used by their creators to shift space around us. The rubix concept stemmed from the need for an algorithmic formula for controlling the use of redirection techniques; it allows for many different spatial combinations whilst a level of control is constantly maintained. In the animation the initial Escher-esque space is a representation of our perceptual system where huge amounts of information arrive in the brain from multiple streams. The process of perception involves the brain selecting and rejecting contradicting pieces of information leading to a perception of reality that only gives us glimpses into the world we are in.” (more at TARDIS: Architectural Thesis)

I'm actually more supremely impressed by Chris Kelly's thesis than his movie accompanying it. Rubix, his five-minute short deals with malleable, almost fabricesque qualities of urban spaces, shifting our perception, turning ready-made buildings as hindrances or signposts of attention into trenches of possibilities and absences of space to fill. I'm definitely nowhere near professional architecture, but I'd say reallocation of urban space has already been an important factor, especially in Japanese destruction porn anime/manga (wherein architecture itself is endowed with a phoenix-like constant resuscitation) - and that destruction is apparently mirrored in recent superhero movies like The Avengers or Man of Steel.

Folding (or real-time manipulating) urban space is not an old trick in mindbending SF: we've had Dark City, Inception or even The Matrix dealing with that issue and demoscene products are also abundant with swirling cityscapes (as it hits you conceptually as much as visually and that procedurally generated process is not just kinky, it's quite crunchable) - and parkour's obviously something of a mindset we cannot overlook. And, oh, do you remember Bruce Branit's brilliant VR-melancholy piece World Builder?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VzFpg271sm8

This obviously doesn't mean for one single second that you shouldn't shove your face into Rubix - it's infused with Avalonesque sepia sadness and some Brian Eno, if I hear it right. Brilliant work and I'd love him to work on some mental, mental conceptual work for a mental, mental video game. But check out his thesis on Issuu (godly PDF), it's mouthwatering.


Street Fighter Motion Sculptures (And Forms. And Toribash.)

http://vimeo.com/66115264

The Irish art director used Cinema 4D and Vray to mimic the fighting moves of Street Fighter characters - specifically Ken, Chun Li, Ryu and Blanka - while turning their bodies into abstractions of colour and form. Each character is easily recognizable from these alone, but Dan the Ad Man focuses on the animation of their signature moves to bring the forms to life (check out Chun Li’s Spinning Bird Kick). Each character’s movements are extended and energy released in a fluid manner, accompanied by familiar theme music and colourful explosions of geometric forms. (more at artsandsciencejournal)

That clearly drives us to this video's inspiration - Forms..

a collaboration between visuals artists Memo Akten and Quayola, a series of studies on human motion, and its reverberations through space and time. It is inspired by the works of Eadweard Muybridge, Harold Edgerton, Étienne-Jules Marey as well as similarly inspired modernist cubist works such as Marcel Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a Staircase No.2″. Rather than focusing on observable trajectories, it explores techniques of extrapolation to sculpt abstract forms, visualizing unseen relationships – power, balance, grace and conflict – between the body and its surroundings. (more on Forms' Vimeo page)

http://vimeo.com/37967381

Both these videos - especially Dan the Ad Man's - remind me of the fairly obscure 3D turn-based indie fighting game TORIBASH - definitely not as appealing as these vids but equally abstract. requiring you to find multiple ways to circumvent expectations of your enemies. Here's a trailer. You'll be thrilled.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzjl0Cu9HgM