EROTICA: Clayton Cubitt's Hysterical Literature

1:40am. London has a tendency to make me feel like she has one foot in the door, using the door to skillfully plant the other foot in my brainstem. Job interview after job interview, mails by the dozens and endless sheets of ideas and contact lists piled up against the windowpanes and the coffeemugs, each with its own name and radiant black personality. Instead of sleeping, I am stuck with five episodes of Clayton Cubitt's Hysterical Literature: gorgeous women reading excerpts from books they've selected only to explode in graceful climax something like a minute before the video's end. This is all done newsreader style, given away the instantly recognizable vibrator whirr and the tempo of the reading stumbling into an erratic silky staccato. The trembling fight against the inevitable.. makes me smile every single time.

The three episodes I've posted feature Teresa Nasty (reading from Sexing the Cherry by Jeanette Winterson), Stormy Leather (reading from American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis) and Stoya (reading from Necrophilia Variations by Supervert). For more Cubittery, head for his Tumblr.


LOOK WHAT THE CAT DRAGGED IN: 2012 October's bookmarked music finds

With tracks by Nina Hagen & Adamski, Atari Teenage Riot feat. Iggy Pop, Hurts, Cylob, Teddy Sambuki, Kúra, Bahlzack, Manicanparty, Swedish House Mafia, Telepheriq Chamberlain, Coconaut, Charli XCX, Autonervous, MS MR, KAS Product, Cruel Machine, New Years Day, Ordo Rosarius Equilibrio, Port-Royal, Geomatic, Sabbath Assembly, 156.


VIDEO: Neuromancer director to dish out 2-minute zombie CPR short

So apparently dead humans can't be turned into zombies - but zombies are well-trained in the art of CPR - more resuscitation - more zombies = PROFIT! The Undeading, by Vincenzo Natali.


LINKS: Bookmarks for 2012-10-20

  • 78 percent of Bitcoin currency stashed under digital mattress, study finds
    The figure translates to more than 7.019 million BTCs, the term used to denote a single coin under the digital currency, which uses strong cryptography and peer-to-peer networking to enable anonymous payments among parties who don't necessarily know or trust each other. Based on exchange rates listed on Mt.Gox—the most widely used Bitcoin exchange—the coins have a value of more than $82.87 million. On May 13, the date the researchers analyzed their data, there were slightly more than 9 million BTCs in existence.

  • Strange Sounds: 7 Experimental Projects Making Music from Natural Elements
    California-based artist Diego Stocco is a master of sound abstraction. A sound designer and composer, he creates unusual sound experiences using anything from everyday objects to contraptions he builds from scratch. From outfitting a tree with a stethoscope, a plastic pipe and a microphone, to blending an old piano with the sounds of sunset, his work has a beautiful nature-grounded quality to it whilst really pushing the technologies and conception of modern sound design.

  • Physicists say there may be a way to prove that we live in a computer simulation
    Back in 2003, Oxford professor Nick Bostrom suggested that we may be living in a computer simulation. In his paper, Bostrom offered very little science to support his hypothesis — though he did calculate the computational requirements needed to pull off such a feat.But now, a team of physicists say proof might be possible, and that it's a matter of finding a cosmological signature that would serve as the proverbial Red Pill from the Matrix. And they think they know what it is.


GFX: bank of cthulhu


Art by Bruce Moore. (via anything from Tumblr)


TRUE SKIN: cyberpunk viral short gets Warner treatment

Warner Bros. Pictures and producer David Heyman's Heyday Films have scored the feature film rights to Stephan Zlotescu's sci-fi short film turned viral sensation "True Skin" says Heat Vision. Zlotescu was an FX genius who has worked on countless music videos and pulled together this near-future set short about a time when people are augmenting their bodies. (more at darkhorizons.com)

Haven't seen TRUE SKIN yet? Watch the Bangkok amok run here!


TRON: UPRISING lightcycle designs

Daniel Simon, lead vehicle designer on TRON: Uprising, created many versions of Beck's hero Light Cycle before the show started. (via tron/facebook)


KICKSTARTER: Distance [a nextgen arcade racer]

Distance is a PC/Mac survival racing game that combines the intense action of arcade racing with the exploration of an atmospheric world. You control a unique car that allows you to boost, jump, rotate, and even fly through a chaotic and twisted city. The world has a mysterious history, and as you explore you'll be able to uncover pieces of its past.

SUPPORT [DISTANCE] HERE.

Nitronic Rush was one of the most admirable arcade games in the past months, completely erasing the need for Tron lightcycles, ramping up the neon arcade with French electro and Tony Hawk Pro Skaterish game mechanics - and completely free. And bugfree. And loud. And too damn addictive. And now there's a sequel? Who are we NOT TO support them?

Our primary focus is on making the solo and multiplayer tracks incredibly fun, which means that there's much that we're iterating on in terms of designing a deeper city and atmosphere, as well as experimenting with different game modes, obstacles, and track designs. [...] On top of the many features and modes in the original game, such as the parkour-inspired Hardcore mode, nail-biting Challenge mode, and heart-pounding Stunt mode, we're now including many fan-requested features that weren't possible before.


TEASER: Machete Girl issue 8

I'm watching people fuck other people looking like cars in a shabby little hut somewhere in the Philippines. Bears eating salmon, and occasionally, each other, near the Brooks river, Alaska. The surface of Mars that looks just like Tatooine, and in a few years, a landscape most possibly LEGO'd out of Starbucks and Wal-Mart, hot items of the American terraforming industry.

Hey. Long-distance runner cyberpunk magazine Machete Girl is right before releasing its issue no. 8. focusing on the concept of cyber mages and I just happened to write the lead feature in it. Thankfully you will have a great number of other articles carving out bad veve out of your head (on Total Recall, Continuum or Dark Angel, just to name a few) and it's also the very first issue with a male model. Until you're waiting for the free PDF download of this issue, head over to their site and also check out previous episodes of Machete Girl TV! ROCK!

I leave you with one more thing to ponder on. There is a well-known and much acknowledged ceremonial magick practice known as the Achieving the Knowledge and Conversation of The Holy Guardian Angel. Which is strange, because I've just checked my Google History and just spent 200 bucks on a psychological profile and a statistic forecast for the upcoming six months based on my OpenGraph.

So I'm pretty much done conversing.


BLADERUNNERESQUE BIOPUNK SHORT: Loom [4K, RED]

Luke Scott in cooperation with RED Camera presents "LOOM". A film shot completely in 4K format in the tone and style of Ridley Scott's dystopian Blade Runner. The film was originally intended to help showcase the prototype REDray 3D laser player. The film was constructed for 3D, the film needed to push the limits of the cameras exposure sensitivity and colour range and 4K projection. Visually the film is unmatched to date in it's use of RED's new technology.

Higher Res version on RED Camera Forums

For the full story read Deadline.com


MOVIE: ridley scott on blade runner 2

It's not a rumour – it's happening. With Harrison Ford? I don't know yet. Is he too old? Well, he was a Nexus-6 so we don't know how long he can live [laughs]. And that's all I'm going to say at this stage. (via io9)


CG: realtime separable subsurface scattering (and some human skin with acne)

This movie represents hours and hours of research, desperation, excitement, happiness, pride, sadness and extreme dedication. Hope you like it.

IMPORTANT: designed to be viewed in HD at fullscreen with scaling off on a 1080p device. Be patient and wait for the movie to load before playing, it's a 1080p movie. Some subtleties are lost in the online version, so I encourage to download the original blu-ray quality version (or the original demo) below, to better appreciate the skin and fine scale render details (but be aware that you will need a powerful computer to play it).

It shows our latest and final advances on real-time skin rendering (Separable Subsurface Scattering), which enables to quickly render skin in just two post-processing passes. Everything is written from scratch using DirectX 10 and rendered in real-time, from the skin to the film grain; if you have a powerful GPU you can download the original demo here... (read more on vimeo)


CYBERPUNK: Blade Runneresque short TRUE SKIN released, heavy on implants

I posted the teaser to an orgy of biopunk promises in early May. Yep, it was True Skin, something the internets hailed as biopunk, nodding to the cyberprosthetics-heavy high concept of nineties' cyberpunk science fiction. It was in Shoreditch, post-job interview, when I saw that True Skin is finally OUT in all its six-minute entirety. And don't get me wrong, it is both amazing and an answer to my question about the memory uploading spam the other day.

Bangkok Market, left in the rain after a neon streak facial. Blade Runner gave us the wet Babel claustrophobia of urban labyrinths and it's been with us ever since from Neuromancer to Ghost in the Shell and all the short films that try real hard to stay with us with their thick eyecandy, staying one of the key motifs that still elude us. Or who knows. The future might be unevenly distributed but it's still a network of stolen iPhones on which suburban kids sketch up plans of mayhem, distribution, violence and getting properly shitfaced. Maybe it's the umbrellas with the glowing shafts and the augmented reality shopping wizards for new hands that keep the future at a relatively safe distance.

True Skin brings all that first-generation gangster romance back - I stole I am on the run I am hiding - and its clichés remind me all the more of the uncomprehensible floorplan Kurzweil gave us about the humanity doing everything it can imagine and then all the things it cannot. Downloading my memories before I get killed so that I could revive myself in a vat a couple hundred miles away doesn't really cut it anymore. For anyone who hasn't read Count Zero or the Richard K. Morgan novels, it's a wonderful treat. For us who've read them already, it's a wonderful visual treat and a great production. It's just the ever-repeating high concept that makes us wonder: just how much did the Mirrorshades Group writers hardwire and solidify our ideas about possible futures?

Whatever readings, pills or brainhacks we need to come up with new ideas about man-machine fusion - I believe we want them now. Now, like the techno kids of Berlin, hellbent on the everpresent alternative: very fucking bad or very fucking good, we don't care. But whichever it is, we want it now.

(True Skin is a wonderful piece of first-generation cyberpunk short film with lots of implants, augmented reality and Hajime Sorayama-inspired robot prostitutes. Get the full credits here.)


MUSIC: The Birthday Massacre - Leaving Tonight (2012)

Easily the best track off the new album of Canadian goth/80s/noir rock band The Birthday Massacre entitled Hide and Seek. Which is actually out TODAY. Buy it now from Metropolis Records or out of sheer curiosity, stream it via revolvermag.com.


SPAM: human memory storage

Getting a tad bit Takeshi Kovacs here at Muswell Hill - there is a caffeine drip going straight into my right eye and the left one is looking at the mail I've just gotten with the subject MARIUSZ, HAVE YOU UPLOADED YOUR MEMORIES TODAY? which reminds me of all the great (...not) spam waves of the early double-zeroes. Landing page (above) is somewhere between Battle Royale and Max Headroom and is at revolution-memory-insurance.com. No idea which game, service, opt-in mailing list or future employer with a plan did that to me but I find this perversely entertaining. And the 20-second loop on the site has been on for more than half an hour. Hypnotic at the very least, but then again we took the hobbits to Isengard and only stopped at the seven hour mark because Windows died a terminal crash. Keeping you updated on this as more details come up.


MUSIC: "Keep it Together" - new track by Trent Reznor/How To Destroy Angels

Trent Reznor's How To Destroy Angels project has released its first new song since covering Bryan Ferry's "Is Your Love Strong Enough?" for The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. "Keep It Together" is an understated electronic burbler featuring the vocals of husband-and-wife team Mariqueen Maandig and Reznor. The song hails from the recently announced An Omen EP, out November 13 via Columbia, and suggests that the Amazon-leaked track listing for the new set may be correct after all. As Stereogum points out, the Reznor-scored Call of Duty: Black Ops II video game is out the same day. (via spin)

howtodestroyangels.com


MUSIC MAKING: AudioGL Beta - creating music in the 80s cyberspace

Here in flatland, ideas for musical interfaces may have become largely well-trodden. Not so in the third dimension. And so, one of the most unusual audiovisual interfaces has now hit beta, ready for you to explore. And that does mean “explore”: think navigation through spinning, animated galaxies of musical objects in this spatial modular sound environment. With the beta available, you can determine whether that´s a bold, new final frontier, or just the wheel, reinvented.
The work of Toronto-based artist and engineer Jonathan Heppner, AudioGL is a stunning vision of music creation in 3D space, with modular synths, advanced user-editable modulation, and a freely-navigable, open-ended spatial workspace.
(via createdigitalmusic.com, sent by @dismay22, thx!)

(audiogl.com)


MUSIC: REWORK_Philip Glass remixed

REWORK_Philip Glass Remixed usually meets somewhere in the middle between calming ambient pieces and kinetic electronic contraptions, with a frequent emphasis on pastiche that suits both its subject and its highest-profile guest participants. Beck, for example, stitches together more than 20 Glass works in as many minutes, living up to his stated desire to present a distillation of the composer's entire career as a continuum; the result moves through many phases, with frequently gorgeous results. Dan Deacon, who knows his way around compositions that swirl and clatter hypnotically, constructs "Alight Spiral Snip" around repetitive dissonance before letting the piece give way to smeared-out beauty. Tyondai Braxton gives "Rubric" a toy-box peppiness redolent of his own compositions, while Icelandic composer Johann Johannsson — who knows his way around works both orchestral and experimental — crafts what sounds like an especially inventive bit of portentous film score in "Protest." (via npr.org, sent by @dismay22)

Click here for REWORK_Philip Glass remix listen-ins.


ROBOTS: Bina48 (interview with creator Bruce Duncan)

The entire last week I was living next door to one of the world’s famous avatars: Bina48. A true celebrity. And I have to admit, it was very quiet. I know about Bina48 for a few years now, I’ve made many interviews with one of Bina48′s creators so to say, Martine Rothblatt, but I never met her in “person”. Yesterday was the day.

(read more here, via @presleysylwia)


PHOTO: the prospect of immortality (murray ballard)

“The Prospect of Immortality” is a fascinating photo series about cryonics, a method for preserving deceased humans and animals in the hope that they can be revived by future medical technologies. British photographer Murray Ballard worked on the series between 2006 and 2012, traveling around the world to visit members of the small but dedicated cryonics community and the handful of cryonics facilities that currently exist. The series is named after a 1962 book of the same name by Robert Ettinger—the “father of cryonics.” Ballard’s series will be turned into a book in the spring of 2013. (photo gallery at murrayballard.com, via laughingsquid.com, sent by cloudjunky, thx!)


newsflash, 2012-10-09

planetdamage.com is back after two weeks of maintenance mode, settling in, coping with London, finding good coffee, harassing eBay vendors and getting mildly accustomed to the absurdly non-existent taste of food ingredients. Habaneros still have a nice bite, though. If you have any postworthy news, send it to planetdamage at gmail and brace yourself for content. Cringe softly.