Crystal Voyagers: A Journey Through The New Age: Part One Watch the first instalment of Crystal Voyagers: A Journey Through The New Age. Charting the rise of the Age Of Aquarius and its effect upon music over the past two centuries, this three-part, illustrated lecture is adapted from a talk by Mark Pilkington, given at London's Cafe Oto in December 2012, as part of The Wire Salon series of talks and discussions events. Written and narrated by Mark Pilkington of Strange Attractor Press. Edited by The Wire's Nathan Budzinski. Special thanks to Resonance FM. http://thewire.co.uk http://strangeattractor.co.uk The Wire Magazine

Experimental ½ Hour - Episode XXXVII: Pulse Emitter, Keyon Gaskin, bobbevy Experimental Half Hour Episode 37 Movement and Synthesis Special Filmed live at the Hollywood Theatre, Portland, Oregon November 8, 2012 Pulse Emitter http://synthnoise.com Keyon Gaskin Musical accompaniment by Honey Owens bobbevy This is how we Disappear Choreographed by Suniti Dernovsek http://bobbevy.com Produced by Eva Aguila & Brock Fansler Cameras Frances Fagan PCM Tech Joe Glode This episode was produced through the facilities of Portland Community Media - http://pcmtv.org Special thanks to our Kickstarter Supporters Kristan Kennedy, Rebecca Carlisle-Healy, Sue Lehenbauer Fansler, Mike, S Cano, Marlo De Lara, Bea Coulter, Jonathan Snipes, Nancy Wolfe, INDEX Festival, Victoria Shupe, Beverly Bryan, Mia Ferm, Julian, James Squeaky, Patricia Hall, Lucero Aguiñiga, Grace, Jason Traeger, Jae Choi, Simi Sohota, Rachel Tripp, Christopher Kirkley, Tomasz Werner, Bleakley McDowell, Jesse Sugarmann, Andrew Chadwick, Hayley, Elisa L., katlyn, ellen, Scott Kiernan, Adam Overton, Cary Clarke, Thom Linton, Andrew Michaan, Julia Perry, EMA, Paul Watson, Emily Pothast, Emi Otaki, Daniel Bryant, Dewey Mahood, Michael McGregor, JonnyX and the Groadies, Albert Ortega, Cathy, Kendra Hadlock, Maria Joan Dixon, Sandra Gibbons, sissy, caley feeney, America Valdes, Ashby Lee Collinson, Jeremy, Trundle Nemix, Molly Jenkins, Lars Larsen, Vivian Giourousis, Nicole, Christopher Cantino, Derek, margot padilla, Matthew Happen, Dustin Gatchell, Louise Magnusson, Matt Carlson, Dana Dart-McLean, Daryl Groetsch, Jackie Lopez, molly williams, honey owens, Julie Bach, Jän Strauss, Elizabeth Pusack, Nick Bindeman © 2013 Experimental Half Hour experimentalhalfhour.com Experimental Half-Hour

"We decided to experiment with a new, super-long article format akin to "slow live blogging." When we looked at the traffic charts below, our jaws dropped. Here's what we learned about long form stories--and why quality, not velocity, is the future of online news."

"“Snowfall” has become a verb in many newsrooms after The New York Times launched its beautiful multimedia project earlier this year. Though the format was touted as the future of online storytelling by some, The Times wasn’t the first to pull of this type of format. If you’re looking for inspiration to make snow fall in your own newsroom, here are a few other examples, not all of which come from newsrooms, as I think it would be irresponsible of us to confine ourselves to the sphere of news organizations when collecting inspiration for innovative storytelling formats."

"The NYT’s multimedia project Snow Fall was a huge success, attracting big audiences and lots of plaudits. But the paper can do even better — it can build a new business from this type of project, and change the definition of journalism in the new century."

"We also consider several other models that seek to explain the Fermi Paradox, most notably percolation theory and two societal-collapse theories. In the former case, we find that it imposes unnatural assumptions which likely render it unrealistic. In the latter case, we present a new theory of interstellar transportation bandwidth which calls into question the validity of societal-collapse theories."

"The Boston bombing investigation continues to reveal new information on the two primary suspects, but quietly reported last Friday was the discovery of jihadi propaganda Inspire Magazine - produced by al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) - on a computer belonging to the elder Tsarnaev brother’s widow. The publication, particularly its first issue containing instructions for building a pressure cooker bomb, was spotlighted as a possible resource immediately after the bombings."

"One of the things I talked about at UX London (which I will write up soon) was a thing called Kindleframe. I realised that every morning I checked on a few apps that did a few things – the weather for the day, how the tubes were running, and my two calendars, work and home. Well, if I remembered I checked. And when I didn’t, I was always caught out by a tube line being out of action or that it would be raining heavily later."

The Ghost of Mrs Payne (Field Recording 13.03.1975) The mayor has decided that it's time to hear more from Scarfolk's audio archive. This post refers to a previous one about the disappearance of primary school music teacher Mrs. Payne whose body was found encased inside an ancient standing stone (go here for more detail) Forensic examination of the stone revealed that it had originated more than 300 miles away and historians could not ascertain how prehistoric man had transported it to Scarfolk, much less how Mrs Payne had found her way into a 300 million year old rock. The police reported it as a chance accident. When the stone was broken into chunks and sold as 'Payne's Pain' souvenirs in the Scarfolk gift shop, purchasers began hearing ghostly music in their homes. Additionally, the music was heard at the stone circle where Mrs. Payne's body was found, as well as at the geological site of the stone's origin. The souvenirs were recalled and buried at the centre of the stone circle in Scarfolk fields, now the only location where the music can still be heard, but only on the anniversary of the death of Payne's husband who found himself unexpectedly dismembered during a pagan ritual competition for the under 10s. This is a field recording made from the stone circle. field, recording, scarfolk

"Audiofy.it reads out articles of your choice whenever you have some time to kill."

"The contents being a reproduction of a notebook that, despite the impeccably lettered cover, has nothing to do with the aborted Dune film project. Instead its pages are full of Jodorowsky’s obsession with the Tarot de Marseille. This obsession lasted decades and may offer you at least a partial answer to the question “what has he been doing for the last 30 years?”. In fact Jodorowsky maintained an interest in this centuries old Tarot deck, finally releasing an edition based on his research in 1998 with Philippe Camion."

"Available only for iPhones right now, Oggl offers two key features that separates itself from the other apps: capture and curation."

CULT OF THE SUN GOD music_ PATRICK SHIROISHI / BLACK SUN SUTRA (2013) (www.patrickshiroishi.bandcamp.com) visual_ ARIS KINDT FILMS (www.ariskindtfilms.com) Nancy J Kwon

"Yes, it's undetectable, but more importantly it's unobservable by institutions and countries and sovereigns.... This might be a politically important object."

"Facial recognition will be a growing source of friction because the companies that are building businesses around connecting the physical you to some form of online identity will, over time connect people to the online you that makes them the most revenue, rather than the online you that makes the most sense to you. A lot of this will happen in the background, but there it will have sufficient visibility to be annoying e.g. a picture of your face as a search parameter triggering an advertisement for a particular kind of product."

"I am a Canadian that studied industrial design. It’s not surprising that I often got strange looks when I told people about my thesis project to redesign America’s voting system. The reason is simple though - I find America to be an amazing and fascinating nation and also like exploring the diverse applications of industrial design thinking. The 2012 election was the first time I experienced an American election first hand. I found it to be absolutely exciting and intriguing. I loved it." This is, as all his posts are, beautiful and interesting. It is also full-on Bigend-Draperism -- control through the emotional leverage of nostalgia. Quite brilliant.

"I thought about titling this post, “Google Glass: The Beginning of White Flight from Smartphones,” but instead I’m going to propose a new term, status flight, to describe what happens when elites abandon a status symbol that’s lost its signifying power after becoming too quotidian and ubiquitous."

"Somewhere between a vat of expensive face cream and a baby Neanderthal lies a probable future for synthetic biology."

D Towards K toronto, field, recording, ambient

"Booke is a smartphone companion, which will help you capture,
keep and share all the important moments of your 'real-book' reading experience."

"Lorenzo Pellegrini, who "gardens" the Risoud Forest in Switzerland to assist the future resonant acoustics of the wood currently growing there. It's a violin garden for the 24th century."

"The way in which the public consumes media is changing though. Television shows are broadcast globally and social networking services such as Twitter and Facebook allow millions of fans to communicate and debate with one another in real-time. There’s a chance here to move away from a passive, never-changing form of content"

"The volume of Google searches for finance-related terms may predict moves in markets, research suggests." You'd think that was an obvious signal

A warning to a generation

"You probably remember serial ports as the ancient nine-pin plugs you once used to hook up your mouse or joystick to your computer in the pre-USB dark ages. But tracking down devices that still use serial port connections isn’t so hard, it seems. In fact, according to H.D. Moore, any hacker can find–and tamper with–more than 100,000 of them over the Internet, including critical systems ranging from traffic lights to fuel pumps to building heating and cooling systems to retail point-of-sale devices."

Jan Chipchase: "On Friday I was invited into Google Labs New York and given the opportunity to try out Glass. I declined to put on a pair. Here's why."

"The physical experience of the magazine—which we feel still has real value on paper—is also quite something. The issue has a magazine within the magazine, via little pockets of editorial tucked under full spreads, as well as windows cut into pages to indicate how news photographs are framed, and the 'Yellow Pages' newspaper tucked in the back." The overt separation of print and digital is something that came up in brief conversation with Dan Hill the other day. Hoping to drill further into it in the near future.

I don't have an iPad Mini, and don't yet have a requirement for one, but I am nonetheless both impressed and amused by this case.

"Imagine a documentary about events you've never heard of—that no one's ever heard of—but that are meticulously chronicled in online sources many people trust implicitly. Imagine the confusion. Imagine the buzz. Imagine the publicity"

"Quietweet is a read-only twitter client, which ignores all tweets containing @s, #s or links."

"How Tumblr and Instagram are fuelling a new generation of online-only streetwear upstarts"

"The arrays could help give robots a more adaptive sense of touch"

"You are walking down the street with a friend. A shot is fired. The two of you duck behind the nearest cover and you pull out your smartphone. A map of the neighborhood pops up on its screen with a large red arrow pointing in the direction the shot came from."

"New models are emerging from the life sciences that view the world as a living organism rather than a machine. "These models are coupled with a new aesthetic, which finds beauty in the complexity of life rather than the elegance of symmetry,""

"Researchers have identified a burst of high-energy radiation known as 'dark lightning" immediately preceding a flash of ordinary lightning. The new finding provides observational evidence that the two phenomena are connected, although the exact nature of the relationship between ordinary bright lightning and the dark variety is still unclear, the scientists said." DARK LIGHTNING

"Researchers at TU Delft in the Netherlands have managed to bring two electrons, three meters from each other, into a quantum- entangled state. This result marks a major step towards realizing a quantum network that can be used to connect future quantum computers and to send information in a completely secure way by means of 'teleportation',

""I need money to go to the moon," Bolden said."

“I have two iPhones, one for day and one for the night. When the day phone runs out, the night phone takes over. I never have to worry.” Bigend-Packerism. Some even more awful quotes therein. He should have been prevented from giving the interview.

"...'hauntology''s champions end up pulping their subject matter to feed their theory. Like the similarly détourned 'psychogeography', it deadens the senses to the qualities (you'd hope) it was intended to reveal. Both are cases of theory slipping into ersatz theology – fated attempts to capture elusive, unspeakable experiences in yards of self-referential explication guaranteed to stamp out their pleasures. There's nothing wrong with men in their forties enjoying shared tastes and nostalgic triggers, but do they have to be so po-faced about it?"

"IntiMate is here to make you PLAY MORE with sex tapes by creating a SAFE SPACE to store and share them: 1.  Shoot tapes and pictures DIRECTLY from our app 2.  The app stores & protects tapes for you 3.  Share & COMPETE with COMPLETE STRANGERS"

Schulze's wonderful weird projection map poster of NYC is back on sale.

"Australia was first settled by between 1,000 and 3,000 humans around 50,000 years ago, but the population crashed during the Ice Age before recovering to a peak of some 1.2 million people around five centuries ago, a study said on Wednesday."

"The dozen canvases at Team Titanic are all painted with pheromones instead of pigments. The pheromones are produced by the artist in his studio, collected from his pores while he watches the news on TV, and labeled for their emotional content based on how the news makes him feel. Suspended in linseed oil, they’re mixed on his palette to make a blend of feelings such as anxiety and elation. He then trowels these olfactory paints onto his canvases so thickly that they might take centuries to dry: an aromatic impasto from which the pheromones gradually disperse."

"The visual material consists of static camera shots: images of urban decay and other socio-economic signifiers, road sign clutter, glowering skies - a landscape sharing some territory with the poetic realism of Humphrey Jennings and the Free Cinema film-makers, but framed and cut with a sharper, more avant-garde edge."

"Only collective inventions have any real value, Xul Solar once told his close friend and fellow Porteño Jorge Luis Borges, trying to convince him (unsuccessfully) to write in Neo-Criollo, one of the two languages he had invented and the one he himself preferred to use for writing and conversation.  Such was the importance to Solar of friendship, sodalities esoteric and otherwise, and cooperation.  These days the artist, who died 50 years ago this month and whose close friendship with Borges is at the heart of an ongoing exhibition at the Americas Society in New York, is remembered less for his hermetic, often illegibly coded mystical watercolor paintings than for the collective séance that he made of his particular corner of Buenos Aires' cosmopolitan avant-garde of the 1920s and the decades that followed."

Jamais Cascio: "The talk I gave earlier this month at the University of Minnesota is now viewable at the Ensia website, on YouTube, and embedded below. It runs about 36 minutes, and covers three different scenarios of a sustainable future."

"Among the wide range of articles, I found the one on The Big Grey Man of Ben Macdhui most interesting, since it contains a number of notes and sources on how our environment may potentially incline people to experience the sensation of a ‘presence’ in their midst..."

FACT mix 379 - Grouper (Apr '13)

Christopher Nolan Wants Matthew McConaughey To Go Interstellar, from Bleeding Cool Comic Book, Movies and TV News and Rumors http://www.bleedingcool.com

"...by 2113 we'll have gone through a dozen or so technosocial-fashion generations. Smartphones give way to tablets to phablets to wearables to implantables to swallowables to replaceable eyeballs to neo-sinus body-nanofab systems (using mucous as a raw material) to brainwebs to body-rentals... and those are increasingly considered "so 2110." And with all of these (or whatever really emerges), there are shifting behavioral norms. Don't look at your phone at the dinner table. Don't replace your eyeball in public. Don't reboot your neo-sinus in church."

"Frictionless Commerce Inside Social Media" is the subhead. Which is obviously the buzzphrase/sales-pitch, but it's interesting.

"Using a complex arrangement of pipes and funnels we turn the junk mail that we receive into a streaming audio broadcast that can be enjoyed from anywhere on the Internet."

"Veti-Gel, the name chosen by NYU student Joe Landolina, uses plant polymers to rapidly solidify when applied to open wounds"

also http://mixlr.com/autechre/showreel/autechre-radio-sat-02-mar-2013/ and http://www.autechre.ws/exai/

"Financial repression is not, however, a term you are going to hear politicians come out with. It sounds scary and it is, to some, justifiably scary. Yet we today, in the developed world, have a near 100% debt-to-GDP ratio, and that is without having fought a world war."

"What if ebooks weren't just a sales channel?"

Bruce Sterling Closing Remarks - SXSW Interactive 2013 Acclaimed science-fiction writer Bruce Sterling will again deliver the Closing Remarks at SXSW Interactive. Sterling's state-of-the-industry, state-of-the-world rants are one of the true highlights of the event, so don't miss the 2013 version (vision).

"The results are "quite strange," Oppenheimer said. "These warm, red planets are unlike any other known object in our universe. All four planets have different spectra, and all four are peculiar. The theorists have a lot of work to do now.""

"Research from the University of Maryland School of Medicine has revealed key features in proteins needed for life to function on Mars and other extreme environments."

"They say the stones contain fossilised biological structures fused into the rock matrix and that their tests clearly rule out the possibility of terrestrial contamination. "

"It is believed that 5 percent of the Mexican population worships the saint, whose other names include Holy Death, The White Girl, The Miracle Worker, and The Skinny Girl."

"In humans, individual astrocytes project scores of fibers that can simultaneously connect with large numbers of neurons, and in particular their synapses, the points of communication where two adjoining neurons meet. "

"So how do they know the teeth are “human”?"

"It seems one dolphin can call another specifically by mimicking the distinct whistle of that other dolphin. "These whistles actually turned out to be names. They're abstract names, which is unheard of in the animal kingdom beyond people.""

"When does social media become pathological narcissism? Maybe when you broadcast your whole day via a tiny voice-controlled personal-surveillance drone that hovers in the air and follows you around."

"So on Saturday, Syrian rebels in the east of the country attacked another government checkpoint along the Iraqi border, al-Ya`rabiya, and took it. Some of the besieged Syrian troops, many wounded, escaped to the Iraqi side and were being escorted by Iraqi troops south when they were ambushed early on Tuesday and 48 were killed, along with 8 Iraqi border guards. The attackers had rocket propelled grenades and left three vehicles burning. It is not clear if the attackers were Syrian rebels in hot pursuit across the border or if local Sunni Iraqi clans, who are related to the largely Sunni insurgents in Syria, struck for themselves."

"Q U B E is a handmade Rubik’s Cube with QR-Codes – a physical object that links to pages containing digital content: videos, audio files (music!), images and text. The idea here was to reintroduce some form of physical, human, ‘hands-on’ engagement with post-physical content, rather than pander to the ubiquity of one-finger DOWNLOAD culture."

"Imagine strolling through New York's Central Park with earbuds, listening to music that changes its melody and emotion as you pass each statue, monument, pond, and play area. For instance, if you are walking towards Bethesda Fountain, the orchestral instruments might build to a dramatic crescendo as you approach the water, and walking past a pond might sound the way a Zen monastery feels. This is the kind of experience TED Fellow Ryan Holladay creates with his "location-aware albums," music apps that use GPS to accompany specific landscapes such as The National Mall and Central Park."

"This is the Daytrotter model, essentially. Active since 2006, the site records bands “live, in a studio, with no overdubs, auto tune or remixing,” and fans can listen to the sessions in real time (upcoming sessions) or later, using the archives. Daytrotter — not the band, or their record label — owns these sound recordings. So far, it has over 2,000 sessions you won’t find on iTunes, Amazon, Spotify, Rdio, or any other commercial service, other than DayTrotter. Users can subscribe after a seven day free trial. The cost: $2 per month, after a seven day trial. Daytrotter switched to this model last year, making more sessions available as it added the subscription requirement."

"Cornell and Rutgers researchers report in the March issue of Oceanography that the severe loss of summertime Arctic sea ice—attributed to greenhouse warming—appears to enhance Northern Hemisphere jet stream meandering, intensify Arctic air mass invasions toward middle latitudes, and increase the frequency of atmospheric blocking events like the one that steered Hurricane Sandy west into the densely populated New York City area."

"Astronomers have their fingers crossed that within the haul of data collected by NASA's Kepler mission, which has already detected nearly three thousand possible exoplanets, hide the signatures of the very first exomoons."

"For those of you who haven’t subscribed, or don’t know about it, Green Pages is Design Fiction operationalized. Green Pages makes Design Fiction into something the entertainment industry can use directly."

"the rare earth metals were extracted from nickel-metal hydride batteries collected from 386 Honda hybrid vehicles that were stored prior to being on sale but became unusable by the Great East Japan Earthquake. Further, as soon as a sufficient volume is secured, Honda will begin applying the same process and recycle rare earth metals extracted from used nickel-metal hydride batteries collected by Honda dealers through battery replacement."

"Put simply, antimatter is identical to matter except that it exists with an opposite electrical charge. In this new research, the team was studying mesons—a group that along with other particles are made up of quarks. Mesons are made up of just two quarks, one matter, the other antimatter. Research over the years has led to theories that the quarks that exist as part of mesons, can oscillate between matter and antimatter."

"The government has secretly ramped up a controversial programme that strips people of their British citizenship on national security grounds – two of whom have been subsequently killed by US drone attacks."

video calling as "always-on, ambient, background presence." I love it when BERG do these breakdowns.