February 09, 2009

Closed on Mondays

Closed on Mondays.

Posted by tomk at 11:36 PM | Comments (0)

November 26, 2008

The Drowned World

A new theme park is coming soon to Dubai. Named The Ultimate City, its theme will be the the world refracted through the many faceted crystal-like mind of writer J.G. Ballard. It will be distributed throughout the city to make it's experience as much part of the urban fabric as possible. Some of the attractions will include:

• The Drowned World water park where guests can experience the rising sea levels of global warming as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order.

• As oil rapidly becomes a scarce commodity, Crashland will become the only place to partake in the visceral and intoxicating power of the internal-combustion engine.

• Get closer to the nuclear power of the sun over the ozone free Terminal Beach, or descend into the cool shade of vintage Bikini Atoll concrete nuclear blast bunkers scattered among it's sandy dunes.

• In a special arrangement with the Burj Dubai, a large section of the world's tallest skyscraper has been reserved for High Rise: a paint-ball arena where guests struggle for advantage as they try to reach the top of the building.

• Other attractions will include: The Burning World, Concrete Island, and more.

Well... not quite. This is a swimming pool designed by the Mumbai branch Ogilvy & Mather for HSBC Banking group. It is supposed to raise public awareness of the dangers of global warming, but instead they've succeeded in creating world's first (?) Ballardian swimming pool. With all the apocalyptic talk on this blog lately, I couldn't resist!

Via [Neatorama]

Posted by tomk at 01:33 AM | Comments (1)

May 25, 2008

Mobile Photography Nostalgia

My dead Sony Ericsson T-610s soul taken by the Nokia 6300.

I don't take very many pictures with my cellphone. But, occasionally it is the only tool available to record a moment in time. Usually the picture is forgotten as soon as it is taken. When my trusty Sony Ericsson T-610 died a few weeks ago I was compelled to take a look at the pictures I've taken with it during the five (!) years it served as my phone. Its camera wasn't great and the pictures were very low resolution... on top of that, I'm not a great photographer. But the grainy, low-quality images have already acquired that warm and familiar sheen of nostalgia... the same kind of sheen that we experience listening to vinyl records or cassette tapes or playing old arcade style video games (Galaga!). A long time ago I posted a small set of pictures from the old phone when it was still new to me. Now I've added a bunch more to that Flickr set. Take a look.

My new phone (Nokia 6300) looks a lot like the T-610. I admit that I bought it mainly on the strength of that resemblance... but... I find its new interface a little too slick, its memory bigger than necessary, its photos are bigger but not better, etc., etc... already I'm missing the relative clunkiness of the old phone knowing full well I'll have the same nostalgic feelings for the new one in five years time.

Posted by tomk at 11:44 PM | Comments (0)

September 27, 2006

Random Quotations

Click on panels and drawings for relevant links. Transcription for clarity: "Power operates most effectively not by persuading the conscious mind, but by deliminating in advance what is possible to experience." – CCRU "Kapital really is a planet-wide artificial intelligence, feeding matrix-style, on the energy of human slaves." – K-Punk "The opposite of real isn't phony or illusional – it's optional." – Thomas DeZengotita, Mediated, p. ? "We are lucky that the organic realm reached the foot of evolutionary ladder before the inorganic." – J.G. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition, p. 22 "Why believe in work when it doesn't believe in you?" – Pat Kane, The Play Ethic, p. 79 "What if the 'idea' of progress were not an idea at all but rather the symptom of something else?" – Frededric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future, p.281

Posted by tomk at 01:32 AM | Comments (0)

May 04, 2006

Chinese WWII Comics

A friend of mine went to Shanghai a little while ago and brought me some cool Chinese comics. I got two Tintin reprints and something I haven't seen before:

All the books are 5 inches wide and 3.5 inches high. They are printed on very cheap newsprint. The color of the paper changes throught out and the ink gets pretty faint at times. The swastikas make it pretty clear that it's about WWII. A friend of mine mentioned that it's some sort of spy thriller. I'm not sure if the artist is Chinese or not. The art is very European looking, but then what do I know!

Here are a few sample pages. Click on the images to see them BIG.

Posted by tomk at 12:14 AM | Comments (0)