lost in creteil

Lost in Creteil:


Niemeyer's roof in Bobigny Town Hall.


Olympiades area. I used to live near here, and walk around the brocantes on the weekend.


La Defense

recently

manuel mota + norberto lobo in london 24/06/09

This Wednesday! I can't wait.

green porno! series 2!

Isabella Rosselini's ace collection of costumed underwater stories.

A couple of favourites:

amiga work - suzanne treister

Suzanne says: In January 1991 I bought an Amiga computer and made a series of fictional videogame stills using Deluxe Paint II ... The original Amiga floppy disks are now corrupt.

She also has a great stamp collection.

john whitney, 1961

alphaville

Developed by the Alphaville Urbanismo Corporation in the 1970s, Alphaville São Paolo ‘resembles its fictional namesake in elaborate and all-encompassing surveillance techniques’ writes an American professor of urban studies, ‘including high walls, hidden cameras and alarm systems … The Alphaville gym specializes in self-defence and is called CIA.’ The facts about the development get better, or still worse, depending on whether one prefers dystopia to remain firmly in the realms of fiction or to come fully fledged to life:

To advertise Alphaville, the company sponsored some episodes of a popular prime-time Brazilian soap opera whose leading male character is an architect. The architect and his mistress visit Alphaville where, according to Brazil’s Gazeta Mercantil, the characters exalt the safety, freedom and planning of the place, comparing it to the neighbourhoods shown in US films.

And so … Godard’s film about a city of the future, shot on location in the Paris of the mid-1960s, has endowed not just one but thirty ‘gated communities’ in Brazil with its name. And reality, having provided fiction with the raw material for its most dystopian scenarios, returns the compliment by materialising them. The back-and-forth between image and reality is dizzying: from CCTV to soap opera, from European art cinema to aspirational Hollywood and back again. Where does the utopian projection end and dystopian reality begin?

From Visions of the City

notes from other peoples' notes

Thrilling Wonder Stories on Friday had a great mixture of French and British speakers. The former being daringly intellectual, the latter doomily realistic. It was the hottest day of the year so far. My notes aren't great - too many doodles. And decontextualised quotes that I liked - mainly from François Roche: “protocolising the witch in the forest”, "swimming in a charming distress".

For a succinct glide through the day, check Jim Rossignol's notes.

Bryan McKay wasn't even in the AA! That probably made his concentration span better. On Iain MacLeod:

“SF is a concept and the concept of the future resides in that. It is one of the major myths of Western society. Before SF we had the western, another projection of the American dream, risk, possibilities, wide-open dreams, and prospects waiting to be discovered.”

Eight Problems for Writing on an SF Future:

• The future isn’t going to be dominated by Western culture
• People won’t be people as we know them now.
• Space travel isn’t likely to happen in the way we once imagined.
• Science itself is becoming increasingly incomprehensible.
• Real aliens would be barely recognizable to us as alive.
• The physics and technology required to drive a society more advanced than ours would be incomprehensible to us.
• Language and means of expression will be different.
• There’s a strong likelihood that we’re all going to be dead.

“Maybe, someday, we will get back to the moon, which is never that far away.”

Which makes me think of Le Guin's Anarres:

An anarchist society living on the moon: an ambiguous utopia: the best fiction I've read in a long time.

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