1972 Project
Griffin Sees the Light - Burning Shore
Griffin produced and contributed to underground comix, but he remains best known for the rock poster art he produced in late-‘60s San Francisco. Like many, I bow down amazed before his legendary Jimi Hendrix flying eyeball poster (BG-105), perhaps the supreme eidolon of the era. I also owe a lot to the biomorph erotics of his album cover art for the Dead’s Aoxomoxoa, which worked like an initiatory mandala on my wee stoner mind. But Man from Utopia is the pinnacle, or, perhaps, the pit of Griffin’s psychedelic vision: convulsive, sexual, hermetic, intensely sacred and intensely profane.
Touching the future - Griffith Review
Genevieve Bell writing for the Griffith Review with a trip through the history of computing, AI, systems, cybernetics, and ideas for the way forward. She starts with “THE FUTURE IS not a destination. We build it every day in the present,” in an intro very close in spirit to the “Ashby-Benjamin manoeuvre,” then goes on to cover the Macy conferences (cybernetics), the meeting at Dartmouth (AI), their influence on the Whole Earth catalogue, Jasia Reichardt’s Cybernetic Serendipity exhibition (which I didn’t know about, fascinating), and finishes with the Brewarrina Aboriginal Fish Traps in Australia, as inspiration for “ideas about sustainability; ideas about systems that are decades or centuries in the making; ideas about systems that endure and systems that are built explicitly to endure.” The difference between Macys and Dartmouth in the inclusion of a planetary context and the environment is worth noting and Bell keeps that thread going throughout the piece.
John Naughton | Thursday 5 November, 2020 | Memex 1.1
And so the question is: how did that come to pass? That’s a long story, and some of it is peculiarly American (particularly the racism that runs through that society like the message in a stick of Blackpool rock). But not all of it; there’s an element of it also that other Western democracies share, namely that this pathological polarisation has been a long time building — by my reckoning since the collapse of the post-war Keynesian order from 1971 onwards, and the subsequent ideological infection of ruling elites in most democracies by neoliberalism. We are now reaping the whirlwind of what we sowed in those decades.
James T. Baldwin - Wikipedia
an American industrial designer and writer.[1] Baldwin was a student of Buckminster Fuller; Baldwin's work was inspired by Fuller's principles and, in the case of some of Baldwin's published writings, he popularized and interpreted Fuller's ideas and achievements. In his own right, Baldwin was a figure in American designers' efforts to incorporate solar, wind, and other renewable energy sources. In his career, being a fabricator was as important as being a designer.[2] Baldwin is noted as the inventor of the "Pillow Dome",[3] a design that combines Buckminster Fuller's geodesic dome with panels of inflated ETFE plastic panels.
George Dyson (science historian) - Wikipedia
George Dyson is the son of the theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson and mathematician Verena Huber-Dyson, the brother of technology analyst Esther Dyson, and the grandson of the British composer Sir George Dyson. When he was sixteen he went to live in British Columbia to pursue his interest in kayaking. From 1972 to 1975, he lived in a treehouse at a height of 30 metres that he built from salvaged materials on the shore of Burrard Inlet.
Silver Machines – { feuilleton }
I read this essay by Alfred Jarry called, “How to Construct a Time Machine”, and I noticed something which I don’t think anyone else has thought of because I’ve never seen any criticism of the piece to suggest this. I seemed to suss out immediately that what he was describing was his bicycle. He did have that turn of mind. He was the kind of bloke who’d think it was a good joke to write this very informed sounding piece, full of really good physics (and it has got some proper physics in it), describing how to build a time machine, which is actually about how to build a bicycle, buried under this smoke-screen of physics that sounds authentic.
