“We don’t see things as they are; we see them as we are.” — Anaïs Nin.
On the eve of a new paradigm that demands radical behavioral change for humanity, Stuart McMillen presents this visualization of two of the best known futurist doctrines: ‘Amusing ourselves to death’. Aldous Huxley, who authored ‘Brave new world’ versus George Orwell, who authored ‘1984’.
![The first specialized dental chair was invented back in the year 1790. Around 50 years later, Horace Wells discovered that nitrous oxide could be used as anesthesia, God blessed him. In a vintage ad, it was said:
Dental patients can now administer their own anesthesia. The gas […] is a mixture of nitrous oxide and oxygen. A tube leading to the tanks containing the gases is equipped with a pistol-like control. While wearing a mask, a patient with this control can release as much gas as she needs to overcome the pain. The patient does not lose consciousness but suffers not pain.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_llnjnzsGs21qjrng0o1_400.jpg)
The first specialized dental chair was invented back in the year 1790. Around 50 years later, Horace Wells discovered that nitrous oxide could be used as anesthesia, God blessed him. In a vintage ad, it was said:
Dental patients can now administer their own anesthesia. The gas […] is a mixture of nitrous oxide and oxygen. A tube leading to the tanks containing the gases is equipped with a pistol-like control. While wearing a mask, a patient with this control can release as much gas as she needs to overcome the pain. The patient does not lose consciousness but suffers not pain.
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Free-floating planets had been predicted but now have finally been detected. Jupiter-sized planets float alone in the dark of space, without orbiting a star at all. Astronomers have discovered up to ten of these so called orphan planets while scanning the center of the Milky Way.
They are around 20.000 light years from Earth. Scientists estimate that there may be about as many of them as stars what make them as common as the orbiting planets we know.
(Source: nasa.gov)
“There are more books in the world than hours in which to read them. We are thus deeply influenced by books we haven’t read, that we haven’t had the time to read. Who has actually read Finnegans Wake – I mean from beginning to end? Who has read the Bible properly, from Genesis to the Apocalypse?” — Umberto Eco, for The Guardian Books.
Jonathan Keats, once described as ‘a poet of ideas’ by the New Yorker, is about to pioneer nuptial quantum entanglement at Art Currents Institute. According to quantum mechanics, when two or more particles are entangled, they behave as if they were one and the same. Any change to one instantaneously and identically changes those entangle with it, even if they are a universe apart. Extreme romance, isn’t it?
In the picture: Particle tracks. wiki.brown.edu
The procedures are, technologically, as follows: the equipment is placed near a window where, exposed to solar radiation, a nonlinear crystal entangles photons. Pairs of these are divided by prisms. The photoelectric effect translates their entangled state to the bodies of the couple, entangling them in a quantum wedding. Mr. Keats, who is happily entangled with his wife, says that ‘it is even easier than getting an x-ray’. Paperwork is not required either.
The entanglement will have to be taken on faith because any attempt to measure a quantum system disentangles it.
A quantum marriage will literally be broken up by skepticism about it. Nuptial entanglement is a state of belief.
(Source: artcurrents.org)
Josh Nimoy is behind the visual effects in ‘Tron Legacy’. Nimoy is a software artist who likes working ’in the source of ideas’: he prefers algorithms to Adobe programs.
“Marshall McLuhan was a master of pattern recognition.” — Writer and artist Douglas Coupland in his new book ‘McLuhan: you know nothing of my work!’
(Source: Wikipedia)
The future that was. ‘25 abandoned Yugoslavia monuments that look like they are from the future’. The structures were commissioned by former president Tito to show sites where WWII battles took place or where concentration camps stood. Designed by sculptures and architects, they attracted the crowds, nevertheless they were totally abandoned after the dissolution of the former republic. With the help of a map dated 1975, Kempenaers toured the ex-Yougaslavia to take pictures of these monuments.
Tractatus Digito-Philosophicus -
Described by authors as “an odd venture: a translation of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus into the domain of software development”.
The software intellect – its basic conceptual forms – is rooted in the early 20th century, the 1910s, 1920s, 1930s. That is where the work of Church and Turing, lambda calculus and computability, comes from. And it is also the time of the Vienna Circle, logical positivism, and Wittgenstein’s early work, the ‘Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus’
A project named ‘Bureaucratics’ by photographer Jan Banning that consist in a book and an exhibition. “The product of an anarchist’s heart, a historian’s mind and and artist’s eye”, says the author.
He has photographed some members in various levels of civil administrations in 8 countries, in 5 continents: Bolivia, USA, Yemen, Russia, China, France, India and Liberia.”The photos show what a local citizen would be confronting with when entering”.
In the picture: Typeroom in the Finance Department of the ‘Old Secretariat’ in the state capital Patna. Bihar, India. 2003