Czech artist Jakub Geltner installs sculptures of surveillance cameras into public spaces. As an “intervention into the very character of a city”, he’s been working on the ‘Nest’ project since 2011. Living and working in Prague, he created his first installationdirectly in the center of the city, perfectly assimilating into the surrounding architecture and design of the contemporary urban landscape. From then on, his sculptures turned up in places like a former elementary school, a palace and even on the facade of a church. His latest public space installation, Nest No. 5, features a sculpture of surveillance cameras by the sea.
A graduate of fine arts, he says about his project: “The growth process of a nest on the facades of buildings or in different urban spaces can be implemented as a congestion point or as a starting point of an infection.”
If anyone’s equipped to perform during a pandemic, it’s The Flaming Lips. Even before the pandemic, the band’s frontman, Wayne Coyne, often could be found performing inside a giant bubble. For their appearance on the Late Show with Stephen Colbert on Wednesday night, the band expanded on that concept. Not only did Coyne’s bandmates each get their own bubble, so too did the audience gathered to watch their performance of “Race For the Prize”. Catch the replay below.
“Race For the Prize” appears on The Flaming Lips’ The Soft Bulletin, which celebrated its 20th anniversary last year. Recently, the band teamed with Kacey Musgraves for a new song called “Flowers of Neptune 6”. They also released Deap Lips, a collaborative album with the garage rock duo Deap Vally.
First obvious association coming to my mind is with the visionary projects by Haus-Rucker-Co, from the late 60s on:
Put into the context of Haus-Rucker-Co’s general use of inflatables, as well as today’s emerging fresh-air market—with multiple links explaining this in the actual post—I suggest that what was once an almost absurdist art world provocation has, today, in the form of bottled air, become an unexpectedly viable business model. (Source: BLDGBLOG)
[Image: Haus-Rucker-Co, Grüne Lunge (Green Lung), Kunsthalle Hamburg (1973); photo by Haus-Rucker Co, courtesy of the Archive Zamp Kelp; via Walker Art Center, via BLDGBLOG]
Divergent is a bad book, but its accidental brilliance is that it completely mauled the YA dystopian genre by stripping it down to its barest bones for maximum marketability, utterly destroying the chances of YA dystopian literature’s long-term survival
please elaborate
Sure. Imagine that you need to make a book, and this book needs to be successful. This book needs to be the perfect Marketable YA Dystopian.
So you build your protagonist. She has no personality traits beyond being decently strong-willed, so that her quirks and interesting traits absolutely can’t get in the way of the audience’s projection onto her. She is dainty, birdlike, beautiful despite her protestations that she is ugly–yet she can still hold her own against significantly taller and stronger combatants. She is the perfect mask for the bashful, insecure tweens you are marketing to to wear while they read.
You think, as you draft your novel, that you need to add something that appeals to the basest nature of teenagers, something this government does that will be perversely appealing to them. The Hunger Games’ titular games were the main draw of the books, despite the hatred its characters hold for the event. So the government forces everyone into Harry Potter houses.
So the government makes everyone choose their faction, their single personality trait. Teenagers and tweens are basic–they likely identify by one distinct personality trait or career aspiration, and they’ll thus be enchanted by this system. For years, Tumblr and Twitter bios will include Erudite orDauntless alongsideAquariusandRavenclaw andINTJ. Congratulations, you just made having more than one personality trait anathema to your worldbuilding.
Your readers and thus your protagonist are naturally drawn to the faction that you have made RIDICULOUSLY cooler and better than the others: Dauntless. The faction where they play dangerous games of Capture the Flag and don’t work and act remarkably like teenagers with a budget. You add an attractive, tall man to help and hinder the protagonist. He is brooding and handsome; he doesn’t need to be anything else.
The villains appear soon afterward. They are your tried and true dystopian government: polished, sleek, intelligent, headed by a woman for some reason. They fight the protagonists, they carry out their evil, Machiavellian, stupid plan. You finish the novel with duct tape and fanservice, action sequences and skin and just enough glue and spit to seal the terrible, hollow world you have made shut just long enough to put it on the shelf.
And you have just destroyed YA dystopian literature. Because you have boiled it down to its bare essentials. A sleek, futuristic government borrowing its aesthetic from modern minimalism and wealth forces the population to participate in a perversely cool-to-read-about system like the Hunger Games or the factions, and one brave, slender, pretty, hollow main character is the only one brave–no, special enough to stand against it.
And by making this bare-bones world, crafted for maximum marketability, you expose yourself and every other YA dystopian writer as a lazy worldbuilder driven too far by the “rule of cool” and the formulas of other, better dystopian books before yours. In the following five years, you watch in real time as the dystopian genre crumbles under your feet, as the movies made based on your successful (but later widely-panned and mocked) books slowly regress to video-only releases, as fewer and fewer releases try to do what you did. And maybe you realize what you’ve done.
I absolutely despise what Divergent did to the reputation of The Hunger Games. All of the failings of Divergent and other similar books were projected onto The Hunger Games despite the fact that it does it well. The Hunger Games is clever and memorable, it has simple parts and worldbuilding but it works to its advantage. The characters are fleshed out and have their own motivations and struggles, but it just gets lumped into the other books that try to replicate its success. Plus, the movies and marketing didn’t help out too. The Hunger Games is an amazing series, not perfect at all, but it works very well. There are clear messages and intentions with Collins’ words beyond cash grabs, but it’s been hit hard by those that came after it.
Suzanne Collins wrote The Hunger Games because she had something to say about our own world. People are hating on the prequel she wrote, but I’d say it’s a perfect indictment of our times. Most YA Dystopia writers wrote their books to replicate the success of The Hunger Games, but they failed because their worlds are too different from ours. They tried to turn YA Dystopia into escapist literature, but The Hunger Games was never about escapism because it actually forces you to draw connections to our own society.
The Hunger Games is a warning about our society. Panem is formed in the collapse of America after global warming, food shortages, and war makes resources scarce. The government in the Capitol is an authoritarian fascist regime that uses the machine of Capitalism to crush its citizens beneath their heel.
The ruling class, aka the one percent, gains all the spoils of labor, leaving the citizens in the Districts to starve, barely subsisting on what the Capitol gives them. And if they complain they’re brutalized into submittance. And then, after this becomes too much and they rebel?
The first time, the Capitol creates the Hunger Games. To remind them that they can kill them, even their children, whenever they want. It tells them they are helpless. Your children being slaughtered is Fun. Entertainment. It dehumanizes an already crushed populace. It’s called the Hunger Games to remind them that, no matter how hungry they are, they can always have even crumbs ripped away from them.
The first book came out in 2008 and I remember naively thinking that the Capitol wouldn’t have to fear rebellion (which it does very much) if it just….treated it’s citizens well. A happy country doesn’t need to rebel. Problem solved.
But like….looking around at well, everything, I realize how very naive that was. Suzanne Collins earned her place in YA history, my dudes.
And more to the point, Divergent is absolute shit. Just so bad. So. Bad.
I remember doing a book report on the hunger games around the time the movies were about to come out. During a Q and A, I said something to the effect of “the hunger games tries to alienate the familiar horrors of society. For example, this book is about fascism and the brutal murder of children being glossed over by rich people talking about the jewels and gowns worn by these victims. What is in seventeen and vogue magazines right now? The jewels and the gowns j law is going to wear.” I remember saying it without thinking and realizing mid- ramble how hard that slapped.
Also katniss does fall kinda flat when J-law portrayed her and now of course that’s all I can see when I re read hunger games but at the time I was 13 when the movie came out and at the time all I wanted to be was 16-18 and all the independence that comes with that. So Katniss was right there with me when I’d read the books a year or two prior to that. She was moody and brave and stubborn and selfish and the world reacted to her. There were actuall consequences to her being reckless. It’s kinda similar to when Buffy the Vampire Slayer was allowed to make mistakes with real and even disproportionately severe concequenses. If you’re going to make a Pants character for teen girls that’s the way to do it, the problem with Bella from twilight isn’t so much that she’s flat- she is, but this is very much targeted to girls who are still cultivating personalities of their own. The problem with Bella is she doesn’t have a world of rationally self interested characters to react to her. She throws herself off a cliff? A hot boy will save her ass. She goes off to fight an OP vampire dude alone? She gets injured just enough for some hospital fluff after her boyfriend saves her. She never has a more complicated thought than being a doormat and how best to get herself killed for attention. Katniss has to raise her sister and help her mother or they starved. People died for Katniss’s mistakes. She had to live with the consequences of character weakness. If you’re gonna make a character who is a skin suit you’d best be making sure the supporting cast has some logical reactions to this teen girl popping up in the middle of their political landscape (and katniss is kinda cool in a way cause she calls the adults out for making her the teen in charge of things that are too big to ask of even most adults so it’s a two way street.) the difference between having a believable character represent the teenage girl experience and having a Mary Sue isn’t so much what they think or feel, but rather what they can get away with. Katniss yes is -the chosen one- but she has a skill that she’s developed her entire life and a network of adults politicizing her to their advantage. Yes she is very clever in survival but Cinna, Effie and Hamitch saved her life in the ring. She’s a symbol once the adult uprisers make her one (which probably had more to do with rue than her). The adult survivors ally to protect her and get her to snow. Her role in the revolution is actually very minor from an organizational perspective. The fact that her squadron stormed the capitol? It was all her…but truthfully if it hadn’t been her someone else probably would have. What made Katniss herself was how she responded to being twisted into positions adults put her into…which is a very natural teenage thing to struggle with, being mapped onto a dystopian world and exaggerated (but authentic) political climate. Do ya know what’s not a natural thing for teenagers to struggle with? Losing your entire family to the Myers Briggs test. Even Harry Potter has examples of families that cross house lines. Divergent is…weird because the positions the teens are forced into are not just fantasy, they’re just unnatural? Same with Bella, the choices she faces aren’t dilemmas that make sense. It doesn’t matter if they respond to things the way a teen would if a teen never experience having to tell their fathers they’re dying so they can have a weird baby in the woods with her Uber wealthy predatory vampire husband. I mean, is the average teen gonna wind up in a deadly lottery game? No. But our current political climate really is forcing them to take active roles in social movements young, because the adults broke it. Young people are activists now with very real impacts on movements. They are becoming the voices of revolution. It makes sense that we’ve put teen Katniss in that situation. Because the girls wearing her as pants sure as hell aren’t here wondering what hot boy is hotter. Even the obligatory love triangle gets thrown on the back burner a lot. With Bella that’s just the whole oven.
#qbdchallenge Day 5: A Dystopian Adventure Well most dystopian books don’t feel like an adventure due to the very nature of them, but this is categorised as post-apocalyptic dystopian fiction so I think it counts? Station Eleven tells the story of a travelling troupe of actors as they perform Shakespeare following a pandemic that destroys the world we know
some friends said that I should create a 3d character based off of the upcoming CDprojekt Red game Cyberpunk 2077. so here are some work in progress images of the design! I’m hoping to bring part of the character to a finished game ready textured state! It’s gonna be a great learning experience! I’m so excited!!! It’s been an interesting project so far! I’m absolutely pumped for Cyberpunk 2077
“Elon Musk has secured more than $7bn (£5.7bn) in funding for his $44bn takeover of Twitter from a group of investors including the tech tycoon Larry Ellison, the Qatar state investment fund and the world’s biggest cryptocurrency exchange.
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The Saudi Arabian investor Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, who had initially opposed the buyout, also agreed to roll his $1.9bn stake into the deal rather than cashing out, according to a filing with the US financial watchdog.
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According to the filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, Ellison is putting $1bn into the transaction. Ellison, who is worth about $95bn, made his fortune as the founder of the database-software business Oracle. A member of the Tesla board, he was one of the few top technology executives to openly support the presidency of Donald Trump and reportedly hosted a fundraiser for the politician in 2020 at his California estate.
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Alongside Ellison, the co-investors include Sequoia Capital, a US venture capital fund, which has pledged $800m, and the Dubai-based Vy Capital, which has promised $700m, according to the SEC filing. Qatar Holding, which is part of the Qatar Investment Authority, is putting in $375m as part of the deal, while Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency trading platform, is contributing $500m.”
