The Forgotten Man by Jon McNaughton

In front of the White House a man is sitting on a park bench in the throes of depression. He is surrounded by all 43 presidents. In the forefront, purposefully ignoring the depressed man is President Obama, whose right foot is stepping on the Constitution. James Madison is next to Obama, pleading with him to stop.

This tableau is called “The Forgotten Man”, a painting by Jon McNaughton, an artist who is known for his politically-charged work.

The painting, which uses objects such as discarded dollar bills as symbols and scraps of paper with individual constitutional amendments scrawled onto them, has been making the rounds across the Internet.

The painting was initially released in 2010 and has resurfaced, causing a stir when it appeared for a caption contest on MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow’s blog.

The responses have ranged from sarcastic — “We’ll trade you this peasant for that constitution. We’ll even throw in the bench.” – to Photoshop works of art.

McNaughton released an accompanying YouTube video for his painting. The video shows McNaughton painting the piece with a soundtrack that emulates a movie trailer.

“For a long time I didn’t know if I wanted to paint this picture, because I worried it might be too controversial,” McNaughton explains in a voice over. “(T)his man (on the park bench) represents every man, woman, and child who is an American… he hopes to find the American dream of happiness and prosperity…

[continues at CBS Las Vegas] ]]> http://www.disinfo.com/2012/02/forgotten-man-painting-shows-president-obama-trampling-constitution/feed/ 0 http://www.disinfo.com/2012/02/crafting-with-human-hair/ http://www.disinfo.com/2012/02/crafting-with-human-hair/#comments Sun, 05 Feb 2012 05:50:14 +0000 Haystack http://www.disinfo.com/?p=67848

Victorian Hair Wreath

During the 19th century it was fashionable to incorporate human hair into brooches, watch chains, wreaths, and other objects that could be worn or displayed. Victorian Gothic explores the lost art of sentimental hairwork:

Mrs. Hamlin of Omaha, Nebraska left a rather curious heirloom to her descendants—an intricately woven bouquet composed entirely of human hair. Buried deep inside, each of its flowers is numbered with a tiny label corresponding one of fifteen names written on a separate index card; those of herself and her loved ones. More than a century ago, each of these people offered up their locks of brown or gray—literally, pieces of themselves—to provide the material for what would become a lasting symbol family unity.

The weaver need not have been the eccentric that one might suppose. On the contrary, she was likely to have been a conventional middle class lady going about her fancywork. She may have included a…

Victorian Hair Wreath

During the 19th century it was fashionable to incorporate human hair into brooches, watch chains, wreaths, and other objects that could be worn or displayed. Victorian Gothic explores the lost art of sentimental hairwork:

Mrs. Hamlin of Omaha, Nebraska left a rather curious heirloom to her descendants—an intricately woven bouquet composed entirely of human hair. Buried deep inside, each of its flowers is numbered with a tiny label corresponding one of fifteen names written on a separate index card; those of herself and her loved ones. More than a century ago, each of these people offered up their locks of brown or gray—literally, pieces of themselves—to provide the material for what would become a lasting symbol family unity.

The weaver need not have been the eccentric that one might suppose. On the contrary, she was likely to have been a conventional middle class lady going about her fancywork. She may have included a lock of her own in the wreath, but quite possibly she did not, preferring instead to be present as the sum of its parts; the invisible weaver of family ties. As a good 19th century woman, the domestic harmony she fostered was an expression of herself; her self-portrait in sacrifice.

As Helen Sheumaker describes in Love Entwined: The Curious History of Hairwork in America, hairwork in its myriad forms had not only established itself as longstanding tradition by the later half of the 19th century, but had become an active fashion. Husbands went to work wearing watch fobs fashioned of their wives hair. Locks from the dearly departed were mounted into rings and brooches. Ladies filled their autograph books with snippets from their friends. At a time of rising commercialism, sentimental hairwork became a way both to signal one’s sincerity and, paradoxically, to stay in style.

[Full Article and More Pictures at Victorian Gothic]

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A Renaissance man, Tom is also an accomplished musician who has done something truly unusual and, to my mind so compelling, that if you are anywhere near Los Angeles this week, you should go to the most unique of record release parties. I asked Tom to explain for disinformation:

It’s Sunday night, I’m up in Topanga in my friend Ysanne’s cabin, and as I experience no internet, no cell phone, and a space that is one part The Hobbit and one part Deadwood I’m hard pressed to imagine a better place to be sleeping before my record release on Wednesday. The record, BY POPULAR DEMAND, whose release I’ll be celebrating with friends at La Luz de Jesus gallery in LA, was recorded on a machine built when these conditions were the norm: a turn-of-the-century convergence of leather, oak, gears, and brilliance—a wax cylinder recorder built by Thomas Edison.

The single for the record was the first song both recorded and released on wax cylinder since 1914, and just as the title is a joking nod to the obsolete technology, the record itself is an exercise in purity in analog recording. We recorded onto wax cylinder, transferred the cylinders onto tape, then ran from tape directly to a vinyl lathe. The music that reaches your ears when you put the record on was not only recorded without electricity, it was never digitized or converted to an algorithm. No noise reduction, no editing. The pure sound of the first successful recording process in the history of our planet, and as an exercise in pure analog audio it will only be released as a physical, vinyl record.

In the process of making my first record, I felt like I needed to clean out the programming of a lifetime of constant noise. For me to be able to effectively communicate my opinions and feelings, I needed to start from a foundation that would align me with performance and poetry over equipment and equalizations. I believe what I sacrificed in audio subtlety, I gained by carving the clearest path to my ideas. These recordings and what I believe they represent are just as much a part of my life now as the songs themselves.

Our planet is spinning faster than imagination. How long did it take for The Merry Pranksters to go from being Public Enemies to having their chariot enshrined in the Smithsonian as a National Treasure? Decades. But in the 21st century, it seems the time from getting pepper sprayed to having your tent placed in an art gallery is about two months. Gail Potocki is reading to me right now that Shepard Fairey just made $25,000 selling prints at Occupy LA. Even our rebellions are effectively co-opted by capitalism now.

We are all mad. If by definition madness is being consistently somewhere in your head other than present, as we drive and walk and talk with our faces down into our cell phones, how could we call ourselves sane? We are “here”, but not… here. Am I calling for a return to Stone Age values? Not at all. But we discard technology as fast as we can create it. We wait in lines for hours to buy some updated gadget that we can’t live without, yet didn’t know existed before a press release two weeks earlier.

Let’s try the same story with a different pill, and see just how deep the rabbit hole goes: Wednesday the 25th in Los Angeles, at La Luz de Jesus gallery, a record is being released (just like the newest new toy, and not at all) that for a wholly human reason you absolutely can’t live without. It won’t be commercially released on CD, and that’s an important part of the story. But above all else, you don’t have to purchase anything to get the message. Come celebrate with us on Wednesday. If you can’t make it, we are lucky enough to have a web that connects our ideas- watch my TEDx talk, or the footage of us making the record (below). Take it in. Live with it for a moment. See if you agree.

We’ll be waiting.

Thomas Negovan
Topanga Canyon, CA
22 Jan 12

Aleister Crowley defines magick as “the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will.” This statement provides the magickal formula in a very simple yet powerful way.

Union of Opposites is a public ritual performance that explores how the principals of magick operate in the astral and physical worlds. It is a live experiment with the participation of an audience. I have designed this working to activate the chakras in a specific order that is very unconventional. Given the advancements in science and technology since Crowley’s lifetime the rituals must be constantly revised in order to still be effective. The energy currents working in the world today are much quicker and powerful than just a few years ago. I have altered or even reversed many aspects of traditional ritual to conduct these forces.

Five thousand years from now — let’s say we didn’t find the God particle. We’re still looking. I think we probably won’t be making things of the nature that we are now. I think we’ll just be trying to appreciate things more. Maybe we’ll design better ears. I mean, our hearing’s crappy. We’ll have huge ears and we’ll be able to tune in to Mars, or we’ll have a hundred lenses through which we can look onto the surface of Mars with our so-called “bare eyes,” or look through our hands. We’ll be able to be in the present more effectively.

Read More: Believer

While the preservation of hunting trophies may be the best-known use of the taxidermist’s art, fans of Walter Potter’s anthropomorphic tableaux can attest to the fact that it has its other, more silly uses. Potter (1835-1918) was a self-taught taxidermist who grew up in the rural community of Bramber, Sussex, at a time when stuffing dead animals was considered to be a suitable hobby for young boys. For technical assistance, he would have had any number of popular manuals at his disposal. For inspiration, he had his younger sister’s illustrated nursery rhyme books and the Great Exhibition of 1851, where anthropomorphic taxidermy was first displayed to the British public.

His first major contribution was an elaborate diorama depicting the death and burial of Cock Robin, which he began at age 19 and took seven years to complete. Each of the animals from the English nursery rhyme are represented, behaving in character; a rook with a book is parson, a mourning dove leads the funeral procession, an owl digs the grave.

Potter was encouraged in his hobby, which brought customers to his father’s inn. By 1880 his collection had grown into an important attraction for the tiny village of Bramber, and came to be housed in a separate museum building on land next to the inn. Here he welcomed visitors, received donations of small game from local farmers, and steadily improved his displays. The museum became so packed, and its tableaux so rich in detail, that returning patrons were never at a loss to find some new and interesting feature that they had overlooked before.

[Full Article and Images at Victorian Gothic]

Like a modern day Dr Frankenstein, Enrique Gomez De Molina creates hauntingly stunning hybrid sculptures made from the stuffed parts of dead animals. But it…could land the Miami artist in jail for up to five years and see him forking out $250,000 in fines.

He pleaded guilty to illegally importing parts from endangered species to make his beloved mythical creatures. He smuggled in the parts, skins and remains, from whole cobras, pangolins, hornbills, and the skulls of babirusa and orangutans from areas all over the world including Bali, Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines and China.

Fuehlometer (Feel-o-meter) by Richard Wilhelmer, Julius von Bismarck, and Benjamin Maus is a light installation consisting of a giant smiley face that reflects the average mood of the people living in the city. The average emotional value is calculated through the computational analysis of the faces of people passing a camera located in a specific part of the city.

The dance for the realization of the future begins in the corridors of art, literature, and culture. Only by connecting together the greatest visionary minds with the most innovative and rule-breaking forms of artistic expression and cultural mind-melding can we unlock the full potential of the Future and bring it into the Present. We offer you the bold new interdisciplinary movement of the 21st Century. A place where the right brain and left brain merge into a new “Undivided Mind”.

The future is all around us today. The explosion of the Internet and powerful mobile devices have transformed life in fundamental ways for billions of people. We need to increase our efforts to open source technology so that it becomes available to the billions who lack it. We must push the envelope of the latest p2p technology to enable new applications which bring us closer together as a society. We want a future-friendly culture that embraces technology and understands that technological innovation plays a central role in solving the world’s most persistent problems.

We encourage a new generation of thinkers who understand that fun and learning are not mutually exclusive and that the most complex topics can be grasped if there is enough curiosity, wonder, and enthusiasm for learning. Labs, companies, and startups around the world are making startling steps forward in the fields of nanotechnology, robotics, brain-computer interfacing, 3D printing, materials science, wearable computing, life extension, social networking, and more. We must understand these advances so that we can ensure that they benefit as many people as possible.

Join us for a profound exploration of what it means to be human. A first-hand look into the genesis of a powerful new intellectual and expressive culture.

In the video above Rachel Haywire talks about her ideas for the Extreme Futurist Festival and what she hopes to accomplish with this new event that takes place in Los Angeles on the 16th and 17th of December. Her dream of bringing the intellectual and artistic communities together in which the best minds of science, technology, and alt-culture unite was brought into reality through working with Michael Anissimov of the Singularity Institute. After working on the Singularity Summit Michael decided to give XFF his attention due to having a similar vision for Transhumanism.

Transforming the barriers between underground and mainstream the organizers of Extreme Futurist Festival are excited about the first year of their event. The festival will feature speakers, artists, bands, and performers ranging from Natasha Vita-More (Chairwoman of Humanity+) to Hanin Elias. (founding member of Atari Teenage Riot) Vendors include RE/Search Publications and comic artist Zac Finger.

In the video Rachel also reads some of her writing from the Disinformation book Generation Hex and discusses how it applies to the event. Tickets are on sale now.

For his Limit Telephotography series, Paglen used high powered telescopes to picture the “black” sites, a series of secret locations operated by the CIA. Often outside of U.S. territory and legal jurisdiction, these locations do not officially exist, they range from American torture camps in Afghanistan to front companies running airlines whose purpose is to covertly move suspects around.

Paradoxically Paglen’s images deepen the secrecy of their subject rather than uncover it. Limit-telephotography most closely resembles astrophotography, a technique that astronomers use to photograph objects that might be trillions of miles from Earth. Paglen’s subjects are much closer but also even more difficult to photograph. To physical distance, one has indeed to add the obstacle of informational concealment.

I’ve finally decided to catch up with him and interviewed him via skype:

We have this idea that secrecy is this perfectly oiled machine but the secrecy system is not all that organized. Also we imagine that there is one single brain orchestrating secrecy behind the whole State but this is not the case. Lots of things are contradicting each other. The secrecy system is internally inconsistent but also incoherent.

lot of the infrastructure of the rendition program had to be modified because of the way journalists, human right activists and researchers have turned it into a political issue and made it public. But now we have the drone assassination programs which are a kind of version 3.0. of the rendition program.

I can only talk from an American perspective. The Black World is a State that is inside the State and it works differently. It’s monarchic in the sense that it’s not a democracy. It is run by generals and ultimately by the President. There’s very little overview of it by other parts of the government and obviously by the people. It has a tendency to change everything around it to its own image.

For example, if you want to build a secret plane then you need first a secret factory to build it. Thousands of workers and managers will be working in that plane factory, they have to swear secrecy and you have to ensure that they will indeed keep the secret. That means that social engineering will also have to be organized. All this will require a lot of money which you obviously can’t get from the congress. So you have to find ways to fund your project without ever telling anyone how you’re going to use that money. Once you have the planes, you need a secret airbase. But how do you create a place on the surface of the Earth that will remain secret? So you build that place and claim that it doesn’t exist. Everything you do is outside of the court system so you also need to set up new laws which are actually not even laws since they haven’t been voted by the congress. So you start to create your own laws and legislation. Over time, the rest of the State starts to look more and more like the secret part of the State. It’s that structural organization that people should be concerned about, because illegal things are bound to happen where there is no oversight. That’s what happened with the rendition flights and torture program and recently with the drone assassination program.

Image of a horse from the Lascaux caves.

If you thought that those ancient cave paintings at Lascaux and elsewhere were pretty abstract, think again. AP via Fox News reports that DNA studies suggest the cave painters were actually painting what they saw:

Cave painters during the Ice Age were more like da Vinci than Dali, sketching realistic depictions of horses they saw rather than dreaming them up, a study of ancient DNA finds.

It’s not just a matter of aesthetics: Paintings based on real life can give first-hand glimpses into the environment of tens of thousands of years ago. But scientists have wondered how much imagination went into animal drawings etched in caves around Europe.

The latest analysis published online Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences focused on horses since they appeared most frequently on rock walls. The famed Lascaux Cave in the Dordogne region of southwest France and the Chauvet Cave in southeast France feature numerous scenes of brown and black horses. Other caves like the Pech Merle in southern France are adorned with paintings of white horses with black spots.

Past studies of ancient DNA have only turned up evidence of brown and black horses during that time. That led scientists to question whether the spotted horses were real or fantasy.

To get at the genetics of equine coat color, an international team led by the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research in Germany analyzed DNA from fossilized bones and teeth from 31 prehistoric horses. The samples were recovered from more than a dozen archaeological sites in Siberia, Eastern Europe, Western Europe and the Iberian peninsula.

It turned out six of the horses had a genetic mutation that gives rise to a spotted coat, suggesting that ancient artists were drawing what they were seeing. Brown was the most common coat color, found in 18 horses…

[continues at AP via Fox News]

RSH: “At all levels, ultimately graffiti is an act of cultural insurgency. It is a rebellion; against the norm, against society at large, against corporations, against the city or “government.” Graffiti is the act of changing the visual environment in the public space. It doesn’t matter if its a quickly scrawled tag or a well developed painting, it shouldn’t be there and it is.”

James Curcio: To begin with, I’d like to hear what you think the function of graffiti art is. Maybe it has a purpose, maybe it doesn’t, but even if you don’t intend a purpose, a social action like that has a reaction, it serves a function. They don’t necessarily all need to have the same function but I imagine when you really cut down to it there is a fairly small range of possibilities there. What do you think?

Raymond Salvatore Harmon: Modern urban visual environments are controlled by corporations and city governments (which are in fact almost always corporations themselves). They decide where a road goes, how big signs can be, when a billboard can go up, etc. This is all dictated by financial gain. Advertising revenue plays a huge part in city planning.

When someone alters this visual landscape without permission they are fucking with the economic value of that environment. In doing so they are counteracting the attempt that the city government makes to control that environment. While the content and message can vary greatly within graffiti, the act is very clear. Graffiti is doing this act in violation of the law.

Increasingly we are seeing the growth of something that appears to be “graffiti”, in that it has co-opted graffiti’s common visual aesthetics and techniques, but it is done with permission. “Street art” is graffiti without the teeth. When it’s being done with permission it’s just the same as the advertising billboards. It’s part of the plan, and in being so it’s devoid of the same level of depth found in an act of true vandalism.

Read the interview on Modern Mythology

A larger-than-life Lego man bearing the cryptic phrase “no real than you are” has washed ashore on the Florida coast. Beachcombers in Siesta Key found the roughly 8-foot-tall Lego man just before dawn Tuesday. The figure had “Ego Leonard” and the number 8 on its back.

In 2007, an almost-identical creation was found in the Netherlands. Another turned up in England the next year.

The confusion about the nature of God starts with the idea God is separate from Existence. Also, there seems to be a tendency to treat the Father as God itself and the Son & Holy Spirit as a part of, but not equal to the Father. From these simple misunderstandings comes the logical paradoxes we’re all familiar with.

So here’s where we begin to clear things up. God is the single thing, but there are three aspects that make up the totality of God. Here’s the analogy: we take a piece of cheese. The cheese is one thing; however, there are aspects to the cheese that make up the whole thing: we have the shape, color & taste of the cheese. So where does the cheese end and its aspects begin? Well obviously that’s an impossible question.

So now the issue is defining the Father, Son & Holy Spirit aspects and how they together define God.

• The Father aspect is Existence as a whole. All of Existence — the Alpha & Omega. The Totality of everything that ever was and ever will be; from a clump of dirt to the spaces in between the spaces. From Heaven to Earth.

• The Son aspect, Christ is the agency of Intelligence, or Consciousness.

• The Holy Spirit aspect is Energy itself.

Now we put these concepts together and learn that energy is intelligent and comprises Existence itself. Through science we have actually learned all of existence is energy vibrating at various densities. Everything you see, touch and think is energy in one form or another. And we can say energy is intelligent through simple observation; What makes a chair stay a chair? What makes a carpet continue on as a carpet? Why don’t all the molecules just separate into one big mush? Because of Consciousness. Energy is Consciousness. Also, energy cannot be created nor destroyed — in other words, the Alpha & Omega. But we possess our own personal Consciousness — we were ‘made in God’s image.’ It doesn’t mean God looks like a man, it means we possess Consciousness.

But does this apply to all people or some and how do we tell the difference?

The difference is like night and day. Mankind was created like any other animal — however our destiny was different than other animals — the plan was to become one with Christ and receive Consciousness, thus bringing Heaven to Earth. The old narrative tells us Christ saves us from a life of sin when we accept Him as our personal savior. But in this new context Christ redeems us from our life as an animal and we are born again with the knowledge we are one with God. These are very subtle but key distinctions being made here.

How do we bring about this change in ourselves? First, we have to take the question seriously. Specifically we have to realize it is a personal thing we are doing — we make the choice.

Second, we have to change the way we think. Because of this new revelation of the exact nature of Christ; that is, Christ as Consciousness, we can say the key to developing Consciousness is following your Highest Light (God within You). To change how we think, in order to develop Consciousness, we have to stop accepting beliefs and start creating ideas — ideas that make you feel good about your little corner of the universe.

But before I explain what that means I want to talk more about the differences between ripened souls and unripened souls; the difference between Man & animal. The animal has instincts, like the instinct to follow and the instinct to lead, we call this the instinct for social hierarchy. Big dog on top bites the little dog on the bottom, and this dynamic maintains order in the community — and this is essentially how human society works — which would be fine for all eternity if we weren’t created with the greater purpose of bringing Heaven to Earth. And when we think of this new world do we see cops and politicians ordering us around with their guns and tanks and bombs? No. Of course we don’t. What we see are people living in harmony because they know how to act in a civilized fashion without coercion. Domesticated Primates, collectively known as people, only follow certain rules because they’re afraid of the consequences of not following [the rules], however real peace is only possible if we understand the purpose of moral-based laws. And that means understanding the value of empathy. So where do we begin?

Simple — with the definition of morality: to treat others the way we want to be treated. On a collective level, this means a total reevaluation of all our values & laws is needed as it pertains to this perfect concept of morality. This means rethinking our attitude towards taboo subjects such as recreational drug use & even sex.

The beginning of the End: The Entity aka “God” reveals itself in Three stages [naturally] the first stage was that of the Father aspect, then Christ and now The Holy Spirit. The transitional phase between the Son aspect and the Holy Spirit is known as the Apocalypse, a Greek word literally meaning “Lifting the Veil.” The information the Holy Spirit will reveal will unite us in Union with God, creating peace on Earth or Heaven on Earth.

The symbolism inherent to this new age is the eye in the triangle, a coded reference to the 3rd EYE. Holy Spirit reveals the means to open the 3rd EYE as a gateway to the Collective Unconscious / Mind of God uniting us on a higher mental level, causing by reflex action, peace on Earth. We do this by creating energy with our bodies in the intention of opening the 3rd EYE -or- by focusing your attention to your forehead while engaged in strenuous physical activity. Such as dancing, et. al.

Other helpful hints the Holy Spirit reveals includes the mandate that you ‘follow your highest light.’ How does one follow your highest light? As you might suspect, it is a fairly autonomous process. The issue is one of inspiration rather than instruction. There are no leaders; only artists who inspire us through their art. We recognize our Consciousness, or “soul,” as the part of God that is a part of us. Our theology and our imagination are synonymous. So in practice, following your highest light means creating ART-MYTH as personal spirituality. Wanna see some examples …?

What happens when developing Consciousness and how it happens are potentially two different things. What happens is that developing Consciousness means you are one with “Christ” and are saved — but how it happens specifically varies wildly from individual to individual, although several people can have similar experiences. But in the past the assumption was that what was happening and how it was happening were the same thing — and so by that logic there was only one way to be saved; become “Christian.” However, this does not suffice because by virtue of the fact God speaks directly to us — following your highest Light is The Way, The Truth & The Life.

So now the burning question is: Who was Jesus?

Jesus was a Man who attained Consciousness in all its full-tilt bewildering mystery. The thing about Existence being a form of Consciousness is that by possessing a personal Consciousness —*— we have the potential to manipulate reality with our mind. This is confirmed in the Bible, book of Matthew Chapter 21, verse 21. Where Jesus says after the apostles witnessed Him wilting the fig tree: “Truly I say to YOU, If only YOU have faith and do not doubt, not only will YOU do what I did to the fig tree, but also if YOU say to this mountain,’Be lifted up and cast into the sea,’ it will happen.”

It is our goal to promote Consciousness not only within ourselves but to the world at large. Only when all of mankind receives Consciousness will the final battle between Good & Evil begin. Because Consciousness itself does not guarantee someone is Good; it does not guarantee they will act with empathy —all it means is they have the potential power of God. Don’t panic.

For decades, paleontologists have puzzled over a fossil collection of nine Triassic icthyosaurs (Shonisaurus popularis) discovered in Nevada’s Berlin-Ichthyosaur State Park. Researchers initially thought that this strange grouping of 45-foot-long marine reptiles had either died en masse from a poisonous plankton bloom or had become stranded in shallow water.

But recent geological analysis of the fossil site indicates that the park was deep underwater when these shonisaurs swam the prehistoric seas. So why were their bones laid in such a bizarre pattern? A new theory suggests that a 100-foot-long cephalopod arranged these bones as a self-portrait after drowning the reptiles. And no, we’re not talking about Cthulhu.

After considering the more brutal aspects of modern octopus predation, paleontologist Mark McMenamin of Mount Holyoke College came to the conclusion that the shonisaur remains had been deposited in a “kraken” lair by its massive, tentacled squatter:

We hypothesize that the shonisaurs were killed and carried to the site by an enormous Triassic cephalopod, a “kraken,” with estimated length of approximately 30 m, twice that of the modern Colossal Squid Mesonychoteuthis. In this scenario, shonisaurs were ambushed by a Triassic kraken, drowned, and dumped on a midden like that of a modern octopus. Where vertebrae in the assemblage are disarticulated, disks are arranged in curious linear patterns with almost geometric regularity.

A shiv is a weapon crafted from the limited resources of a prisoner’s closed world. Crudely constructed from such things as spoons, shoelaces and upholstery tacks, shivs lie somewhere between the graceful and the grotesque. They’re primitive, too — like outsider art, but produced deep on the inside.

The individual parts that make up a shiv tend to be everyday objects, innocent things furtively reconstituted as lethal weapons. Each design choice is essential, but what’s particularly notable is that shivs, at their core, are not so much evocations of minimalism as they are symbols of survivalism. A shiv is all about masked utility: it’s an innocuous object with improbably toxic intent (whether used to attack others or to protect oneself…)

Read More: Design Observer:

This book consists of an inventory of all the non-verbal information contained in a daily newspaper. All of the words have been cut out of the Edmonton Journal of 16 August 1977 (the day on which Elvis Presley died). How do we ‘read’ pictures with no verbal context or information? What is the informative value of typographical structures and orders when stripped of meaning? The visual material in this publication provides a basis for the debate on these questions.

This is Part 2 of an excerpted series for Reality Sandwich from the anthology

Despite the exciting creative possibilities posed by new media in regard to myth, they do not come without a price. The danger presented by the presence of myth in modern media is paramount, and must be considered outside the mythic framework of industry, for instance, which reduces the material world to a matrix of profit and risk.

Though the propaganda of fascist mythologies such as those of Nazis or the USSR serve as the clearest example of these dangers, they exist in only slightly more subtle forms in the media produced by modern capitalist states. (Subtlety in this case not being an indicator of benevolence, necessarily.) After all, it was Mussolini who declared fascism to be the merger of state and corporate power.

Though media is ostensibly the watchdog of the government, both the government and media agencies of the capitalist state are beholden to international corporations and their interests. The contextual nature of truth makes myth in media a potential form of national or even international coercion. The story of American politics and news media between the 1950s and the present serves as a cautionary tale of such possibilities.

There is no ensuring that mythological images, and the powerful psychological forces that they represent, aren’t being used by corporations towards short-sightedly greedy ends, not to mention a benefit for the “self” of the corporation to the detriment of all others. When there is no mechanism for establishing human needs and rights as paramount to corporate or industrial myths, this is an increasingly dire concern. As organizations invariably try to present themselves in the most positive light it is impossible to get a read of their actual values from an intentionally fabricated myth.

This myth of benevolence presents itself on a national level as well. American culture in particular has a need to present itself as a benevolent superpower, leading the rest of the world into an Enlightened era of growth and commerce. This is not unlike Britain’s Empire, upon which the sun never set. In both cases the hubris exhibited was not merely of capacity, but more importantly, more catastrophically, it represents the rigid and wholesale self-congratulation of a myth that has so overshadowed reality that the two share nothing in common …

(Read article on Reality Sandwich)

In 1979, Henson showed “Limbo (The Organized Mind),” on Johnny Carson’s show, bringing the Muppets into his bizarre equation. The music was scored by Scott.

Read the entire article on MotherBoard

Time and time again folk rock legend Bob Dylan has blatantly borrowed for his lyrics. Christie’s auction house acknowledged in 2009 that a handwritten Dylan poem that was up for sale really consisted of words from a song by country crooner Hank Snow. Director Martin Scorsese showed in his 2005 documentary, “No Direction Home,” how Dylan stole the line “Go away from my window…” — the immortal opener of his 1964 song “It Ain’t Me, Babe” — from singer John Jacob Niles. Dylan also purloined text from Japanese writer Junichi Saga’s novel “Confessions of a Yakuza” for his 2001 album “Love and Theft.” And that’s not the only thing Dylan lifted from Asia.

Bob Dylan's "Opium," (2009) next to a photograph by Léon Busy, taken in Vietnam in 1915. Credits: Left: Gagosian Gallery / Right: © Musée Albert Kahn

For the current exhibition of Dylan’s paintings, “The Asia Series,” which runs from September 20 to October 22 at Gagosian’s Madison Avenue gallery, the artist painted 18 images — and some of these are copied from well-known photographs, the New York Times reports. Gagosian claims on its Web site that the show is “a visual reflection on his [Dylan's] travels in Japan, China, Vietnam, and Korea,” and the “people, street scenes, architecture, and landscapes” that he encountered there. But some digging on a discussion page at the Dylan fan site Expecting Rain, which furnished the evidence that prompted the New York Times article, reveals that no less than ten pieces in “The Asia Series” may in fact be a visual reflections of Dylan’s travels through online photo archives rather than of any personal journey…

[continues at ARTINFO]

Trevor Paglen’s work deliberately blurs the lines between science, contemporary art, journalism, and other disciplines to construct unfamiliar, yet meticulously researched ways to see and interpret the world around us. He is also the author of several books: Torture Taxi, the first book to comprehensively cover the CIA’s extraordinary rendition program; I Could Tell You But Then You Would Have to be Destroyed by Me, a book looking at the world of black projects through unit patches and memorabilia created for top-secret programs; and Blank Spots on the Map: The Dark Geography of the Pentagon’s Secret World, a book that gives a broader look at secrecy in the United States.

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In the opening lines of his 1978 publication, Diableries: La Vie Quotidienne Chez Satan, Jac Remise relates how a crew of demolition workers in Paris discovered a mysterious wooden box hidden in the ruins of a condemned building. The box, which had been wrapped with old military belts, was found to contain a collection of photographs depicting a hedonistic world filled with drunken devils, sinister skeletons and scantily clad women. An anonymous note found buried among the glass images added:

“This is the work of my life, it is thus that I dreamed of Hell. If my visions are true, then the wicked may rest assured, the afterlife will be sweet for them to bear.”

What the demolition workers discovered that day was a series of photographs known as Les Diableries, The Diabolical. Each scene in the series was composed of an elaborate diorama sculpted out of plaster and clay and embellished with miniature props. Created in Paris during the 1860s, the series was printed in the form of stereoscopic transparencies which, when viewed with special lenses, produced a mesmerizing 3D effect.

Most people view creativity as an asset — until they come across a creative idea. That’s because creativity not only reveals new perspectives; it promotes a sense of uncertainty.

The next time your great idea at work elicits silence or eye rolls, you might just pity those co-workers. Fresh research indicates they don’t even know what a creative idea looks like and that creativity, hailed as a positive change agent, actually makes people squirm.

“How is it that people say they want creativity but in reality often reject it?” said Jack Goncalo, ILR School assistant professor of organizational behavior and co-author of research to be published in an upcoming issue of the journal Psychological Science. The paper reports on two 2010 experiments at the University of Pennsylvania involving more than 200 people.

The studies’ findings include:

• Creative ideas are by definition novel, and novelty can trigger feelings of uncertainty that make most people uncomfortable.
• People dismiss creative ideas in favor of ideas that are purely practical — tried and true.
• Objective evidence shoring up the validity of a creative proposal does not motivate people to accept it.
• Anti-creativity bias is so subtle that people are unaware of it, which can interfere with their ability to recognize a creative idea.

Read more here.