TIMES, TIME, AND HALF A TIME. A HISTORY OF THE NEW MILLENNIUM.

Comments on a cultural reality between past and future.

This blog describes Metatime in the Posthuman experience, drawn from Sir Isaac Newton's secret work on the future end of times, a tract in which he described Histories of Things to Come. His hidden papers on the occult were auctioned to two private buyers in 1936 at Sotheby's, but were not available for public research until the 1990s.



Saturday, April 18, 2015

More Human than Human


Ed (2014) © Chris Jones. Video Source: Youtube.

For today, see a sample of computer generated imagery from September 2014. Soon, we won't be able to tell real people from virtual humans online. From the creator, Chris Jones:
Work in progress, hand-made with Lightwave, Sculptris and Krita, composited with Davinci Resolve Lite. Music by me. ... Due to popular demand I'm attempting to extend the soundtrack, but it's not coming easily... so it could take a while. No scans, motion capture or photos were used (except for reference). First half rendered in ~800 hours on a 2008 vintage quad core. Additional rendering by GarageFarm.


Wednesday, April 15, 2015

Little Pockets of Eternity



The Photography Workshop is the Website of Mumbai-based photographer Kedar Kulkarni. You can see his personal gallery here, and particularly his beautiful photos of small town India here. Kulkarni also runs workshops for other photographers and posts their works. For today, see images from the site taken by Dinkar Patil. In November 2014, Patil captured the animate, the inanimate and the people along the Narmada River, all interacting in the breathtaking regional environment and eternal light of India. This was Patil's Roadtrip Series 5:
The walking part of the journey began in Vadodara, Gujurat, India and ended in Jabalpur, Madhya Pradesh, India. A total walking distance of 800 kms that was completed in 32 days, with rest stops, with an average of 30 kms, walked per day for a total per day, walking time of between 7-8 hours.
Patil does something curious here. Stone gods clustered in corners come alive, while the landscape's living inhabitants begin to look fixed and permanent. It is a fascinating swap.


Patil's style is un-photoshopped, anti-glossy, uncontrived. It could be Kulkarni's influence, who lists his great inspirations in the history of photography here. Patil's photos take the viewer back to a time when we still believed in a reality, served by the camera. From the dawn of photography, photos documented interactions between an artist, a tool, and the environment. At that time, we kept track of things, rather than things keeping track of us. We were the actors and agents, not our tools. By contrast, in today's graphics, the camera dominates the photographic story. We are no longer watchers, we are watched. Cameras and other tools for seeing (and spying) oppress us in an endless House of Mirrors with meta-visions and meta-narratives. Thankfully, that is not the case here: in Patil's work, some little pockets of eternity slip through his lens.

Monday, April 13, 2015

Photo of the Day: Suntory Whisky 3D on the Rocks


See more of Suntory's 3D-printed ice cubes here, and my earlier post on Blade Runner custom scotch glasses, here. A 3-D printing Redditor corrects this story: "Not 3d printed -- idiot reporter thinks anything computer controlled must be a 3d printer... It was milled with a very awesome mill."

Sunday, April 12, 2015

Forever: Maybe Not the Word You Want?


Johnny Depp's original 'Winona Forever' tattoo. Image Source: johnnydepp.org.

In the past couple of days, the word forever kept coming up. Finally, it all converged in a 'plate of shrimp' moment. The first mention came up in this analysis at The White Review of Johnny Depp and Winona Ryder. The article, Famous Tombs: Love in the 90s, described Depp's and Ryder's relationship as the American youth romance of the decade. Author Masha Tupitsyn then probed a more interesting question. She almost cracked what, exactly, happened to the Depp-Ryder romance, not in terms of what it meant privately to the two actors, because we can't know that, but what it represented to the rest of us.

Image Source: Buzzfeed.

Tupitsyn hints that it never went anywhere, but Johnny and Winona did. She believes that Depp sublimated it in alcohol and drugs, replacing love for a woman with addictions so distracting that it became impossible to get back to the original source. Meanwhile, Ryder moved forward, but part of her is still trapped in that past time. It wasn't just her love for Depp. She embodied a decade for Generation Jones and Gen X rebels, symbolized by the curious fact that she is naturally a blonde, but for decades has dyed her hair Gothic black:
Like John Cusack, another black haired/pale skinned 80s/90s idol, as well as a youth actor whose great, and perhaps only gift, was to enact a different kind of youth (a counter-youth and counter-masculinity) in his youth, Winona Ryder was never timeless, she was of the time. Most especially that brief time in her life, her teenage years and early twenties. Perhaps this is why Jake Gyllenhaal’s light hair was dyed jet-black for the retroactive DONNIE DARKO, and Christian Slater’s jet-black for HEATHERS. Something about dark hair showing up in the late 80s and early 90s as a form of retribution for an aesthetically fascistic and representationally narrow decade. These are people who were not kissed by the sun, who were not California Dreamin’, or, as the German writer Heinrich Laube puts it, ‘These pale youths are uncanny, concocting God knows what mischief.’ If, as the teenage radio pirate DJ, ‘Hard Harry’ puts it in PUMP UP THE VOLUME (1990), the 80s were a totally ‘exhausted decade, where there’s nothing to look forward to and no one to look up to’, Winona Ryder rose up from the bleached-blonde ashes of the 1980s.
Depp and Ryder started in gothic and horror genres. Their early work, like that of contemporaries Keanu Reeves, Parker Posey and River Phoenix, appeared in dark indie films or popular movies with unsettling vibes. Depp made his feature film debut in Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), in which he played a nice but useless boyfriend. These roles reflected a time, when, for a brief period, surreal depictions of the collective unconscious entered the American mainstream in almost unedited forms. It was remarkable. David Lynch, an American director surreal enough to be respected by Europeans, became popular, as his Twin Peaks exposed the underside of the American Dream.