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Lorna Mills and Sally McKay
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Just saw a new phrase for being '"a bit thick" that I like very much (thanks Jim):
not the sharpest tool in the shed
will make a change from my old standard:
not the brightest light on the tree
And then of course there's always:
not the shiniest marble in the bag
not the ...... ...... in the ......
anyone?
KissMachine • • • KissMachine • • • KissMachine• • • KissMachine• • • KissMachine
I have posted about Kiss Machine in the past. This little magazine is on the move. For instance, the new Babies and Robots issue has a spine! Perfect binding?! Criminey! But even more exciting are these personal highlights:
- Emily Pohl Weary surpasses herself in the ever-eloquent editorial. Excerpt: "Perhaps the only remaining refuge from high speed is birth and the awkwardness of life during our first few years. Before we gain fine motor control and an awareness of how to use things like keyboards, we're stuck in an altogether human reality."
- Jesse Hirsh spins a reality-based cyborg tale, culminating with an unsettling metaphor of the internet as the body for an unfortunately homogeneous new mind. Excerpt: "The evolution or transcendence of the human mind toward divinity is not a new or isolated concept. However, the field of artificial intelligence is perhaps the most meticulous, ambitious and widespread attempt at this goal that we have seen for some time. It is rivalled only by the religiosity of NASA and the space program."
- Tyler Clark Burke writes a ripping good mortality rant. Excerpt: "All the strangers are alive on the planet right now (which is cool, I mean rad, without being radical); everyone who is alive will be dead at the same time at one time, and then almost mid-sentence like right now I reminisce about all the best run-on sentences I've ever written, like someone is reading it and it is alive and so are they and, punctuation long-forgotten, I remember that we are social beings and we do share things like fantasies about the Unabomber and Henry Darger-dirges ..."
- I'm very grateful for the lucky accident that plopped me into the world during this particular junction of space/time because once in a while I get to read Paul Hong's writing. I have tried several times both in the past and this very evening to find a representative passage of Paul's work, but the writing is so tight and resonant that to pull one bit out is to do the whole a serious disservice. Just find the zine and read it.
The words below are from Dr. Maja Materic, computer scientist studying artificial intelligence, and Director of the Robotics Laboratories at the University of Southern California, quoted from the overly-styled millenial documentary Me and Isaac Newton by Michael Apten. Above images are stills from the film, depicting Materic, her child, and some of her robots.
There's always this worry on the part of some people that robots will take over the world. But robots will always be completely different from people because they've evolved in a completely different context. There's really no comparison. [...] We'll just have to make sure, as they become more complex, that we understand them well enough. The same way we have to understand any creatures. Nothing else is controllable today, not just robotics. Animals aren't controllable and yet we are not always threatened by their presence.
Tomorrow night I am talking on a panel about self-publishing (details here). In an effort to figure out what I think about self-publishing these days, I've been looking back over some old work. I used to disseminate simple, black and white, three-fold flyers as art projects. I decided to post the text and images below from one of my favourites, first made in 1996.
It was cold and it rained so I felt like an actor
– David Bowie, "Five Years"
The end of the world was thoroughly predictable and yet it surprised everyone. It was hot. The sun hung low in the sky, a huge dark ball of flame. There were massive earthquakes and people fell into great rifts that opened suddenly in the ground, slipping down into the flaming bowels of the planet. There was mass hysteria, sobbing, screaming and looting. The highways were clogged with cars. Loved ones clung to each other with wild fear in their eyes. Teenagers tried desperately to get home to their families. TV news announcers stayed, sobbing, at their posts until the electricity went dead, like captains going down with the ship. Mothers clutched children to their breasts and fathers stood by, paralysed with love, frustration, fear and rage. All this was expected.
What surprised everyone was that it only happened once. Adults were amazed to find that, along with everything else, they felt relieved. This was finally it. It was like the release you feel when your home-team, a non-functioning group of pathetic, disillusioned millionaire pro-athletes from other cities, gets eliminated from the playoffs and you don’t have to muster the energy to cheer for them any more. They just had to get through these next few hours and all those years of anxiety would finally be over.
Another surprise was that it wasn’t really all that bad. Each individual death was no more excruciating than being shot in the head during a liquor store hold-up, dying in a house fire, or being crushed under the wheels of a truck, all familiar events that had been happening to people for ever.
People looked about them blankly. They saw that it was the end of the world. There was fire, there was brimstone, four horsemen came clattering around the corner and whizzed by in a dramatic flurry of blowing capes and manes. It looked just like they’d imagined it would, and yet most people felt distracted from the the significance of the event. This wasn’t a story book disaster or a made-for-TV movie. Everyone had a million other pressing, specific details clamouring for their attention.
Another surprise was that no one survived. When it was all over, and the dust had finally settled, there was no lone soul left staggering through the rubble. No one woke from a terrible nightmare to find that it was all true – no one got to be the last one left alive on a ravaged planet. The place was truly deserted. The cockroach race continued, just like everyone thought they would, but they were insects who never had a concept of humanity to start with.
It was done now, and no one had really even seen it happen.
