Category: april 2019

Bicycle with a Vision

The Humble Fabulist1 Comment

Eyes on the future

Benjamin Bowden
Spacelander bicycle 1946
Fiberglass, chrome-plated steel, leather, and rubber

Launched at the Britain Can Make It exhibition organized by the Council of Industrial design in 1946, this curvaceous product hinted at a future of consumerist affluence, and the glamour associated with the utopian worlds of science-fiction films. It was one of many prototypes for new, industrially produced goods that over 1.4 million people queued to see. While it could be admired, the bicycle could not be bought at the time of the exhibition, owing to continued shortages of materials and labour after World War II. ”Britain Can’t Have It” became the show’s popular nickname.

From The Value of Good Design, an exhibition at MoMA in Feb 10-Jun 15, 2019.

April 4th, 2019

Emissary Forks At Perfection

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Ian Cheng
Emissary Forks At Perfection 2015-16
Live simulation and story (colour, sound). Infinite duration

”A video game that plays itself,” as Cheng describes it, this digital simulation is generated in real time with no fixed beginning or end. Created using the Unity engine, a popular software tool for developing 3-D video games and AI models, the animation takes place far in the future. It tells the story of Talus Twenty Nine, an artificial intelligence that oversees a lush terrain in which new plants and animals constantly evolve in a Darwinian setting. The AI resurrects an ancient cadaver from the twenty-first century, and summons a pet dog to guide the undead through his posthuman world. Every time the program is run, a new scenario unfolds. The result is an endlessly changing, fantastical model of biological evolution and machine learning in the absence of human life. [source: MoMA]

Emissaries is a trilogy of simulations about cognitive evolution, past and future, and the ecological conditions that shape it. It is composed of three interconnected episodes, each centered on the life of an emissary who is caught between unraveling old realities and emerging weird ones. [source: Ian Cheng]

Emissary in the Squat of Gods
Emissary Forks At Perfection
Emissary Sunsets The Self

MoMA

April 4th, 2019