5 Guides to Life from Cultural Luminaries. By Kirstin Butler Finding practical applications for philosophy, or what Ovid can teach us about sex. One of our favorite unattributed quotes goes as follows: “Life is a test. It is only a test. If this were your actual life, you would have been given better instructions.” The good news is that guidance is in fact out there, which is why we’ve put together a short list of reads (and one documentary) that gather the best of what we’ve collectively learned about the tricky art of living. In 2011, we live in an age without existential anchors, a state that leaves many of us feeling adrift in our day-to-day lives. [A]nyone who hopes to enrich his or her life by experiencing it in the light of classic philosophical and literary works can hope to find something here.
From Dante to David Foster Wallace, All Things Shining suggests that non-religious westerners look for sacraments in (sometimes surprising) new places. Running on the treadmill is an occasion for the following observation: Prof. Dr. Thomas Metzinger: “No one in this room ever had a self…” DMLcentral. The Virtual Revolution - Non-Branded BBC Interviews For Download And Reuse By The Public. Music. Music Music ‘Hypnagogic pop’ and the landscape of Southern California James Ferraro Touch Screen Splatter Punks of Digital Tokyo (In production, due to be completed in 2013) I’m sitting on the AstroTurf lawn of The Grove, a ‘retroscape’ shopping mall in Los Angeles, listening to 1980s covers band The Copycats deliver immaculate counterfeits of bygone MTV hits. Coined by The Wire magazine’s David Keenan in 2009, ‘hypnagogic pop’ is a term for a new generation of American lo-fi musicians who channel the 1980s sounds of mainstream radio rock, New Wave mtv pop, sedative New Age and the peppy synth-driven soundtracks of Hollywood blockbusters.
Hypnagogic is the term for a state between being awake and falling asleep, associated by some with hallucinations that are hyper-real rather than surreal. LA is a city where Spectacle (in the Situationist sense) and the Spectacular (in the geological sense) are freakily entwined. Hypnagogic is a 21st-century update of psychedelia. Simon Reynolds. Digital Culture. DIGITAL. Why digital culture? - 101 Culture. Digital Culture.
Articles/books. The Edge | Digital Culture Centre. The EDGE Questions: 13 Years of Futurism by Cultural Luminaries. Coming Soon (Maybe): A TechCrunch Book Review Column. TED. Culture. DIGITAL. Tech. Process. Culture City Online: Gallery Browsing Without Leaving Home - Metropolis. WWW/Internet. The legacy of Brazil’s pioneering digital culture policy, and why it should be protected. Jose Murillo produced the following primer on Quora, explaining the legacy of Gilberto Gil (and his successors) and Lula’s policies, now endangered under a new Minister of Culture: “I think it would be useful to mention the elements which, in my view, created the set and setting for the Brazilian Digital Culture Experiment. * a minister of culture like Gilberto Gil, who created such thing as the Tropicalia movement in the 60s, and was seconded by his own vice, Juca Ferreira, resulting in 8 years (2002-2010) of a continued program happening at a strategic moment for technology and culture. * advanced free software policies implemented since 2002 by the Brazilian government as a whole, creating a better IT environment for understanding the fabrics of the internet. (1) I think it is important to highlight that there was a cultural narrative underlying the whole movement, one that Gil was able to adapt to the 21st century.
The ‘Brazilian Public Software’, more about it here:
Issues. Gaming. Digital culture. Global Village. Curation/collaboration. Social Media.