damage

WEEKEND: [hyper-conscious] Hyper Japan 2012, Psydoll in London

Hyperreal. A copy of the real without any origin or reality, states Baudrillard. The authentic fake, says Umberto Eco. Atari Teenage Riot amps the volume to 11 with excruciating delicacy. This place is a big biosemiotic onion on the mainstream timeslot. That's me, it is a Saturday and I just lost a wonderful girl named Charlotte into a crowd of seemingly acid-ridden Marios and Yoshis and a gothloli army equipped with masks of blatant and vague liebevacui disinterest that would send even Rocco Siffredi into the PITS OF LIMP. (Yes, pits of limp. Get over it.)

Welcome to Hyper Japan, an ecosystem of pre-Cyber Monday kawaii innecessities, sweet lolita treats, pop magazines, mangas, toys, the yodawg 9gag cosplayers (doing le meta cosplay of enacting 9gag comment trolling in real life, idling along the walls in slomo neurotic unison), the occasional parents shocked into mute statues of glossy Munchian terror, an endless streak of geek couples and an evolving katamari of fans - a grandiose pop bath simulation of UK tourists condensed into a few hundred square meters of Earls Court. I suddenly miss the RFID-tag visitor tracking and its visualization sprayed across AR layers and a backchannel masturbating on us with staccato squirt tweets and event blabber - anything that could kick HJ off from its initial pink froth touristy phase to something teeth-grittingly modern. Ish. Hopefully without the Fukushima radiation treatment. (For better psychographic profiling, check out a massive video footage archive from JackDigital about this February's Hyper Japan event.)

I'm voicing this to Wendy, silently dripping coffee into my eyesockets. `Why would you expect anything so specifically underground here? This is Nihon at its mainstream and as such it is quite alright`, she says, leaving me in a flurry to dispatch enemies. She spends an hour practicing with showman swordfighter troupe KAMUI who carefully elude topics like proper stance, legwork or balance while I'm playing around with the Handroid, the only thing left for me to fiddle with if I don't want to play Yu-Gi-Oh or mess around with the new Tekken release. I obviously break it. The Kinect-controlled mechanic hand doesn't care too much about introduction, its sensor glares at me, reads my very heart and sticks its mechanic fingers into a grumpy gesture of ROCK regardless of how I hold my fingers against the sensors, its cognitive muscles paralyzed into my personal statement.

"Bad targeting", I tell the devs, "this is a mindreader hand, not one that mimics."

"Yes", they say.

In a universe similar to ours, my blood splatters on cheap warehouse wallboards, not quite elegantly.

Needless to say, we decide to move underground.

Bethnal Green's Resistance Gallery, tucked away in Poyser Street behind an almost unmarked door offers just the flipside of HJ's gluttonous pink - it is a sensuous, pulsing liqueur of black and red and sweet, sweet dense grime. Poised on the top floor maid café we take in Nawashi Murakawa's Yoshiwara bondage performance and the Monsterlune Freakshow, above them, the iconic figure of Batou broods away in existential glitch. Little pocket universes and little pocket interwebs work best and this is clearly one of them, one of those freeze-frame moments when you look around and see your lifegraph map itself out, below us, a scene of mock cannibalism, resurrection and a twisted love triangle of vaginal glitter, sparsed with statements of power and self-scrutiny along structures of rope.

I always wondered what kind of veves shibari structures align themselves to. My guesses may actually be well-founded.

In a universe not completely unlike ours, robotic baby heads looking like typewriters making love to horology explode in alphabetical order.

In other news, as I'm typing these, campaigners are busy fundraising to oppose the imminent demolition plans for Earls Court.

There is now a metabubble anomaly on the Central line.

PS. As for little pocket universes and frothing bubbles of meta - we had quite a lengthy discusssion over those with @silcucc - with a message of intent that puts all little universes into sentience. TRUST YOUR STORY.

by damage

TRAILER: 2088 (Steven Ilous), more pre-Robocop porn

Pre-Robocop non-human crime division meets a derelict car and a very, very angry robot with it. Only a minute long, yet the actor models, the cars, the cityscape - it all looks wonderfully melt together. Amazing soundwork by ECHOLAB, more info on 2088's Facebook page and of course, it has been delivered to you by the mad robocop otaku Riplakoidase!

by damage

PLANETDAMAGE: lifesign, 2012 November

Six weeks in a nutshell, ruddy staccato on a Halloween night, dictated by an overdose of caffeine and probably a bit of hatred, too. And I just watched someone onscreen drink half a bottle of wine with his eyesocket.
Read more

by damage

LINKS: Bookmarks for 2012-10-20

• 78 percent of Bitcoin currency stashed under digital mattress, study finds
  The figure translates to more than 7.019 million BTCs, the term used to denote a single coin under the digital currency, which uses strong cryptography and peer-to-peer networking to enable anonymous payments among parties who don't necessarily know or trust each other. Based on exchange rates listed on Mt.Gox—the most widely used Bitcoin exchange—the coins have a value of more than $82.87 million. On May 13, the date the researchers analyzed their data, there were slightly more than 9 million BTCs in existence.

• Strange Sounds: 7 Experimental Projects Making Music from Natural Elements
  California-based artist Diego Stocco is a master of sound abstraction. A sound designer and composer, he creates unusual sound experiences using anything from everyday objects to contraptions he builds from scratch. From outfitting a tree with a stethoscope, a plastic pipe and a microphone, to blending an old piano with the sounds of sunset, his work has a beautiful nature-grounded quality to it whilst really pushing the technologies and conception of modern sound design.

• Physicists say there may be a way to prove that we live in a computer simulation
  Back in 2003, Oxford professor Nick Bostrom suggested that we may be living in a computer simulation. In his paper, Bostrom offered very little science to support his hypothesis — though he did calculate the computational requirements needed to pull off such a feat.But now, a team of physicists say proof might be possible, and that it's a matter of finding a cosmological signature that would serve as the proverbial Red Pill from the Matrix. And they think they know what it is.

by damage