posted by on 2007.03.26, under Uncategorized

Some great images of what it might look like if they had built Borif Iofan’s Palace of the Soviets – a giant wedding cake of a building with a huge Lenin sculpture on top. Rem Koolhass has written a bit about how the foundations, which were actually built, got turned into a giant indoor/outdoor swimming pool.
Le Corbusier also submitted a project to the design competition for this building. He didn’t win, but his design was a very influential early modernist project.

posted by on 2007.03.26, under Uncategorized

I have been looking for this album for years.. and there it is. All digitized and ready to download. Sweet. This stuff showed up on many skate videos of the late 80s, early 90s.

posted by on 2007.03.25, under Uncategorized

Things are going to be in transition here for the week – I have uploaded most of the new, bright orange/yellow Rise Site, but Michele’s pages will remain on the old style until we get it all updated to the new. And I am sure there will be some bugs here and there for a bit. If you see a problem out there, drop me a line at jquinn -at- rise-ind.com and I will fix it.

FFCC00 Rules!

posted by on 2007.03.22, under Uncategorized

On Slate today, an explainer about why you don’t find alot of video art on youtube and similar sites turns into a pretty good explanation about what video art is.

posted by on 2007.03.21, under Uncategorized

I always love engrish.com, but this one is fantastic. Would make a great T-shirt.

posted by on 2007.03.15, under Uncategorized

Beware the ides of March…

“Regardless, shortly after the assassination the senators left the building talking excitedly amongst themselves, and Brutus cried out to his beloved city: “People of Rome, we are once again free!”. A wax statue of Caesar was erected in the forum displaying the 23 stab wounds. A crowd who had amassed there started a fire, which badly damaged the forum and neighboring buildings. In the ensuing chaos Mark Antony, Octavian (later Augustus Caesar), and others fought a series of five civil wars, which would end in the formation of the Roman Empire.”

posted by on 2007.03.07, under Uncategorized

Also, related to my earlier post about the evolution of religion: artist Damien Hirst’s take on part of the matter.

The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living

posted by on 2007.03.07, under Uncategorized

Jean Baudrillard died.. one of the great theorists I actually enjoy reading. If you have some time today, read a bit from “Simulacra and Simulation”. Its (most of it at least) on Google Book Search, well, a simulation of the book anyway. Well, read it then you tell me.

posted by on 2007.03.07, under Uncategorized

There is a fantastic article in the New York Times on the evolution of religion, detailing the work of Scott Atran and others who have been trying to figure out just why humans hold counter-intuitive ideas such as believing our consciousness continues after death – or that a mind or spirit disembodied from physical form exists and created everything. Its a long read, but a great argument and lead-in to the research. Here is a chunk from the middle:

“Whether or not it is adaptive, belief in the afterlife gains power in two ways: from the intensity with which people wish it to be true and from the confirmation it seems to get from the real world. This brings us back to folkpsychology. We try to make sense of other people partly by imagining what it is like to be them, an adaptive trait that allowed our ancestors to outwit potential enemies. But when we think about being dead, we run into a cognitive wall. How can we possibly think about not thinking? “Try to fill your consciousness with the representation of no-consciousness, and you will see the impossibility of it,” the Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno wrote in “Tragic Sense of Life.” “The effort to comprehend it causes the most tormenting dizziness. We cannot conceive of ourselves as not existing.”

Much easier, then, to imagine that the thinking somehow continues.”

posted by on 2007.03.06, under Uncategorized

We got invited up to the Getty Center to see Tim Hawkinson’s show open up.. here is a write up about it in the New York Times. I am excited to see it, and bet the Getty has awfully nice wine and cheese.

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