[Also wut. -egg]
Survivalist Singles and climate change erotica:
Related to my earlier post about prepper condos, The Guardian’s Alice Bell riffs on “doomsday dating” services like Survivalist Singles and Amazon’s curious book category Books › Fiction › Erotica › “Global Warming & Climate Change.” Yes, both are real. From The Guardian:

The emergence of a discourse on doomsday dating – real or fictional – maybe says something quite depressing about 21st-century attitudes to the future. Romance is often about hope after all, though I appreciate some might argue this is a slightly heteronormative view (or at least the politics of childbirth is worth reflecting upon if digging deeper into this issue). If you want some optimism, there’s that icon of postmodernist survivalism, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, who, on a date in one of the later series, is told by her boyfriend that knowing her leads to him puzzling over what the plural for apocalypse is.

Maybe scorched earths, like broken hearts, do heal. Or maybe not. Perhaps the plural for apocalypse is simply the conceit of commercial television wanting to run beyond the previous season’s overly dramatic denouement. Perhaps living through disaster by proxy of science fiction has made us too blasé about it all. It’s easy to giggle at doomsday dating, but arguably it’s no laughing matter.

“Fancy a doomsday date? If things get really bad, it may be your best bet” (via The Daily Grail)

[Wut. -egg]
15th century Flemish portraits recreated in airplane lavs using toilet tissue, seat-covers and paper towels:

It all started when artist Nina Katchadourian went into an airplane bathroom and spontaneously improvised a 15th century Flemish costume from a toilet-seat cover and shot a suitably posed self-portrait. This inaugurated an ongoing series of wonderful 15th century Flemish-esque portraits shot in a series of airplane lavs, in which a variety of replica garb is improvised from toilet tissue, seat covers and paper towels.

While in the lavatory on a domestic flight in March 2010, I spontaneously put a tissue paper toilet cover seat cover over my head and took a picture in the mirror. The image evoked 15th-century Flemish portraiture. I decided to add more images made in this mode and planned to take advantage of a long-haul flight from San Francisco to Auckland, guessing that there were likely to be long periods of time when no one was using the lavatory on the 14-hour flight. I made several forays to the bathroom from my aisle seat, and by the time we landed I had a large group of new photographs entitled Lavatory Self-Portraits in the Flemish Style. I was wearing a thin black scarf that I sometimes hung up on the wall behind me to create the deep black ground that is typical of these portraits. There is no special illumination in use other than the lavatory’s own lights and all the images are shot hand-held with the camera phone. At the Dunedin Public Art gallery, the photos were framed in faux-historical frames and hung on a deep red wall reminiscent of the painting galleries in museums like the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Seat Assignment: Lavatory Self-Portraits in the Flemish Style

[Excellent info. -egg]

7 rules for recording the police:
Rule #6: Master Your Technology. [Steve Silverman at Gizmodo]

[The critic-speak here is a bit over the top, but the pieces are pretty cool. -egg]

Large fabric replicas of houses:

Seoul’s Leeum Samsung Museum of Art is exhibiting Do Ho Suh remarkable “Home Within Home” until June 3. Suh’s piece consists of several large-scale hanging fabric recreations of the houses he’s inhabited.

An important characteristic of Suh’s “homes” can be found in the fact that they respond to the spaces in which they are exhibited and by doing so, bring about new interpretations to them. His artistic attempts in the unique Rem Koolhaas-designed architectural space at Leeum are especially remarkable in that light. Suh installed Reflection near the sloping passageway that leads to the exhibition galleries so that the work can serve as an introduction to the exhibition. In the Ground Gallery, he also built a home out of a soft, light, and translucent fabric that stands in a stark contrast with the almost overwhelming space made out of concrete. Suh first received wide attention from the international art world with a work in which he recreated, using thin jade-toned Chinese silk, the traditional-style house (hanok) in the Seongbuk-dong neighborhood of Seoul where he spent his childhood and adolescence. In addition to this work, titled Seoul Home/Seoul Home, he also presents in this exhibition other homes he has had in New York and Berlin. Through their placement in a museum, these private spaces become spaces for others that are open to interpretation through viewers’ experiences.

The Black Box, an especially distinct feature of the Koolhaas building, is like a “home within home” that floats inside the enormous space of the architecture. By placing two works, Fallen Star-1/5 and Home within Home-1/11, together in this space, Suh draws out an interesting conversation. Specifically, Fallen Star-1/5 expresses the emotions the artist experienced while living as a foreign student in the United States through the form of a hanok that fell and crashed into an American apartment building. On the other hand, Home within Home-1/11, taking the form of a hanok lodged inside an American house, represents the state of becoming gradually familiar with a new culture. While works like these grow out of the artist’s private experiences of cultural collision, they also symbolize more broadly the experience of the contemporary being, who constantly experiences clashes arising from individual, cultural, and regional “differences” and struggles to adapt to them. In A Perfect Home: The Bridge Project (Leeum Version) and Gate (Leeum Version), also installed inside the Black Box, Suh tries to give new meanings to “home as both boundary and passage.”

Home Within Home (via Geisha Asobi)

Thanks a lot, robot friend:
Brandon Boyer gives this the lofty designation of “the funniest 20 seconds of video”. Even after repeated viewings, I can’t stop laughing.
[Video Link]

[Interesting. -egg]
Tastemaker X: faux stock exchange game for music fans:

Tastemaker X is a new mobile social game that creator Marc Ruxin says lies somewhere between “Hollywood Stock Exchange for music and fantasy sports for music.” Marc is a veteran media industry future-thinker who happens to have excellent taste himself in music (and books and films), so if anyone can pull off a music discovery system wrapped in a massively multiplayer game, it’s him. At left is Marc talking about Tastemaker X and the gamification of culture at the recent ad:tech conference. Tastemaker X

[Also tasty, I believe, and easy to cultivate on small artificial islands. -egg]

Snails inadvertantly massage woman’s face:
At a beauty salon in Krasnoyarsk, Siberia, an employee performs a “medical-cosmetic” massage on a client using African snails. The salon is the only one in the region using the “snails method”, which owner Alyona Zlotnikova claims can speed skin regeneration and eliminate wrinkles. Photo: REUTERS/Ilya Naymushinclaimed.

[What an utterly charming installation piece. Boy, I’m sure glad *I* didn’t have to wire up all those damn cats. -egg]

Army of Lucky Cats:
Boris Petrovsky writes: “The Maneki Neko (jap., literally Beckoning Cat; aka Lucky Cat, Money Cat) is a common Japanese figurine which is believed to bring luck, attract customers and bring prosperity. The Lucky Cat waves with the raised left paw and holds a historic coin in front of itself with the right one. The Lucky Cat as talisman and selling product is wide-spread in Asia and meanwhile almost all over the world.”
The video of Boris’s installation was shot and edited by Nina Martens; view it at Vimeo [via Creative Applications]