Category Archives: Futurism

57074803 story Posted by Soulskill on Wednesday February 26, 2014 @05:10AM from the i-have-no-mouth-and-i-must-scream dept. Ellen Spertus writes "I'll be teaching an interdisciplinary college course on how technology is changing the world and how students can influence that change. In addition to teaching the students how to create apps, I'd like for us to read and discuss short stories and essays about how the future (next 40 years) might play out. For example, we'll read excerpts from David Brin's Transparent Society and Ray Kurzweil's The Singularity is Near. I'm also considering excerpts of Cory Doctorow's Homeland and Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age. What other suggestions do Slashdotters have?" You may like to read: Post

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Ask Slashdot: What Essays and Short Stories Should Be In a Course On Futurism?

The Guggenheim Museum opened their comprehensive retrospective of Italian Futurism on Friday, the avant-garde art movement of the early 20th century that everyone is talking about. The exhibition contains 300 pieces created from 1909 to 1944, but what is Futurism and why should you care?

What is Futurism? Why is it Italian? Those questions are two sides of the same coin. In 1909 the Italian poet and writer Filippo Tommaso Emilio Marinetti published the Futurist Manifesto, a youthful celebration of technology, dynamism, speed, and violence. Marinetti condemns museums and the academy because of their associations with the elderly bourgeoise and, as is to be expected, fetishizes the metropolitan laborer and the glory of hard, industrial toil. It's an art movement that indicts art and celebrates war as "the only cure for the world."

The Italian connection is because it was founded by an Italian and concentrated mostly in Italy. There was some Futurist activity in Moscow, though the Russian Futurism was primarily a literary practice, and had the most impact during Lenin's rise before dying out in the late 1920s. Futurism was so closely linked with Italian politics, nationalism, and industrialization that it didn't gain a lot of traction elsewhere, and most of the folks practicing it were of Italian descent. By the end of World War I and the advent of a second wave of Futurism, the movement was essentially inextricable from the burgeoning fascist regime of Benito Mussolini.

Was it fascist? Basically. The infamous phrase from Marinetti's first manifesto claiming war as "the world's only hygiene" is a pretty direct line to the pro-war, anti-history politics that were foundational to the movement (and vital to fascist doctrine). The Italian Futurists were also active and vocal proponents in the lead-up to World War I. Though the movement in it's original formation had mostly fizzled out by the end of the war, Marinetti revived the movement and stayed active in the fascist political climate of post-war Italy, advocating for Futurism as the state art and becoming closer with Prime Minister Benito Mussolini (Il Duce).

What was their art like? As previously stated, in Russia Futurism was poetic and literary. In Italy, it took forms as diverse as architecture, music, literature, and film. With the development and proliferation of flight technology, aeropainting emerged as a primary expression of the form from the 1920s to the 1940s. Futurism was a contemporary of the more Paris-centered Cubism, and some artists merged the styles into Russian Cubo-Futurism.

Aesthetically, Futurism was a lot of primary colors and hard lines, infected by the disjointed perspective of Cubist portraiture, while also embracing the brushwork of Impressionism. We mentioned some of the subject matter above: war, machinery, modernization, urbanism, vertigo, construction, flight, youth, labor, and revolt. You can find a nice assembly of paintings here.

We can see the legacy of Futurism all over contemporary culture: graphic design, illustration, cyberpunk, science-fiction and film (notably in Blade Runner), futurists, biotechnology or "the metallization of the human body," manga, and art deco, as well as the more direct impact it had on the subsequent movements of Surrealism and Dada.

How Does It Make You FEEL? Ideologically, Futurism had elements of anarchism and communism, was overtly patriarchal and misogynist, and emerged as arguably the first modernist (art) movement that united a philosophy of the future with anti-intellectual, anti-cultural (establishment) politics, justified by blind nationalistic faith in the classically fascist model of a highly politicized militant government.

Like the best Soviet art, German expressionist film, and science fiction, Futurism is full of dynamic motion and achieves a kind of variant anachronismalways evoking a time-not-yet-arrived or a past-that-never-was with a visual language quite legible in any present moment. Like the best art, it attempts to inspire action, civic and political. Like the best (read: most nefarious) ideologies, it was driven by a compelling and authoritative leading voice that thrived on complex symbols, xenophobic fears, and conservative values masked by a rabid support of the chaos of modernization.

As the movement of Futurism is now relegated to history, this is obviously a part of a process of forcefully divesting the toxic convictions from the artistic products. It is a part of the endless art/ethic dialectic. A modern audience can look on Futurism artwork and likely enjoy and understand it naturally and acutely, perhaps more-so than other movements before or after, but that understanding also comes at a cost.

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Know Before You Go: The Guggenheim's Italian Futurism Exhibit

Italian Futurism, 1909-1944: Reconstructing the Universe, at the Guggenheim, is a spectacular survey of what has long been the most neglected canonical movement in modern artbecause it is also the most embarrassing. An avant-garde so clownish, in its grandiose posturing, and so sinister, in its political embrace of Italian Fascism, has been easy to shrug off, but the show makes a powerful case for second thoughts. It arrays some superb paintings and sculptures, the best of them by Umberto Boccioni, whose death in the First World War, at the age of thirty-three, deprived the movement of its one great artist. And marvels of graphic and architectural invention reward a stroll up the Guggenheims ramp, through an eventful installation by the curator Vivien Greene. Yet even the most original Futurist artsuch as Boccionis gorgeous and explosive painting The City Rises (1910-11) and his dazzling sculpture of a body in motionfeels a bit unequal to the presumptions of the movements ringmaster, the poet and master propagandist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. The show begins in 1909, the year of the publication of Marinettis first Futurist Manifesto; it ends in 1944, the year of his death, of heart failure, after service with the Axis forces on the Eastern Front. (He was at work on a poem celebrating an lite Italian Army unit.) Futurism was Marinettis creation. Both its glories and its miseries come home to him.

A cosmopolitan prodigy, Marinetti was born in Alexandria in 1876, and was educated at the Sorbonne and the University of Genoa, where he took a degree in law. He wrote most of his poetry in French. His father, a lawyer employed by the Ottoman administration in Egypt, staked him to a fortune. Like many a restless youth of his generation, he thrilled to new currents in the arts and philosophy, from Wagner, Nietzsche, and Bergson to the French apostle of revolutionary violence Georges Sorel. Marinetti streamlined a mlange of radical ideas into an aestheticized politics of upheaval for upheavals sake, with a strutting emphasis on heroic virility. He declared an intention to destroy museums, libraries, academies of every sort, and wrote, We intend to glorify warthe only hygiene of the worldmilitarism, patriotism, the destructive gestures of anarchists, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and contempt for woman....

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Peter Schjeldahl: Futurism and Italian Fascism.

In a surprising breakthrough for the world of materials science, researchers have created some of the most powerful artificial muscles we've ever seen. And they did it with simple fishing line. These freakishly strong and cheap muscles could revolutionize robotics, and perhaps one day our own bodies.

Ray Baughman, director of the NanoTech Institute at the University of Texas at Dallas, has spent much of his career trying to build artificial muscles out expensive, cutting-edge materials like carbon nanotubes. But Baughman's team recently discovered that elegant solutions can come in cheap and easy packages: the answers to many of their research questions could be bought for $5 at a local tackle shop. Sometimes, scientific discoveries are just a matter of rethinking how we use something that's part of our everyday lives.

Above: A "breathing" textile, engineered from Baughman's team's new artificial musculature

How do you get muscle out of a fishing line? First, you have to create tension that can be released.

It's a simple process that goes by an equally simple moniker: "twist insertion." Researchers led by Baughman describe the technique in detail in this week's issue of Science, but the gist is as straightforward as it sounds. One end of a high-strength polymer fiber (like a 50 pound test-line, for example, available at pretty much any sporting goods store) is held fast, while the other is weighted and twisted. Twist a little and the line becomes an artificial "torsional" muscle that exerts energy by spinning. Twist a lot, however, and something interesting happens: the cord coils over on itself, creating an ordered series of stacking loops:

There's a decent chance you've seen this kind of looping before, maybe while twiddling your shoelace, a length of excess yarn, or who knows? a fishing line between your thumb and forefinger. Another good example, Baughman tells io9, is a rubber-band-powered plane. "If you finger-spin the propeller, initially what you see is that the rubber band just twists," he says, "but if you add more twist you get these nucleated coils."

First author Carter Haines, a PhD Candidate in Baughman's lab, demonstrates twist insertion | Credit: UT Dallas

And it turns out that in high-strength, low-cost polymer fibers like fishing line and sewing thread, the emergence of these coils signals a fundamental shift in the material's properties. It goes from being an artificial torsional muscle to a powerful, artificial tensile muscle. That means it becomes an actuator that contracts when activated, just like the muscles in our bodies do. What's more, these artificial muscles are really, really strong.

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Scientists just created some of the most powerful muscles in existence

Bill Cunningham Futurism in Men #39;s Wear Video NYTimes com

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Bill Cunningham Futurism in Men's Wear Video NYTimes com - Video

"We intend to destroy museums, libraries, academies of every sort, and to fight against moralism, feminism..."

That is part of the legendary Italian Futurism manifesto, published in 1909 by Italian poetFilippo Tommaso Marinettion the French newspaper Le Figaro. Even though the movement wanted to destroy museums, its work is now at a major one in New York, theGuggenheim, for its first comprehensive retrospective in the United States.

Although the movement ended in 1944, a retrospective is happening only now because Futurism had a stigma attached to it. WNYC's art critic Deborah Solomon says Marinetti denounced museums, women, film, institutions, and even pasta.

"It comes packaged with the silliest ideas in the history of art," she said. "The futurists sometimes can sound like a group of high school punks."

Solomon adds some of the art is better than the ideas, especially the early works.

Still, the Guggenheim show ends with what is considered the biggest criticism against Futurism: some of the art was propaganda for Italian dictatorBenito Mussolini.

"That explains why Futurism never went anywhere and why the Italians kind of felt out of the story of modern art in the latter 20th century," said Solomon.

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Art With A Stigma: Italian Futurism in NYC

He might not be the next Roger Ebert, but that didnt stop futurist and artificial-intelligence pioneer Ray Kurzweil from giving Spike Jonzes Oscar-nominated and slightly satirical sci-fi dramedyHera strongly positive review on cinematic if not all technology grounds. This is a breakthrough concept in cinematic futurism in the way thatThe Matrixpresented a realistic vision that virtual reality will ultimately be as real as, well, real reality, Kurzweil writes in a review posted recently on his site KurzweilAI.net. Kurzweil, now Googles director of engineering, is author of books such asThe Singularity Is Nearand The Age of Spiritual Machines and subject of the documentaryTranscendent Man, all of which detail Kurzweils vision of a future when computer intelligence becomes self aware and merges more fully with human intelligence.

Related: OSCARS: How The Adapted And Original Screenplay Races Could Go Down To The Wire

Overall, Kurzweil calls the film very successful, and says it does a better job than most predecessors, such as Steven SpielbergsA.I.,in portraying a plausible future where a human and an artificial intelligence could have some sort of relationship.

Related: OSCARS: Uploading Her With Production Designer K.K. Barrett

InHer,Joaquin Phoenixs lonely and depressed lead character Theodore becomes enamored with the operating system, which he dubs Samantha, that he has installed on his computer. Samantha, seductively voiced by Scarlett Johansson, becomes more and more emotionally involved with Theodore, even as Samantha grows more sophisticated and independent.

Related: 2014s WGA Award Nominees Share Thoughts On Screenwriting

Kurzweils caveats are mostly about the timing and rapidity of some technology developments portrayed in Jonzes slightly-in-the-future world.

His biggest beef, though,is a familiar one to his longtime followers, revolving around the films portrayal of artificial intelligence as a stand-alone creation. Samantha and Theodore have issues, despite some creative efforts to get around it, with the fact that one of them has a body and the other one doesnt, and one of them is developing rapidly into something new.

Related: OSCARS: Karen O To Perform The Moon Song From Her

But in the future, Kurzweil says, that wont be a problem. An AI, he says, wont be over there, separate from and disconnected from and eventually superior to humans, but part of and merged with them.

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Artificial Intelligence Pioneer Gives Her A Thumbs Up

Speed cameras have been put in at various intersections across the globe. Depending on who you ask, they were put in to bring in money or to reduce accidents. But here's one reason why they don't reduce accidents as much as we think they do.

In the past we've talked about how extraordinary results cause people to believe that their "luck" is going one way or another. There is The Gambler's Fallacy, which causes people to think that, if a coin has landed on one side an unusual number of times it is "due" to land on the other side on the next flip. Conversely, there's the hot hand's fallacy, which causes people to think that a person who has shot dice successfully a few times is on a hot streak and will keep shooting well. In fact, both hot streaks and cold streaks are part of the normal course of events. A coin flipped many times will have long streaks of heads or tails. A die thrown enough times will come up lucky for long streaks in a row.

In the more superstitious days of gambling, casinos would literally have "coolers." They are incarnations of good luck, who will sit near a lucky gambler and cool their hot streak. Some people say that professional coolers are just an urban legend, but there are a few gamblers who believe in amateur coolers. A person sits next to them at a table, and their luck turns. What's really happening is regression to the mean. Every hot streak is a slight blip caused by chance, a temporary break away from regular casino results. Keep flipping that coin long enough and no matter how many heads you once got in a row, you'll get an even distribution between heads and tails. Keep playing roulette long enough and no matter how much you win in the first hour, you'll lose in the long run because the odds are in the casino's favor.

What does this have to do with speed cameras? For the most part, they're placed at intersections that are "hot" and have an unusually high number of accidents. Some of those intersections are legitimately more dangerous and need the cameras, but even if all the intersections in every city were equally dangerous, some would have a strangely high number of accidents in a year. The next year it would most likely regress to the average number of accidents per year, even if nothing were done, for the same reason that a streak of red in roulette will eventually turn black. Because both the dangerous intersection and the non-dangerous intersection will most likely have a reduction in the accident rate the year after the speed camera is put in, it would take a careful analysis to distinguish which reduction was due to extra caution on the part of thrifty drivers, and which was just the result of chance.

In fact, this problem is the same for all safety measures. An unusually high number of deaths or accidents will cause people to demand something be done. Safety measures walls, speed limits, laws, overseeing agencies are put in, and the problem is reduced. But was there a real problem, or was there simply the occasional chance increase in numbers we'd expect to see in everything from average rainfall to lotto winners? And did the safety measure really help, or did things just go back to what we think of as normal?

[Via The Improbability Principle]

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Why speed cameras don't work as well as we think they do

If You Go

What: Bestselling author Gary Shtyengart will read from his new memoir, "Little Failure," and engage in a conversation with CU's Sasha Senderovich

When: 7 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 20

Where: Room 235, University Memorial Center, University of Colorado-Boulder campus

Tickets: Event is open to the public. Admission is free, but RSVPs are suggested. Email cujewishstudies@colorado.edu

Info: jewishstudies.colorado.edu or email cujewishstudies@colorado.edu

Looking at comic novelist Gary Shteyngart's life and career through a science-fictional prism, he sort of has it all, at least metaphorically: futurism, "time travel," technophilia. He's even an alien. Or as close to it as you can come.

Born in the former Soviet Union in 1972, he immigrated with his Jewish parents to the United States in 1979, that pivotal year in which, some argue, the Communist world began its final collapse, courtesy of Thatcher, Reagan, Gorbachev and Pope John Paul II.

"The experience of being born in the Soviet Union and coming to America, that's kind of science fiction right there," a buoyant Shteyngart says by phone from New York. "We took an interplanetary journey. We left a world that was struggling and slowly sliding into a Third World country. America had its problems, but it looked like the future to me ... I saw a Corvette and I thought, 'This thing can fly, surely!' It looked like it could take off to the stars."

Gary Shteyngart says he wrote "Little Failure" because it's time to leave behind his "Russian American experience." (Brigitte Lacombe / Courtesy photo)

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Noted satirist brings 'interplanetary journey' to CU

JAFA 2014 PART 4 FUTURISM
JAFA is a one of a kind, creative, avant garde runway show. It is a student competition held for our 3 Josef #39;s School of Hair Design campuses in Fargo and Gr...

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JAFA 2014 PART 4 FUTURISM - Video