From the Beautiful Faces series (2012) by Tran Nguyen.
• “What possessed a generation of young European artists, and a few Americans, to suddenly suppress recognizable imagery in pictures and sculptures? Unthinkable at one moment, the strategy became practically compulsory in the next.” Peter Schjeldahl on the birth of abstraction.
• “A profanely mystical work of hyperpurple theory-porn, ObliviOnanisM is an auto-erotic intellectual fiction envisioning the phantastical unending odyssey of a young woman, Gemma, whom you will never know.”
• Psychedelia—An Ancient Culture, A Modern Way of Life, a 520-page history of psychedelic culture by Patrick Lundborg. Related: Ken Kesey talks about the meaning of the Acid Tests.
[Hodges] made a convincing case that Turing’s teenage crush on a fellow schoolboy, Christopher Morcom, was an important catalyst for his lifelong preoccupation with the relationship between brain and mind. Morcom’s unexpected death at the age of eighteen was a shattering blow to Turing, who began to reflect on whether his friend’s consciousness might survive after death or whether it was simply a result of complex material processes and expired when life did. Hodges also linked the famous “Turing Test”, in which a computer attempts to pass as an intelligent human being, to Turing’s own dilemma as a gay man in a homophobic world. (Turing called his test the “imitation game”, and Hodges observed, “like any homosexual man, he was living an imitation game, not in the sense of conscious play acting, but by being accepted as a person that he was not”.)
Michael Saler reviews three books about computing pioneer Alan Turing
• Paul Gallagher at Dangerous Minds looks at Flowers, Lindsay Kemp’s theatrical staging of Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers.
• David Pearson designed a new edition of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four for Penguin.
• Quadtone – Lumisonic Rotera: Mariska de Groot plays a light-to-sound instrument.
• “Cash Mobs” Go Global—Battle Spreads Against Chain Store Dominance.
• Cities and the Soul: a feast of Italo Calvino links at MetaFilter.
• 25 dessins d’un dormeur, Jean Cocteau, 1929.
• Haunted Decor: a Flickr group.
• Computer In Love (1966) by Perrey & Kingsley | Computer Love (1981) by Kraftwerk | Computer Love (1992) by The Balanescu Quartet
