Stacked: MVRDV’s vision for future Shenzhen

Shenzhen, located north of Hong Kong, both fascinates and frightens me in equal measure. I’ve been writing about how the city is being used as a social laboratory to test the world’s most sophisticated city-wide surveillance system in the latest issue of Icon.

But it’s the recent competition to re-design its central business district that I’m linking to today. Steven Holl Architects actually won the competition, but it is the four towers (two of which are above) proposed by Rotterdam’s MVRDV that caught my eye. The towers, stacked precariously almost like a pile of books, provide shelter for large public spaces below. It’s an original and bold urban vision designed to encourage street life in Shenzhen: the soon-to-be surviellance capital of the world (via SpaceInvading).

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Bookmarks for March 02

I don’t think I’ve ever linked to the Daily Mail before, I almost feel like promising never to do so again. But credit where credit’s due. Suzanne Moore citing the wonderful Joni Mitchell (above) in her reasoned defence of our civil liberties was so incredibly well put that I couldn’t stop myself. .

+ MI5 deny Eric Hobsbawm the right to see his file, even though the erudite Marxist-historian is 91.

+ David Blunkett’s back and warning against a surveillance society. Hark at pot, as they say up North, but he’s a welcome convert to the libertarian cause.

+ The New York Times is launches on the Kindle e-book reader. The “future of journalism” looks like it has the graphic power and functionality of a CD-Rom from 1992.

+ Whatever happened to … the protagonists in the Miner’s Strike most, ahem, arresting image.

Orwell Prize targets political bloggers

Glad to see that the Orwell Prize for political writing has been extended to included blogging. Heard Jean Seaton on the Today Programme this morning saying that if Orwell were alive today, he would have been a blogger. She added: “He was always absolutely avid about whatever was the contemporary form of media.”

“He would have been interested in the democratic possibilities of it – anyone can do it as long as they’ve got access to a machine,” said DJ Taylor, Orwell’s biographer. “[But], the misuses to which blogging has been put … would have appalled him. There would, in all probability, have been an essay on Blogging and the English Language.”

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Lately I’ve been listening to Spotify

Spotify login screen

Originally uploaded by bertop

I’ve finally got it with Spotify – the Stockholm-based  streaming service that’s been widely touted as the future of music.  It allows users to create playlists and then share them with their friends over the internet with surprising ease. Awful name I know (may as well have just called it Spodify)  but it’s a really nice application that helps you listen to a lot of new music in exchange for listening to the occasional advert.

The catalogue not at all bad: in building my first playlist it had over half the tracks I was looking for and they loaded almost immediately. Naturally, for a new service, there was a lot of stuff missing. Okkervil River were listed, but not yet their sublime new track Starry Stairs; no sign of The Dø, the wonderful Finnish-French duo (whose On My Shoulders has been my favourite track of the year); and I also missed tracks by new acts like Chew Lips (Solo), Jack Penate (Tonight’s Today) and Clerkenwell’s madcap The Real Tuesday Meld. Esoteric choices, perhaps, but all of these are already available on either Last FM or MySpace.

So … fellow Spotifiers here’s my first playlist:

Florence and the Machine – You’ve got the Love
Justice – D.A.N.C.E.
Diplo – Big Lost
Florence and the Machine – Dog Days
Santogold – L.E.S. Artists
Friendly Fires – Paris (Aeroplane mix)
Jay-Z – Brooklyn Go Hard
Dirty Projectors and David Byrne – Knotty Pine
Basia Bulat – Before I Knew
Monkey – Heavenly Peach Banquet

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Bloody hell, Bjork is now following me on Twitter.

(link)

“I’m a photographer … not a terrorist”

Photographers’ protest at Scotland Yard,
London, UK 53.JPG

Originally uploaded by gruntzooki

Scenes from today’s National Union of Journalists’ (NUJ) protest against new anti-terror laws at New Scotland Yard. According to the British Journal of Photography press photographers could face up to 10 years in jail if they are caught snapping pictures of police. According to the NUJ the police already have form.

““The relationship between photographers and police could worsen next month when new laws are introduced that allow for the arrest – and imprisonment – of anyone who takes pictures of officers ‘likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism’.”

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Kim Ji-Hwan and Jin Sol: reinventing the subway map

I really like Kim Ji-Hwan and Jin Sol’s  reinvention of the subway map. Taking an obvious cue from Harry Beck the pair have re-imagined transit maps for Tokyo, Osaka and Seoul (left). They offer both the “circuit diagrams” we are accustomed to, while also presenting a more geographic representation of the city. Geography and geometry in harmony.

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The FT watches the Watchmen

It’s not often that the Financial Times covers the comic industry – but then again its not often that a grapic novel as brilliant as The Watchmen is adapted for the silver screen. Here’s what it thinks:

“The best comics (writes FT film critic Nigel Andrews) are honoured as near-prophetic screeds: their mix of words and pictures form a pop-hieroglyphic art that tilts at global or social anxieties, through fable and fantasy, and interrogates notions of heroism, while occupying an aesthetic vantage ground between literature and cinema.”

He goes on to wonder if Hollywood can handle the Watchmen. Well can it?
(via Art & Letters Daily)

Why our police can’t read the new ID cards, but our hackers can

Originally uploaded by opexxx

It’s been a bad week for ID cards. The UK government admitted on Thursday that neither its police nor its border guards had any current capacity to read or store the biometric data that is held on the damned things. Responding to a Freedom of Information request by the tech site silicon.com, the Identity and Passport Service (IPS) revealed that “no police stations, border entry points or job centres have readers for the card’s biometric chip”, that despite the fact that ID cards have been issued to foreign nationals in November last year, with the IPS expecting to issue 50,000 ID cards by April.

Elsewhere, hackers in the US said that they had built a mobile platform that can clone large numbers of the unique electronic identifiers used in US passport cards – using off-the-shelf equipment costing just $250. UK hackers have already done something similar.

Quite apart from the many moral objections to the ID card – and the astronomical cost of issuing them, – it seems that, according to a growing body of evidence, the cards are not even fit for purpose: recording and storing our biometric data.

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Bookmarks for February 03

The 21st century has finally begun, says Bruce Sterling’s alter-ego, Bruno Argento

“After 1989 we enjoyed a strange interregnum where “history ended.” Everyone ran up a credit-card bill at the global supermarket. The adventure ended badly, in crisis. Still, let us be of good heart. In cold fact, a financial crisis is one of the kindest and mildest sorts of crisis a civilization can have. Compared to typical … catastrophes like wars, epidemics, earthquakes, volcanoes, endemic political collapse — a financial crisis is a problem for schoolchildren.”

+ Lord Foster to be stripped of his peerage.
Starchitect to lose out after moving to Switzerland. Maybe he’s the first victim of the new 21st century.

+ Padraig Reidy: the Wikipedia editing debate highlights a retreat from web utopia.

+ Older net users give the younger generation a run for their money.

+ More from the London at Night series.
The Boston Globe continues its wonderful pictures of nocturnal London

Carol Vorderman: New Tory maths advisor and former peddler of ‘debt trap’ loans

Carol Vorderman

Uploaded by Milo 2009

David Cameron has invited Carol Voderman (right) to help formulate a future maths strategy for the Tories, according to this morning’s Guardian.

For 10 years Carol Vorderman was also the public face of FirstPlus, a debt consolidation company and seller of loans to people already in hock. Last year an advertisement featuring her was criticised by charities. Credit Action said that an offer on one of the company’s secured loans acted like a “debt trap” that encouraged people to get into levels of unmanageable debt.

It has always been difficult to work out why such a brilliant and beautiful woman lowered herself to selling such dodgy perfectly legal loans to people already in lot of financial difficulty. It was not like she needed the money. At the time she was widely reported to be the best paid female TV presenter in Britain. Some say she was on as much as £900,000 a year from presenting Countdown alone.

Surely – with a reported IQ of 154 – she had done the maths. And worked out that the high rate of interest charged by FirstPlus would ultimately lead to further financial ruin for many of its customers. Indeed many of them are now facing bankruptcy and repossession.

Cloud Atlas: David Mitchell novel to be adapted by Hollywood

First Showing is reporting that David Mitchell’s masterful Cloud Atlas will be adapted for the big screen. The film of the book (that should have won the 2004 Booker Prize) will be produced by the Wachowski Brothers and directed by Tom Tykwer, who previously directed  Run Lola Run.

My first thought is that Cloud Atlas is pretty un-film-able. The book is a literary jigsaw puzzle: something both entertaining and difficult at the same time. It takes a long time to ponder, without ever being too heavy. So much of that will surely be lost in translation.

What will remain, I think, will be highly entertaining,. Like Danny Boyle’s re-making of Trainspotting, it will romp along nicely enough; hopping through different adventures and riffing along different genres. Think of Timothy Cavendish’s misadventures, for instance,  and how they would make for a tight little Ealing-style comedy.

But it will be a fluffier Cloud Atlas on offer. Of course it will. The Brothers Wachowski can only carry it up to a point. Their V for Vendetta simplified much of Alan Moore’s political message after all and it made for a frustrating adaptation, despite excellent performances from Geoffery Rush and Natalie Portman (the latter an evens-bet for Luisa Rey in Cloud Atlas). The brothers also famously failed to give the Matrix Trilogy much sense in the end. Could they do better with Cloud Altas with just two hours to play with?  I wonder.

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Is the curse of Terry Gilliam about to be lifted?

Terry Gilliam 2

Originally uploaded by Shavart

Watchmen the Movie is going on general release next month.  However much I am looking forward to the Zack Snyder version, I still wish that it had been made by Terry Gilliam. The great maverick director failed to make the movie – twice. Indeed Terry Gilliam (right) has had more than his fair share of film failures. He has released just one movie, the Brothers Grimm, in a little over a decade.

But wait. Hope is at hand. There are signs that the former-Python’s career is about to take a positive turn. Here’s why:

1) June see the release of The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus – which was delayed two years because of the death its original actor:  Heath Ledger.

2) The word on the web is that Terry Gilliam’s movie after that will be an adaptation of Pat Ruskin’s The Zero Theorem – and that it promises to be his strangest since Brazil. Billy Bob Thornton is to star. Shooting starts in May.

3) Beyond that, Gilliam has said that he finally reboot The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, with Johnny Depp and, possibly, Michael Palin in the title roles.

Is it time to suggest that the curse of Terry Gilliammight finally have be exorcised or am I tempting fate?

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LightLane: portable cycle lane concept shows the way

Here’s a bright idea. A lazer-powered light that projects a cycle lane on to the road behind the bike. Light Lane (left), by designers Alex Tee and Evan Gant, turns every street into a temporary cycle lane- and helps with visability too. It’s currently under development, not even at the prototype stage – so don’t expect it to see it in Halfords anytime soon.

(via dustbowl)

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The Designers Republic: The Peoples Bureau For Consumer Information finally closes

Oh no. The Designers Republic is no more. It’s gone bust after 26-years of anti-establishment design.

Staunchly Sheffield, a city it stuck to even when Warp Records – one of its main clients –  abandoned the city, the Republic was strongly influenced by both Russian constructivism and corporatism. It made many cracking record covers.  It always, always stood out and they often designed as if they had access to outer space.  They even used to have a shop, in the Shibuya district of Tokyo, called The Peoples Bureau For Consumer Information which I think just about summed them up.

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Back to the future: Futurism at 100

Have enjoyed the New Statesman’s Owen Hatherley recent essay on the Futurist art momement, which celebrates its 100th anniversary this February. He writes:

“Peter Saville borrowed a Depero design for the cover for New Order’s debut album, Movement, and in many respects futurism’s legacy has been more visible in pop music than in fine art. The 1980s group the Art of Noise took their name from Luigi Russolo’s 1913 manifesto of futurist noise-music, “The Art of Noises”, which proposed the harnessing of industrial and electronic sounds, and their percussive mesh of samples and stabs in turn had a huge effect on 1980s hip- hop acts such as Public Enemy.”

• Futurism 100! is at the Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art, London N1, until 19 April. Exhibition includes Luigi Rusulo’s Music (see left).

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