Lifeboat Foundation

Paren’t… Dia Gnosis — Pre Script Shun

To phone franco via dia butt who gets the last ward afterword?
If yousia verse-ion of him, the forking lickhead, the microcausemic
mountInous mass of livesticktock, in short the long hall and complete
contorted portion he calls his all, rhe-lay hi’m the fowling note:
Hey stoop’dID - go phown \y/ourself biway of cellyou’llar singall. : )
Ur Temp plated off ov and constintuated bi a
basement(ate) heap of sething cellves this
in-digInous that this present present and
list of listless lowermisters and passingpastmast
massterrs who try (h)and be by mayking a b–
line, or eve n’ skip-ping it altogether by notched hopsgotcha
and snhatches of patches of splace to rather gather
togetherness. Zeno knew, just as Xeno new — (more…)

Medical science has changed humanity. It changed what it means to be human, what it means to live a human life. So many of us reading this (and at least one person writing it) owe their lives to medical advances, without which we would have died.

Live expectancy is now well over double what it was for the Medieval Briton, and knocking hard on triple’s door.

What for the future? Extreme life extension is no more inherently ridiculous than human flight or the ability to speak to a person on the other side of the world. Science isn’t magic – and ageing has proven to be a very knotty problem – but science has overcome knotty problems before.

A genuine way to eliminate or severely curtail the influence of ageing on the human body is not in any sense inherently ridiculous. It is, in practice, extremely difficult, but difficult has a tendency to fall before the march of progress. So let us consider what implications a true and seismic advance in this area would have on the nature of human life.

Continue reading “Who Wants To Live Forever?” »

Artifacts, Artifictions, Artifutures 0.5

It’s not a physical landscape. It’s a term reserved for the new technologies. It’s a landscape in the future. It’s as though you used technology to take you off the ground and go like Alice through the looking glass.
John Cage, in reference to his 1939 Imagined Landscape [1].

In the last installment (see here, here and here) I argued that the increasing prominence and frequency of futuristic aesthetics and themes of empowerment-through-technology in EDM-based mainstream music videos, as well as the increasing predominance of EDM foundations in mainstream music over the past 3 years, helps promote general awareness of emerging-technology-grounded and NBIC–driven concepts, causes and potential-crises while simultaneously presents a sexy and self-empowering vision of technology and the future to mainstream audiences. The only reason this is mentionable in the first place is the fact that these are mainstream artists and labels reaching very large audiences.

In this installment, I will be analyzing a number of music videos for tracks by “real EDM” artists, released by exclusively-EDM record labels, to show that these futuristic themes aren’t just a consequence of EDM’s adoption by mainstream music over the past few years, and that there is long history of futuristic aesthetics and gestalts in electronic music, as well as recurrent themes of self-empowerment through technology.

In this part I will discuss some of these recurrent themes, which can be seen to derive from a number of aspects shared by Virtual Art (any art created without the use of physical instruments), of which contemporary electronic music is an example because it is created using software. I argue that this will become the predominant means of art production — via software — for all artistic mediums, from auditory to visual to eventual olfactory, somatosensory and proprioceptual artistic mediums. The interface between artist and art will become progressively thinner and more transparent, culminating in a time where Brain-Computer-Interface technology can sense neural operation and translate this directly into an informational form to be played by physical systems (e.g. speakers) at first, but eventually into a form that can be read by given person’s own BCI instantiated phenomenologically via high-precision technological neuromodulation (of which deep brain stimulation is an early form).

Continue reading “Electronic Music as Emerging Tech. Embryo of Art's Entire Future — Part One” »

By Avi Roy, University of Buckingham

I want to live longer and help others do the same. I assumed the most effective way to do that is by understanding the science of aging and then engineering solutions to extend human lifespan. That is why I became a biomedical researcher and over the past several years I have pursued this goal almost single-mindedly.

When a 2004 study showed that reducing the calorie intake in mice extended their life by 42%, I enthusiastically embraced the results and even put myself on a calorie restricted diet. But, subsequently, a 2012 study showed that long-term calorie restriction may not have the promised benefits. On the contrary, fewer calories without the required nutrients might actually cause harm.

Calorie restriction is not the first such “promising” route that eventually did not live up to the promise, and it will not be the last. Antioxidants showed promise in holding back diseases caused by aging, but now we know that antioxidant supplements are more likely to shorten your life.

Continue reading “If you want to live longer, do nothing” »

Asia Institute Report

Proposal for a Constitution of Information
March 3, 2013
Emanuel Pastreich

Introduction

Continue reading “"Proposal for a Constitution of Information" from the Asia Institute” »

wee halve houses because, (s)mutch liȇk cured accuraysee,
hutch liȇk vid’ veil-lid-ity, touch lijȇk acyrillic pewrity,
wee liȇk two be rheborn bye the day
And houses within houses beakause wee liȇk a fire fractal
Liȇk the Phoenix feather front-tier fringed bye
Its population-liek seethe ov sunny
Tongues liȇck transient paint upawn space sitself
Thus rooms four wombs withinside the larger twomb ov house
Thrue puckerparting labiassed doors wee move head
first out from form, to be rhesearected bye the (-m-)
Inute (h)as well/s
Four wee on-live the day liek it was h/our life
mand night liek a no ther’s
And wee live-on-e’er the (-m-) inute liek {-t-} it was the day
Hand each second as though {-t-} it were the
first minute Cand secowned second
Thus halls liȇk vul[can]vic
Passaways (…burn–, werrm–, I mean pass ages) Tube e
(…-t–urn–, mum–, knot tubey, butt two be) revoluted minutely,
Too be the not now, to be the knotted not then not now, t(w/h)o
Both be and beenaught bye becoming inst.ed; altimetely two bhe
Born and die bye
The passling ov pulsed doors and halls
In microcosmic cataclysm sublime, wee pass two and fro as
Though {-t-} it were e’er forth and foremost fireward
Hinto the forge[t]fall [f]org[e]

A( )negative prefix is a( )n indefinite article taken’ a( )step back 2 look back a( )head. Thus not U or mue or me, but yus. Thus no chair is the chair, a( )nd therefore no chair a chair, for the particular is not the category a( )nd hence the category, in particular, isn’t.

Ent. Ropey.

Where?

Noware.

Continue reading “___n true p___” »

Congratulations Drs. Musha, Pinheiro & Valone on their soon to be published new book.

For those who are interested T. Musha, M.J. Pinheiro and T. Valone (Advanced Science Technology Research Organization, Yokohama, Japan, and others) have a new book that will be published soon:

Artifacts, Artifictions, Artifutures 0.4

In the final part of this installment, I will analyze a few more mainstream music videos with future-friendly memes and motifs, this time looking at videos mostly from 2010. In the last two installments, I argued that the increasing prominence of future-friendly memes and motifs as well as themes of self-empowerment via technology in mainstream music are significant insofar as such an increasing prominence extends the general awareness and potential-recognition of futurist or futuristic concepts, causes and potential crises, and insofar as it presents a sexy and appealing vision of the futuristic gestalt and of technology both high (e.g emerging, converging and otherwise-radically-transformative technologies) and low (e.g. consumer electronics).

This final part of the present installment will be my last dip in the mainstream as far as this series in concerned (although I am finding some of these EDM beats getting stuck in my head, despite myself). The next installment will consider some future-infused visuals and videos made by artists of EDM and electronic-music-“proper” (as opposed to the recent mainstream incorporation of EDM beats as a musical foundation).

Following that we’ll take a more pragmatic and discerning eye to the near future of music, considering how certain existing and on-the-horizon enhancement technologies could potentially disrupt the music industry and dramatically increase the variety and diversity of new music still to come.

All of the following images are the copyright of Interscope Records.

Continue reading “Future-friendly Memes & Motifs in Mainstream Music pt. 3” »