In the film Wall-e (2008), the surviving colony of humans live on a massive starliner (the Axiom) traveling through space. The passengers spend their days reclining on hover chairs while waited on and cosseted by robots. In one scene a voice on the public address system exhorts: “Attention, Axiom shoppers. Try blue! It’s the new…More
Buying time
I stumbled across wikiHow‘s advice to students who need to buy extra time to complete an assignment. You upload a corrupted MS Word file to the online assignment submission system. Eventually someone will get round to asking you to submit it again, by which time you might just have it finished. There’s an art to eking out…More
Let’s play
If you have a weekend to spare you can while it away watching YouTube video clips accompanying gamesters as they play through, and talk through, every level of Grand Theft Auto IV or Minecraft or Tombraider III, or just about any computer game, old or new. It’s not as easy to return to a computer…More
Art challenges life
Artists, designers, curators and critics might have difficulty writing about art were it not for the useful word “challenge.” So fashion designer “Walter Van Beirendonck has continued to challenge conventional fashion trends with his distinctive vision” (link). Here are some other obvious examples. “Banksy challenges British cultural identity with warped, twisted versions of British icons”…More
Derrida for stand-ups
It’s easy to get carried away with words, either written or spoken, especially if you’re good at stringing them together. I was reminded of this propensity at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, with its programme category “Spoken Word,” indicating entertainments in which amusing writers like David Sedaris stand up and talk, and others sit and listen…More
Melancholy urbanism
I revisited Waverley Cemetery in Sydney a few weeks ago. It covers a valley that looks out to the Pacific Ocean. It’s a site of loss and remembering of course, but it also conforms to the architectural geometry of melancholy. The horizon is sovereign, and reminds the visitor of the reaches of time, distance and…More
Some wild life
An engagement with nature enhances people’s emotional attachment to places according to a recent article by researchers into sustainable cities, Timothy Beatley and Peter Newman. They maintain that “Urban environments that are greener, more nature-full, will attract greater interest by residents and help to strengthen emotional bonds to place and community, in turn increasing urban resilience”…More
Signature city
Certain buildings appear on the landscape as if a gesture of the hand at the end of a letter, a tick of approval on a report card, or a graffiti tag on a bare wall. The gestural effect is most pronounced when new buildings plant themselves on places already imprinted on memory. This is Melbourne for…More
Cappuccino epidemic
There’s a surfeit of cafes in Australia, reflecting no doubt what’s happening all around the world — at least in aspirational, bourgeois euro- and anglo-centric urban and semi-urban settings. It’s a fact bound to impress itself on the returning tourist, who meets the phenomenon with some gratitude. There’s always somewhere to rest, to recuperate, it’s…More
Pride of place
“And for the indignity and degradation thus inflicted on a proud people and a proud culture, we say sorry.” This is a quote from the official Apology to Australia’s Indigenous Peoples announced by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd in February 2008. A signed copy of the apology is on display at Parliament House in Canberra. Pride is…More