Saturation Point

Image Source: Business2Community.

Singularity experts regard ageing as a complex set of biological mechanisms which can be decoded, rebooted with stem cells, rejigged genetically, medicated, contained, redirected and even reversed. This is a literal-minded over-rationalization. Gurus like Ray Kurzweil set a date for the onset of the Singularity (the year 2045!), the way wild-eyed prophets used to arrive out of the desert to predict the end of the world. The end of the world was often a year that was almost, but not quite, over the horizon.

Perhaps ageing can be conquered by downloading human consciousness into a computer, or eased by engaging with the arts and material culture. However you choose to attack the problem, once you are out of the goldilocks zone of ages 18 to 35 - the period when the world weighs your juvenile potential and considers you to be naturally synchronized with material dynamics - the ageing process asks you one simple question about psychological agility: how much change can you take? Can you bear the emotional burden of the Singularity? What is your saturation point?

In Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy, the scientific unlocking of ageing biology and related diseases is fairly easily accomplished. The real challenge comes when the ultra-aged face prolonged mental distress as their brains are expected to survive beyond a normal human lifespan. After the Singularity, Robinson predicted, the eternally young will go mad. Only the most resilient will learn how to survive, and the results will not be pretty.

More Human than Human

Ed (2014) © Chris Jones. Video Source: Youtube.

For today, see a sample of computer generated imagery from September 2014. Soon, we won't be able to tell real people from virtual humans online. From the creator, Chris Jones:

Work in progress, hand-made with Lightwave, Sculptris and Krita, composited with Davinci Resolve Lite. Music by me. ... Due to popular demand I'm attempting to extend the soundtrack, but it's not coming easily... so it could take a while. No scans, motion capture or photos were used (except for reference). First half rendered in ~800 hours on a 2008 vintage quad core. Additional rendering by GarageFarm.

Little Pockets of Eternity

The Photography Workshop is the Website of Mumbai-based photographer Kedar Kulkarni. You can see his personal gallery here, and particularly his beautiful photos of small town India here. Kulkarni also runs workshops for other photographers and posts their works. For today, see images from the site taken by Dinkar Patil. In November 2014, Patil captured the animate, the inanimate and the people along the Narmada River, all interacting in the breathtaking regional environment and eternal light of India. This was Patil's Roadtrip Series 5:

The walking part of the journey began in Vadodara, Gujurat, India and ended in Jabalpur, Madhya Pradesh, India. A total walking distance of 800 kms that was completed in 32 days, with rest stops, with an average of 30 kms, walked per day for a total per day, walking time of between 7-8 hours.

Patil does something curious here. Stone gods clustered in corners come alive, while the landscape's living inhabitants begin to look fixed and permanent. It is a fascinating swap.

Patil's style is un-photoshopped, anti-glossy, uncontrived. It could be Kulkarni's influence, who lists his great inspirations in the history of photography here. Patil's photos take the viewer back to a time when we still believed in a reality, served by the camera. From the dawn of photography, photos documented interactions between an artist, a tool, and the environment. At that time, we kept track of things, rather than things keeping track of us. We were the actors and agents, not our tools. By contrast, in today's graphics, the camera dominates the photographic story. We are no longer watchers, we are watched. Cameras and other tools for seeing (and spying) oppress us in an endless House of Mirrors with meta-visions and meta-narratives. Thankfully, that is not the case here: in Patil's work, some little pockets of eternity slip through his lens.

Photo of the Day: Suntory Whisky 3D on the Rocks

This is a 3D-printed ice cube, in a scotch glass | @HumansWLorD ➤ http://t.co/tEcgtmbWyp pic.twitter.com/NQvcJ6NUqP
— Jeff Faria (@PatriotsOfMars) April 14, 2015

See more of Suntory's 3D-printed ice cubes here, and my earlier post on Blade Runner custom scotch glasses, here. A 3-D printing Redditor corrects this story: "Not 3d printed -- idiot reporter thinks anything computer controlled must be a 3d printer... It was milled with a very awesome mill."

Forever: Maybe Not the Word You Want?

Johnny Depp's original 'Winona Forever' tattoo. Image Source: johnnydepp.org.

In the past couple of days, the word forever kept coming up. Finally, it all converged in a 'plate of shrimp' moment. The first mention came up in this analysis at The White Review of Johnny Depp and Winona Ryder. The article, Famous Tombs: Love in the 90s, described Depp's and Ryder's relationship as the American youth romance of the decade. Author Masha Tupitsyn then probed a more interesting question. She almost cracked what, exactly, happened to the Depp-Ryder romance, not in terms of what it meant privately to the two actors, because we can't know that, but what it represented to the rest of us.

Image Source: Buzzfeed.

Tupitsyn hints that it never went anywhere, but Johnny and Winona did. She believes that Depp sublimated it in alcohol and drugs, replacing love for a woman with addictions so distracting that it became impossible to get back to the original source. Meanwhile, Ryder moved forward, but part of her is still trapped in that past time. It wasn't just her love for Depp. She embodied a decade for Generation Jones and Gen X rebels, symbolized by the curious fact that she is naturally a blonde, but for decades has dyed her hair Gothic black:

Like John Cusack, another black haired/pale skinned 80s/90s idol, as well as a youth actor whose great, and perhaps only gift, was to enact a different kind of youth (a counter-youth and counter-masculinity) in his youth, Winona Ryder was never timeless, she was of the time. Most especially that brief time in her life, her teenage years and early twenties. Perhaps this is why Jake Gyllenhaal’s light hair was dyed jet-black for the retroactive DONNIE DARKO, and Christian Slater’s jet-black for HEATHERS. Something about dark hair showing up in the late 80s and early 90s as a form of retribution for an aesthetically fascistic and representationally narrow decade. These are people who were not kissed by the sun, who were not California Dreamin’, or, as the German writer Heinrich Laube puts it, ‘These pale youths are uncanny, concocting God knows what mischief.’ If, as the teenage radio pirate DJ, ‘Hard Harry’ puts it in PUMP UP THE VOLUME (1990), the 80s were a totally ‘exhausted decade, where there’s nothing to look forward to and no one to look up to’, Winona Ryder rose up from the bleached-blonde ashes of the 1980s.

Depp and Ryder started in gothic and horror genres. Their early work, like that of contemporaries Keanu Reeves, Parker Posey and River Phoenix, appeared in dark indie films or popular movies with unsettling vibes. Depp made his feature film debut in Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), in which he played a nice but useless boyfriend. These roles reflected a time, when, for a brief period, surreal depictions of the collective unconscious entered the American mainstream in almost unedited forms. It was remarkable. David Lynch, an American director surreal enough to be respected by Europeans, became popular, as his Twin Peaks exposed the underside of the American Dream.