time machine // database // travel guide
timespace coordinates: early 2000s Los Angeles
One Hour Photo is a 2002 American psychological thriller film written and directed by Mark Romanek and starring Robin Williams, Connie Nielsen, Michael Vartan, Erin Daniels, Gary Cole, and Eriq La Salle.
In an interview, Romanek said that he was inspired to create this movie by films from the 1970s about “lonely men”, notably Taxi Driver (1976). (wiki)
timespace coordinates: 16th century. conquistador Tomás Verde in New Spain, neuroscientist Tom Creo working on a cure in 2005, 26th century space traveler Tommy in a self-contained biosphere bubble. flying in outer space toward the golden nebula of Xibalba
The Fountain is a 2006 American epic romantic drama film written and directed by Darren Aronofsky and starring Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weisz. Blending elements of fantasy, history, spirituality and science fiction, the film consists of three storylines involving mortality and the resulting loves lost, and one man’s pursuit of avoiding this fate in this life or beyond it.
Production mainly took place on a sound stage in Montreal, Quebec, and the director used macro photography to create key visual effects for The Fountain at a low cost.
The design of the space traveler’s ship was inspired in part by Biosphere 2 near Tucson, Arizona.
Critics’ reactions to the film were divided, but it has gained a cult following since its release. In December 2008, Aronofsky expressed interest in reassembling The Fountain, not as a director’s cut, but as an alternate story that combined theatrical footage and unused footage. (wiki)
Overview uses satellite and aerial imagery to demonstrate how human activity and natural forces shape our Earth. This perspective provides a powerful look at the planet where we live and the civilization we are creating. – www.over-view.com
Italian photographer Massimo Listri captures some of the most wondrous and bizarre collections gathered throughout history in Cabinet of Curiosities, a new XXL edition from Taschen. (via colossal)
Radical Botany is an extraordinary contribution to the burgeoning fields of plant studies and the nonhuman turn. The book succeeds beautifully in discovering and entwining an entire tradition of speculative botany that will reshape plant studies and posthumanist theory. I have no doubt this text will be eagerly devoured by readers.– Stacy Alaimo, author of Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times
DESCRIPTION
Radical Botany excavates a tradition in which plants participate in the effort to imagine new worlds and envision new futures. Modernity, the book claims, is defined by the idea of all life as vegetal. Meeker and Szabari argue that the recognition of plants’ liveliness and animation, as a result of scientific discoveries from the seventeenth century to today, has mobilized speculative creation in fiction, cinema, and art.
Plants complement and challenge notions of human life. Radical Botany traces the implications of the speculative mobilization of plants for feminism, queer studies, and posthumanist thought. If, as Michael Foucault has argued, the notion of the human was born at a particular historical moment and is now nearing its end, Radical Botany reveals that this origin and endpoint are deeply informed by vegetality as a form of pre- and posthuman subjectivity.
The trajectory of speculative fiction which this book traces offers insights into the human relationship to animate matter and the technological mediations through which we enter into contact with the material world. Plants profoundly shape human experience, from early modern absolutist societies to late capitalism’s manipulations of life and the onset of climate change and attendant mass extinction.
A major intervention in critical plant studies, Radical Botany reveals the centuries-long history by which science and the arts have combined to posit plants as the model for all animate life and thereby envision a different future for the cosmos.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Preface | vii
1. Radical Botany: An Introduction | 1
2. Libertine Botany and Vegetal Modernity | 28
3. Plant Societies and Enlightened Vegetality | 56
4. The Inorganic Plant in the Romantic Garden | 86
5. The End of the World by Other Means | 114
6. Plant Horror: Love Your Own Pod | 144
7. Becoming Plant Nonetheless | 171
Acknowledgments | 203
Notes | 205
.. it’s POETIC UNDERSTANDING AND JUSTIFIABLE HATE. It’s July 4 on the top of the Empire State Building after reading an ART SIN BOY mimeograph at Club 57 watching fireworks and thinking about the smile exchanged on the street and nothing but a second glance and lots of dreaming. … It’s letting records skip for ten minutes and thinking it’s beautiful. … IT’S LISTENING TO OTHER POETS AT CLUB 57, TALKING TO POETS, BEING A POET AT CLUB 57. It’s painting on ST MARK’S outside of STROMBOLI PIZZA.
… IT’S DREAMS OF FALLING INTO WARM WATER HOLE WITH EXOTIC FISH CREATURE AND ENOUGH LIGHT TO SEE EVERYTHING.
it’s painting on walls in the suburbs.. IT’S FINDING OUT THE SPACE AGE BEGAN IN 1958. … it’s pornographic pictures and blue feathers.
TimeSpace Warps 