The Art of Victorian Photocollage

...in the exhibit PLAYING WITH PICTURES currently at the Met. Loved this and am inspired to do my own, and just really think everyone should go see it.

Post-mortem retinal images

A lot of articles that look to be worth reading over at Bill Jay's website, but of note on page one of the essays, IMAGES IN THE EYES OF THE DEAD, a comprehensive study of the historically misinformed notion that the final image before death is captured on the retina.

File in the "Extremely disappointing that this phenomenon isn't real" category right next to this debunking of archeoacoustics/paleoacoustics being recorded upon the pottery of antiquity. Well, crap.

However, retinal photography for strictly medical purposes remains a valid field, yielding some incredible images.

The screwed up sounds of THE SINFUL DWARF

"Won't it be funny to see a Danish movie titled The Sinful Dwarf? In a theater?" my friends and I mused, sallying forth towards a midnight screening at the original Alamo Drafthouse.

Well, it wasn't funny. It was really messed up, actually...

Find out what happens here!

Watch the skies!!!

Paul Davies, collaborator with SETI (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) has just published a book I really want to get, THE EERIE SILENCE: RENEWING OUR SEARCH FOR ALIEN INTELLIGENCE.

Perhaps in reaction, Stephen Hawking has made a public statement about his concerns for attempted contact with extraterrestrials.

Is it too late? Have we already put the last nail in the coffin with the Voyager Golden Record launched in 1977? Check out it's awesome content on this fantastic site devoted to it.

Philip K. Dick EXEGESIS to be published: About Fucking Time

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/30/books/30author.html?hpw

Now I don't have to figure out how to initiate a publication of it myself, something I was contemplating a strategy for as recently as yesterday while looking through the VINTAGE PKD publications short section of 2 letters to VALIS editor Mark Hurst. Of note, that the protagonist--a fellow named Huston Paige pre-dating Horselover Fat--in the original draft transforms at book's end into a ventriloquist's dummy!!!! (awesomely terrifying TWILIGHT ZONE twist-esque and dropped from the final publication totally), and the following tantalizing quote: "The cooperation of discrete objects: a possible clue to high-order mimicry?" Reminiscent of Jung's SYNCHRONICITY.

However, I can always still edit an annotated VALIS. Maybe on the web, elaborating upon this online version of the entire book.

"Commonalities between western and native science"

"Cosmic Serpent is a Collaborative project led by Indigenous Education Institute and UC Berkeley Space Sciences Laboratory. Cosmic Serpent is funded by the National Science Foundation under grants No.DRL-0714631 and DRL-0714629." Awesome.

Kerry Tribe's H.M.

Kerry Tribe's H.M. is an amazing 16mm film installation described by my buddy as "projectionist porn" due to the incredibly rickety and complex contraption rigged to run a single strip of film between two projectors at a 20-second delay (the duration of memory left within the titular subject's perception after his experimental 1953 brain surgery resulted in unexpected damage) while a single fixed soundtrack is mixed to sync up alternately with one side or the other of the resultant split-screen, echoingly staggered, pseudo-documentary images...all the means to the end of creating a formally imitative examination of memory, brain lateralization, aging, neuro-plasticity, and the impermanence of consciousness and identity.