Deep beneath Vegas’s glittering lights lies a sinister labyrinth inhabited by poisonous spiders and a man nicknamed The Troll who wields an iron bar.
But astonishingly, the 200 miles of flood tunnels are also home to 1,000 people who eke out a living in the strip’s dark underbelly.
Some, like Steven and his girlfriend Kathryn, have furnished their home with considerable care - their 400sq ft 'bungalow' boasts a double bed, a wardrobe and even a bookshelf.
Austin Hargrave Las Vegas tunnels
Deeper underground: Steven and Kathryn live in a 400sq ft 'bungalow' under Las Vegas which they have lovingly furnished with other people's castoffs
FULL ARTICLE HERE:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1326187/Las-Vegas-tunnel-people-How-1-000-people-live-shimmering-strip.html
Another interesting post of a story and pictures of an abandoned area of New York.
"In a different era, Edgemere's seaside was a thriving resort, with grand hotels, a bustling boardwalk, and thousands of residents. Today, it is devoid of buildings and permanent residents, and "has stood vacant, except for plant life and wild dogs, for more than 35 years, when thousands of summer bungalows and stores were plowed under as part of the Arverne Urban Renewal Project, a massive building project that was put on hold and never revived," according to the Rockaway newspaper The Wave. The city continues to maintain the streets in south Edgemere - to some degree - with signs lurking in the bushes and new curb cuts floating like islands in the urban wilderness. But few sidewalks remain intact, most roadways are pockmarked with potholes or covered in shifting sands, and the entire area is used as a communal dumping ground. Clothing, mattresses, toys and used condoms are discarded in the middle of streets. Some remain undisturbed for over a month. "
ARTICLE HERE:
http://kensinger.blogspot.com/2010/09/south-edgemere-wasteland.html
Monday, November 8, 2010
The Web That Time Forgot
MONS, Belgium — On a fog-drizzled Monday afternoon, this fading medieval city feels like a forgotten place. Apart from the obligatory Gothic cathedral, there is not much to see here except for a tiny storefront museum called the Mundaneum, tucked down a narrow street in the northeast corner of town. It feels like a fittingly secluded home for the legacy of one of technology's lost pioneers: Paul Otlet.
In 1934, Otlet sketched out plans for a global network of computers (or "electric telescopes," as he called them) that would allow people to search and browse through millions of interlinked documents, images, audio and video files. He described how people would use the devices to send messages to one another, share files and even congregate in online social networks. He called the whole thing a "réseau," which might be translated as "network" — or arguably, "web."
Historians typically trace the origins of the World Wide Web through a lineage of Anglo-American inventors like Vannevar Bush, Doug Engelbart and Ted Nelson. But more than half a century before Tim Berners-Lee released the first Web browser in 1991, Otlet (pronounced ot-LAY) described a networked world where "anyone in his armchair would be able to contemplate the whole of creation."
Although Otlet's proto-Web relied on a patchwork of analog technologies like index cards and telegraph machines, it nonetheless anticipated the hyperlinked structure of today's Web. "This was a Steampunk version of hypertext," said Kevin Kelly, former editor of Wired, who is writing a book about the future of technology.
Otlet's vision hinged on the idea of a networked machine that joined documents using symbolic links. While that notion may seem obvious today, in 1934 it marked a conceptual breakthrough. "The hyperlink is one of the most underappreciated inventions of the last century," Kelly said. "It will go down with radio in the pantheon of great inventions."
Today, Otlet and his work have been largely forgotten, even in his native Belgium. Although Otlet enjoyed considerable fame during his lifetime, his legacy fell victim to a series of historical misfortunes — not least of which involved the Nazis marching into Belgium and destroying much of his life's work.
The entire article is worth a read. Check it out.
Friday, November 5, 2010
Name- Readymade
Check this project out- it explores the use of the 'name' as a 'readymade'...
parallel worlds- parallel identities?
http://www.aksioma.org/name/
NAME Readymade is a "Name changing” gesture perpetrated by three Slovenian artists who, in 2007 officially changed their names to the Slovenia’s economic-liberal, conservative prime minister at the time, Janez Janša.
All three of the Janez Janšas’ private and public affairs, their performances, writings and exhibitions – in a word, their entire lives – have been conducted under this name ever since. Janez Janša works through a series of artistic, political, administrative and mediatic actions performed by himself together with Janez Jansa and Janez Jansa. Works exhibited in this show (valid ID cards, passports, credit and bank cards, driving licences, birth and marriage certificates, and so on) are generated by the reality itself.
NAME Readymade - THE EXHIBITION
Curator: Zdenka Badovinac
Name as Readymade
An interview with Janez Janša, Janez Janša and Janez Janša by Lev Kreft
NAME Readymade - THE BOOK
Museum of Modern Art Ljubljana, Oct. 2008
Friday, October 29, 2010
Here's a link to a text by Russell Means, it's from a speech he gave in 1980- Means speaks to the problem of indigenous cultures becoming "Europeanized."
Here's an excerpt-
"But each new piece of that “progress” ups the ante out in the real world. Take fuel for the industrial machine as an example. Little more than two centuries ago, nearly everyone used wood–a replenishable, natural item–as fuel for the very human needs of cooking and staying warm. Along came the Industrial Revolution and coal became the dominant fuel, as production became the social imperative for Europe. Pollution began to become a problem in the cities, and the earth was ripped open to provide coal whereas wood had always simply been gathered or harvested at no great expense to the environment. Later, oil became the major fuel, as the technology of production was perfected through a series of scientific “revolutions.” Pollution increased dramatically, and nobody yet knows what the environmental costs of pumping all that oil out of the ground will really be in the long run. "
Hi Everyone- Out of our Detroit discussions we see alternative and parallel strategies of land use and geographic narratives-
Here's a new project by artists Julieta Aranda and Anton Vidokle that proposes a parallel economy to our current neo-liberal model- it's called Time/Store... another utopian economic alternative to our 'morning after' hyper-capitalist collapse?
Time/Store on Essex Street follows the historic Cincinnati Time Store, opened by the American anarchist Josiah Warren in 1827 as a three-year experiment in alternative economics. Warren's idea was to develop an exchange system where the value assigned to commodities would come as close as possible to the amount of human labor necessary to produce them. For example: 8 hours of a carpenter’s labor could be exchanged for eight to twelve pounds of corn. This system eventually led to the creation of time currency, and to contemporary time banking—an international movement of alternative economics.
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