Colosseo: Reimagining the Roman Coliseum with type (Canon 7D) from Cameron Moll on Vimeo.

Cameron Moll has created a poster that depicts the Coliseum using type. The Colosseo is a gloriously hybrid entity, digitally produced but mechanically reproduced. The prints are these beautiful objects, but the Colosseo is also data. You can buy parts of the data as vector art glyphs, while a low-resolution digital copy flies around the Internet.

The artwork is great but I’m sharing this for the video, which first lovingly depicts and then explicitly discusses the fetishistic craftsmanship of printing the posters. In fact, the video devotes far more time to the process of reproducing the work than to the time spent creating it, which was done on a computer and much more time-consuming. (Moll has released other videos focussing the act of digital creation.)

Here’s why this fascinates me:

An analysis of art in the age of mechanical reproduction must do justice to these relationships, for they lead us to an all-important insight: for the first time in world history, mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual. To an ever greater degree the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility. From a photographic negative, for example, one can make any number of prints; to ask for the “authentic” print makes no sense. But the instant the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applicable to artistic production, the total function of art is reversed.

Walter Benjamin The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

And yet, here are Cameron Moll and Bryce Knudson managing to impart all kinds of aura and ritual to the reproduction. The reproductions are weirdly more authentic than the original which is just a file with dubious forward-compatibility.

I enjoy this alchemy, made possible by the presence of easier reproduction techniques. It transmutes the time needed to make a letterpress work into painstaking labour when, at the moment of invention, it was labour-saving. Imagine the salespeople and inventors of these machines learning that their long term legacy would be assured by how difficult they are to use, compared to their displacing successors (yes, yes, I know there are special features of the resulting print that are unique to the process but the video is all about the process itself).

What I’m deeply curious about is what comes next. At what point will the techniques have morphed and changed to that point that lovingly submitting PDFs to be printed “by hand” on colour printer feels more authentic than whatever’s replaced it? I suppose we’re about due for dot-matrix nostalgia.

I think we’re already seeing some glimpses of that sentiment in essays like this one:

I want to make things, not just glue things together.

Mike Taylor Whatever happened to programming?

Part of a series: B-List Holy Grails

When I was a kid, lasers were these unimaginably powerful devices that would one day be used to bore tunnels through mountains. Instead, we use them to watch DVDs and irritate cats.

Written by: Tree Lobsters

Poster Child:
Lasers- a way to tire your dog out in the backyard from the comfort of your living room window.

Ryan:
I really liked this one! But then I thought, we’re using lasers to adjust the shape of our freakin’ EYEBALLS, so they did end up being a little futuristic after all.

Tim:
To this day, the military has not given up on laser weapons.

What’s this all about?

In the waning days of 2009, Julian Dibbell mentioned videophones as a holy grail technology that ended up being a b-teamer. I liked the concept so much that I ran a contest on Quiet Babylon, looking for more examples.

This is one of the shortlist finalists as chosen by a panel of judges consisting of myself, Ryan North of Dinosaur Comics & Project Wonderful and street artist Poster Child.

All of: B-List Holy Grails

Part of a series: B-List Holy Grails

MiniDiscs: It has been a near-universal of science fiction for the storage media of the future to be sexy, smaller versions of our current ones. But, when miniature discs finally arrived… in fact, I don’t recall even noticing their arrival. But some guy I knew did get a MiniDisc player, right around when iPods began to take over the world. He would burn a little playlist onto each one, and carry them all in differently coloured little mini-cases. It was immediately obvious to anyone other than him what a fantastically useless piece of technology this was compared to the now-ubiquitous MP3 player.

Written by: David Rusak

Tim:
I was slow to come around to this one, but then I remembered every hacker movie from the 80s and 90s (even The Matrix).

Ryan:
I liked this one, but I thought it was maybe too precise. The future is often today made either bigger or smaller, and I’ve seen movies in which the future was either giant laserdiscs-sized CDs or tiny tiny CDs – effectively, a MiniDisc. I also knew a guy who was big into MiniDiscs! I think he has an iPod now. JUST LIKE EVERYONE ELSE

Poster Child:
As minds trapped in the present, we always make the mistake of imagining the future to be like the present refined. The future is more about game changers.

What’s this all about?

In the waning days of 2009, Julian Dibbell mentioned videophones as a holy grail technology that ended up being a b-teamer. I liked the concept so much that I ran a contest on Quiet Babylon, looking for more examples.

This is one of the shortlist finalists as chosen by a panel of judges consisting of myself, Ryan North of Dinosaur Comics & Project Wonderful and street artist Poster Child.

All of: B-List Holy Grails

Part of a series: B-List Holy Grails

Monorail Haiku

What would the world be
with no Monorail? Pretty much
like it is right now.

Written by: Lori Priebe

Ryan:
‘Cept for Disneyworld! I think? I’ve never been there but I think the monorail is kind of a big deal there. But I took off points because some maglev trains run on a single rail too and those are way futuristic. They float on a cushion of MAGNETS.

Poster Child:
Monorails are a
great visual cue of the
Future we wanted

Tim:
Aside from one entry that consisted of a brand name and nothing else, Lori had the shortest entry. This is to be admired.

Monorails. If Disneyland and assorted futuristic movies created any expectations, it was that I would glide into adulthood on these silent, electric conveyances. No one really believed in flying cars, but the monorail… it always seemed just around the corner; the way we’d all inevitably get to work in the far future of 2000. And now, the monorail is reality! Thousands of people use it every day! Electronic voices remind us to stand clear of the closing doors… as we race from our flight in Terminal A to our connection in Terminal D. I had hoped for more, somehow.

Written by MsMolly

Poster Child:
A subway is lame too, with only two stations. Clearly, we need MORE monorails!!

Tim:
My favourite monorail is the one in Seattle from the World’s Fair. Today it is so dented and beat up looking, it’s a vision of a future that came and went, but never really escaped from the unreality bubble of exibition shows.

Ryan:
This was my favourite of the monorails entries, because we can all sympathize with the AWESOMENESS of hearing that there’s a robot train at the airport, and the disappointment of getting there and it being totally weak. It would at least be something if they addressed you by name, but no, no, they don’t even do that.

What’s this all about?

In the waning days of 2009, Julian Dibbell mentioned videophones as a holy grail technology that ended up being a b-teamer. I liked the concept so much that I ran a contest on Quiet Babylon, looking for more examples.

This is a thematically-linked pair of the shortlist finalists as chosen by a panel of judges consisting of myself, Ryan North of Dinosaur Comics & Project Wonderful and street artist Poster Child.

All of: B-List Holy Grails

Part of a series: B-List Holy Grails

Email lets you communicate instantly, anywhere in the world. Sounds pretty awesome, right? Unfortunately, no. In practice, 97% of my email is Nigerians trying to sell me boner pills, and the rest is from my boss.

Ryan:
Loved the way of casting email to “talk to anyone in the world – FOR FREE!”, which is something we often forget. My first FreeNet email address (ae571@ncf.carleton.ca, baby!) (it doesn’t work anymore) was something really exciting, and I remember the thrill of getting an email message was the same as getting a real message. But email quickly became routine, and now I have so much spam coming in that I have a custom-trained neural network sort it for me before I even look at it. That’s pretty futuristic too, I think!

Tim:
I was the least enthused about this entry, in that I don’t really remember this being a big thing that being reached for. Radio and then phones had gotten us pretty used to the idea of talking to anywhere in the world. I’ve since gone on an IRC nostalgia trip and so would like to revise my opinion somewhat.

Poster Child:
True enough. But email is still pretty damn awesome in my books. It’s how I do 99% of my non-face-to-face communicating, so you get a big thumbs up from me, email!

What’s this all about?

In the waning days of 2009, Julian Dibbell mentioned videophones as a holy grail technology that ended up being a b-teamer. I liked the concept so much that I ran a contest on Quiet Babylon, looking for more examples.

This is one of the shortlist finalists as chosen by a panel of judges consisting of myself, Ryan North of Dinosaur Comics & Project Wonderful and street artist Poster Child.

All of: B-List Holy Grails