Velcro City Tourist Board

Category: Politics

  • a duplicitous priesthood’s superior knowledge of the technology of light and shadow

    Insightful piece on superhero narratives, magic and transhumanism by Iwan Rhys Morus over at Aeon a few weeks back; collides a bunch of my own long-running obsessions in exciting ways. For instance, technology’s deliberate appropriation of the mask of (stage) magic: During the 19th century, the relationship between technology and divinity took a new turn.…

  • geography of fear / fear of geography

    Back when I used to live in Velcro City’s original namesake, I remember being told many times over, by many different sources, that difficult cases of social exclusion or dysfunction were often tagged by overburdened social workers in the area with the acronym NFP—“normal for Portsmouth”. Quite how normal (or not) those cases actually were—and…

  • konst för alla

    From a visit to Malmö Konsthall yesterday afternoon. The have-a-go workshop is of course familiar from UK museums, particularly during school holidays. What was quite a surprise for me was that here, this stuff is just sat there, waiting to be used, without permission or supervision or justification… I’m pretty sure I could have just…

  • fragile, non-fixed ways of thinking

    A bunch of snips from an interview with Matt Ward [via Matt formerly-of-BERG Jones], until fairly recently Head of Design at Goldsmiths: Speculative Design can act as a mode of inquiry or it can be a form of strategic practice within industry. At its worst it’s an aesthetic, a step-by-step guide or corporate vapourware, at…

  • weapons of mass distraction

    Geoff Manaugh / knows the score*. Your outrage is exactly what they want: … an endless landslide of trivial distractions has been steadily eliminating the ground needed for systemic political change. People who might once have been an opposition—or, even better, people who might once have been leaders capable of articulating a clear way forward,…