Infocult: Uncanny Informatics

The Frankenstein economy, or Our Gothic Times

The Frankenstein economy: I'm not sure who said it first, but Teeming Brain is where I found it.

There's a fun political metaphor in the way "Frankenstein" is used to mean either monster or creator.  Wait a few days, and more of us will be peasants, possibly with torches.

Reminds me of one article about The Halloween War, back in the early war on terror day.

Getting medieval on comics

Just found this great idea, translating comic strips into Middle English.  The results are weird, surreal things, with some odd weight to them:

Spotted here, which also has a very odd anecdote involving Dennis the Menace, copyright infringement, and Latin American culture.

(thanks to Rebecca Davis!)

Alan Moore on worms, movies, and the moon maids

Here's a new interview with Alan Moore, with some nicely quotable bits.

"I find film in its modern form to be quite bullying... It spoon-feeds us, which has the effect of watering down our collective cultural imagination. It is as if we are freshly hatched birds looking up with our mouths open waiting for Hollywood to feed us more regurgitated worms. The 'Watchmen' film sounds like more regurgitated worms. I for one am sick of worms. Can't we get something else? Perhaps some takeout? Even Chinese worms would be a nice change."
...

it was the late Will Eisner who brought a cinematic approach to comics in the 1940s after watching "Citizen Kane" dozens of times and transferring its visual style and approach to transitions to the pages of "The Spirit." "As much as I admire Eisner, I think maintaining that approach in recent history has done more harm than good. If you approach comics as a poor relation to film, you are left with a movie that does not move, has no soundtrack and lacks the benefit of having a recognizable movie star in the lead role."
...

Moore said he is now working on new installments in his marvelous comics series "League of Extraordinary Gentlemen"... The new stories take the narrative to the moon where there is a war underway between the giant insects (inspired by the H.G. Wells 1901 book "The First Men in the Moon") and nude lunar amazons. "The idea, it pretty much sells itself, doesn't it?"

Murdering the uncanny valley

Ending a relationship, neoGothic horror style.  First, the discovery of the body:

[O]n September 1, a couple alerted police after discovering what appeared to be a corpse while walking their dog. The body had been wrapped in a bag and bound around the neck, waist and ankles. A head of black hair protruded from one end of the bag.
Police retrieved the body and immediately launched a criminal investigation.

Sounds like a classic sexual violence murder.  Could be the opening of any murder mystery.  But then there's the uncanny valley, technological creepiness aspect:

[S]everal hours later, when forensic pathologists began to unwrap the “corpse” to perform the post-mortem,
 they realized it was actually a state-of-the-art sex doll.

Was it a prank, and art stunt?  Not quite.  Something sadder, and yet also novelistic:

On August 21, the 60-year-old unemployed resident of Izu (Shizuoka prefecture) wrapped his 1.7-meter tall, 50-kilogram silicone girlfriend in a sleeping bag, drove to a remote wooded area, and dumped her. A nice, clean break, he thought.

(thanks to Aaron Schmidt)

Ghost story by Web 2.0: "Slice"

"Slice" (Toby Litt, March 2008) is a multi-platform Web 2.0 story, and a retelling of a classic ghost tale.  It takes place on a series of sites: the heroine's Livejournal blog, her Twitter feed, her parents' blog, her parents' Flickr site, and the parents' Twitter feed. Lisa also maintained a MySpace page, but left it behind - interesting use of dead sites as backstory.  She sets up a bunch of these platforms with her first post.  The whole project only ran for a few days.

From the Penguin site:

Over four days, starting on Tuesday 25th March and ending on Friday, you can follow Slice's story on her own weblog and her parents. If you want to get even more immersed, you can also email the characters and follow them through text messages on Twitter.

If you're joining late, don't worry! All of the old blog entries are archived, so you can just read back if you need to catch up.

The original tale is M. R. James' "Haunted Dolls House" (1923).

We Tell Stories should be considered a key Web 2.0 storytelling project.

The Arctic is an ice island, or Hyperborea returns

Is the Arctic an island?  Polar ice is at historically low levels, and seems to disconnect from Asia and the Americas, according to this National Geographic story:

Our last discussion cast doubt on the currency of data.  So does Nat Geo settle it, at least for fall 2008, or are there competing models out there?

More on the Russian cannibalism story

The British press catch up with last week's Russian Satanist Goth cannibal story.  More details appear, including interviews with police and parents. 

(thanks to Jesse Walker)

CrimeTwitter

More storytelling by Twitter - consider another possibility:

Eentsy weentsy browser pal

A spider crawls across a map of Europe, according to your twisted whims, in this Flash toy:

When will a Hello Kitty version appear?

(thanks to Peter Naegele!)

Spoon River redux, bloggerized

The Spoon River Metblogs is a Web 2.0 storytelling project, inspired by Master's Spoon River Anthology (1915).  The idea is to have individual bloggers post autobiographical fictions about lives in a town (or city).

It's a classic Web 2.0 storytelling concept, drawing on antecedent forms while taking advantage of social media affordances:

“The Spoon River Metblog” updates this complex narrative while returning to the original serial form of distribution....  Bode Media, the publishers of Metroblogging, have built a fictional Metblog site for Spoon River, and the epitaphs as relayed by Davidson are published as individual blog posts.  Readers are free to comment on the individual epitaphs, and draw connections between the different characters.