Is it a horror film trailer? Or an AT&T commercial? Think about it. America is strangled by a genetically engineered vine that seeks to replace all ecosystems with its own hybrid strain of radioactive mind parasite.

If you can’t see the video, click here.

This is the real AT&T ad they didn’t want you to see.

If you can’t see the video, click here.

And this one too.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

As the joke goes, denial ain’t a river in Egypt. With the global economy and polar icecaps in meltdown, Dubai has become a World System inferno that continues to draws moths to its flame. In what could have been scripted in a JG Ballard novel, Dubai’s latest fly trap is the monstrous tower, Burj Khalifa, twice the size of the Empire State Building, which apparently defies physics: the bottom floors are ten degrees hotter than the top ones. I guess there is evidence for heaven and hell after all.

Laura Flanders has a nice polemic to welcome it into the world (see above, or click through to read the transcript below the snip):

The engineering marvel was constructed in the desert heat by low paid immigrant workers, mostly Indians and Pakistanis, paid 5-20 dollar a day. (It’s a state secret how many lost their lives in the process.) While the state-owned construction operation suppressed worker demands and banned unions from the site, it catered to consumer fantasy with equal extravagance. The tower features 144 apartments and a hotel designed by Giorgio Armani, the Italian designer. In what’s been dubbed the “super-scraper,” the super-affluent can live and vacation without leaving the brand, or the building.

Click here for the whole transcript.

Update: I added the MSNBC report at the top because of its striking imagery. “Inferno” and “flame” were metaphoric devices, but upon seeing the video, they are quite literal. It’s striking imagery when compared to 9/11. It’s hard not to look at the Dubai tower’s exploding fireworks without remembering starker images of 2001. Who ever said that irony was dead after the WTC attack was clearly wrong.

For what it’s worth, as I wrote these words, it occurred to me that search engine bots would take my terms out of context. So to be clear, what ever robo-filters are slogging up blog posts about world affairs, none of these keywords are to suggest or advocate any acts of destruction against private property. I cannot help but sense the panoptic presence of internet surveillance. Privilege, it would seem, belongs to those who can “properly” or officially contextualize the symbolic order.

If this is the kind of reality they are promoting, I think I’d rather spend my afternoon in Baghdad.

No doubt, Godfrey Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi wasn’t the final word on cinematography’s powerful capacity to depict the environmental consequences of our modern world. With Manufactured Landscapes comes Jennifer Baichwal’s depiction of photographer Edward Burtynsky‘s stunning images of industry in China. If it’s true that what is not mediated doesn’t exist, we can say now that at least one frightening slice of the world, albeit a pretty massive slice, is here for us to behold. Blink at your own risk.

Is the War on Terror really an advertising conspiracy? From Security Point Media:

Alternative Media for a Captive Audience: Guaranteed message delivery in an environment of heightened awareness.

Visit the Website for more surreal euphemisms.
Media Life Magazine – Your client’s face up at airport security:

“This is about the novelty of the space. It allows us to get our message across visually. Our 3-D campaign has the ad kind of jumping out at you, to put a little Zappos in your day. When I’m coming through security I know that it can be frustrating and this is to provide a little lightheartedness.” – Andy Kurlander, senior marketing manager for Zappos.com.

Like all things Dubai, this architecture is need of some serious deconstruction.

Technorati Tags: Dubai

They’re calling it the Bagdad Disneyland, but, frankly, the Gulf already has its Las Vegas, dubbed Dubai. So now maybe all Iraq needs is Frank Gehry. Argh. Democracy stripped down to a militarized Times Square.

Dan Havel and Dean Ruck called this tunnel “Inversion” and saw it as a celebration of the old space that had once housed art classes. Just before these houses were demolished to clear the site for a coffee house, they peeled off the exterior wood and recycled it into this awesome art installation. Locals knew the buildings and the classes they’d housed, but suddenly the sight drew in more attention. Kids and adults climbed in from off the streets to get lost in the stunning vortex of wood scraps.

In the Information Age, the flow of IP (Internet Protocol) data between locations is nearly ubiquitous. Globe Encounters visualizes in real time the volumes of Internet data flowing between New York and cities around the world. The size of the glow on a particular city location corresponds to the amount of IP traffic flowing between that place and New York City. A greater glow implies a greater IP flow.

A beautiful hyperreal depiction of telephone and IP (Internet Protocol) data flowing between New York and cities around the world, visualized by the art project, New York Talk Exchange (produced by MIT’s Sensible City Lab). The project wants to know: “How does the city of New York connect to other cities? With which cities does New York have the strongest ties and how do these relationships shift with time? How does the rest of the world reach into the neighborhoods of New York?”

Truth is, like a robin attracted to shiny objects, I was magnetized by the stunning imagery. But as I look at the project’s goals, it’s not clear to me what the benefit of this visualization is other than to reinforce the notion that NYC is the communications hub of the world and that people, ho-hum, make long distance calls. But there is this little tidbit:

As Columbia University Professor Saskia Sassen, author of the book “Global Cities,” details in the NYTE project catalog, “The striking piece of evidence coming out of this project is that global talk happens both at the top of the economy and at its lower end. The vast middle layers of our society are far less global; the middle talks mostly nationally and locally.”

PS Note the sponsor (AT&T). Hmmm, makes all that spying seem like an innocent mistake.

Technorati Tags: New York Talk Exchange

192021 is an In incredibly provocative and beautiful assemblage of info graphics about the future of urban growth.

And if you want to monitor the stats that get us there, you can check out the awesome World Clock.

Technorati Tags: 122021