3:AM Cult Hero: F élicien Marboeuf
“The greatest writer never to have written.” By Andrew Gallix: With his bovine-sounding surname, F élicien Marboeuf (1852-1924) seemed destined to cross paths with Flaubert. He was the inspiration for the character of Fr éd éric Moreau in L’Education sentimentale, which left him feeling like a figment of someone else’s imagination. In order to wrest […]
Trickster Figures & Unhinged Paranoia
After more than sixty years of research into ‘UFOs’, not a single ‘alien flying saucer’ sighting has been verified. While it remains possible that extraterrestrial spacemen are visiting the earth, there isn’t a single shred of evidence to back up this assertion, so on balance it is extremely unlikely. This doesn’t mean it is not worth studying UFOlogy as folklore or those who believe in flying saucers as victims of alienation and mass hysteria. Popular delusions of this type can be highly entertaining if you haven’t fallen for the hoax yourself.
Stewart Home on Mark Pilkington‘s Mirage Men.
Urban Screens: The Schematic City in Gaming and Architectural Representation
Over the last two decades, representations of urban space have become a prominent subject within gaming. Franchises such as SimCity and Grand Theft Auto have taken the ebb and flow of the city and created simulations that synthesize the economic, sociopolitical, experiential and aesthetic qualities of urban life into reflexive environments. The eye of the contemporary gamer is trained to decode the isometric projection and urban informatics associated with the “god game” genre and switch over to the point of view of a digital citizen in a sandbox style open-city game without skipping a beat. Advances in computer graphics and a need for increasingly sophisticated in-game navigation and informational systems have made gaming an R&D lab for exploring methods of representation derived from not only architecture, but interface design, cinematography, cartography and data visualization.
Greg J. Smith on the transurbanism of the Grand Theft Auto franchise.