There will be many posts like this across the Web now and tomorrow and for weeks to come. This is just a minuscule speck of human experience, brought to you by the overwhelming pride I feel tonight. What I want to do is just say thank you. Thank you for restoring what little faith we dared to extend to our ailing country.

I spent tonight with my mother in a Russian restaurant, drinking pepper vodka and hoping. Trying to not think, trying to shake the jitters that woke me at 5am today and sent so many of us flying to the polls well before they opened. When the television showed us your power, it was almost instant – the tidal wave of joy. Just as I was saying I was afraid to believe it, the screaming started. Outside, on Santa Monica boulevard, right in the heart of boystown, people were cheering and car horns were going off in the most beautiful cacophony I’ve ever heard. Mom and I stepped outside to absorb it all, along with the cold night air. She turned to me in all that wind and noise to say: “Do you believe it now?”. I almost began to cry.

What happens next is uncertain. Whether Obama will come through, whether we will finally begin to heal – none of it is clear in this moment. All we do know is our fate has been changed profoundly. This was our chance to prove we have evolved and we didn’t blow it. So thank you – to everyone who cast aside their cynicism, to everyone who made their voice heard along with ours. History was made tonight and we can only hope our faith will be justified. Celebrate, people. You’ve earned that right today.

You can keep track of propositions’ progress here.

[No one visits Coilhouse to read some blowhard’s soapbox rant, so I’ll keep it as brief as possible. The following missive is addressed specifically to our young, able-bodied, opinionated American friends of voting age who still aren’t 100% sure they’ll make it to the polls on November 4th. If that description doesn’t directly apply to you, please don’t waste your time reading any further. You might want to watch this charming video of a frolicsome chihuahua instead. Thanks!]

An Open Letter to the Basilica of Latter Day Apathetics (American Branch)

We’re in deep doo doo, loves. Up to our necks like the polar bears and the Dow. Every time one of you says “why bother voting when the system is so corrupt” or “all of the candidates are disingenuous scumbags, anyway” or “the whole thing’s rigged” or “what difference does it make”, we all sink a little deeper into the muck. Not okay. While I may share your doubts and your lack of trust, your personal defeatism mustn’t drag us any further down than we’ve already gone.

I do know a tiny handful of conscientious, some might say radical objectors who refuse to take part in U.S. elections because they want to see the system fail. While I don’t share that desire, I can at least respect their strong convictions. But let’s face it. Anarchic leanings are not generally the reason why folks in our demographic don’t cast a ballot. Far more commonly, people (especially young, moderate-to-liberal-leaning people) fail to vote because they can’t be bothered. The true obstacle preventing them from registering, reading up on the propositions, researching the various platforms and making the Herculian effort of slinging their asses over to the polls is plain old, limp-wristed lethargy.

Perhaps it’s naive, but I remain convinced that the inertia anchoring millions of otherwise rational and compassionate Americans to their armchairs on election day is one of the biggest reasons why our “democracy” needs air-quotes in the first place. Please, if you haven’t yet registered to vote, put aside your premature world-weariness for five minutes and GET ‘ER DONE. There’s still time, but it’s running out. In many states, the deadline is October 4th. That’s tomorrow.

I’m far from confident or enthusiastic about the way our country runs its elections, and this soapbox is an awkward perch for me. But I know one thing for certain, my young, able-bodied, non-voting American friend, and I really hope you will believe me:

Cynicism will not protect you from disappointment. It will not shield your loved ones from harm or neglect. It will never heal your community, fix the ailing economy, or return any semblance of dignity to this country.

Your indifference is not a safety blanket; it is a shroud.

Your vote is your voice. Say something.

Author David Foster Wallace is dead. The self-effacing, hilarious, bitter genius behind Infinite Jest as well as Girl With Curious Hair and Brief Interviews With Hideous Men hanged himself at his home in Claremont, CA. His wife found his body late last night. He was 46 years old.

Here’s an excerpt of Wallace discussing Infinite Jest and what drove him to write it during an interview with Valerie Stivers in the late 90s. It’s as resonant a statement today as it was then, and far more heartbreaking:

I wanted to do something sad. I think it’s a very sad time in America and it has something to do with entertainment. It’s not TV’s fault, It’s not [Hollywood’s] fault and it’s not the Net’s fault. It’s our fault. We’re choosing this. We are choosing to spend more time sneering at hype machines, [while still] being enmeshed in them, than we are living.

[My] secret pretension…I mean, every writer wants his book to change the world, but I guess I would like to know if the book moved people. I assume that the future the book talks about, while it might be amusing, wouldn’t be a fun future to live in. I think it would be nice if the book could maybe make people think about some of the choices we are making, about what we pay attention to and give power to, so maybe the future won’t be quite that…glittery but cold.

Mission accomplished, man. Wish you could’ve stuck around. The future still needed your help.

First, about the website: click here to go to the site of designers Lucy and Bart. Maximize the window. Move your mouse around. Get your face really close to the screen and stare into their eyes. It’s uncanny! Morphing nothing new; we all remember it from a steady stream of ’90s music videos and more recently from the hypnotic Women in Art YouTube spectacle, but this interface manages to make it novel again. Maybe it’s the fact that you can see every pore in the high-res images, the fact that you scan stare into their eyes and manipulate their faces at will, coupled with a flawless, uncomplicated execution. Either way, the simple navigation feels immersive in an unexpected way.

The designers use cheap materials such as cardboard and pantyhose nylon to produce extravagant shapes. While most art clothing made out of bubble wrap, toilet paper and tinsel tends to resemble failed Project Runway challenges, the constructions here contain volume, depth, texture and, importantly, storytelling. The motivations for the designs are explained on the site as “an instinctual stalking of fashion, architecture, performance and the body.” It is stated that designers Lucy McRae and Bart Hess share a fascination with genetic manipulation and beauty expression, and that unconsciously their collaborations touch on these themes, though it was not their intention to communicate this. Their process searches for “low–tech prosthetic ways for human enhancement,” stumbling on new constructions during a creative process that they describe as a primitive, blind search.

[Thank you, Nicola!]

Things have been a bit slow around here – comrade Nadya is off gallivanting around the Nevada desert and comrade Mer’s traipsing about New York, where I was all weekend. Do pardon our regrouping and accept this small offering of oh my god it’s a wearable motorcycle.

It really is. Jake Loniak, a student at Art Center College of Design, presents this wonderful invention. Basically an electric, lithium battery-run exoskeleton with three wheels, Deus Ex Machina would be run by a computer which would translate and respond to the rider’s body with the motorcycle’s own thirty six pneumatic muscles. This SciFi dream-machine is envisioned by Loniak as a sport bike, and, as fate would have it, doesn’t exist beyond his concept as of yet. He’s confident in real world potential of Deus Ex Machina, anyhow: “I believe a working prototype could be made, but it would take a great deal of time and engineering. This isn’t fantasy – it’s a green vehicle, and all of the numbers are based in the real world”. How sweet it could be, Jake. Come on, technologically-inclined billionaires of the world, make it so!

While waiting for a physical prototype, we can torture ourselves with this realistically rendered video of Deus Ex machine in action. Thanks for the pain, Jerem.

Jacques Barzun, as illustrated by Jean-Claude Floch

“Let us face a pluralistic world in which there are no universal churches, no single remedy for all diseases, no one way to teach or write or sing, no magic diet, no world poets, and no chosen races, but only the wretched and wonderfully diversified human race.”

“Finding oneself was a misnomer; a self is not found but made.”

-Jacques Barzun

Last November, historian and cultural critic Jacques Barzun turned 100. In his time, he’s written 37 books on a wide range of topics (38 is in the works), led a prestigious university and received a warehouse full of accolades. He is one of the world’s last living links to the intellectual life of the Belle Époque and the Roaring ’20s (he began teaching when Calvin Coolidge was in office). The word eminent is usually attached to any description of him, no matter who’s writing. It seems to fit.

He thinks the current time is decadent. Not just any decadence, but the sort that ends eras. But it’s not in the signs the usual staid wielder of that word might see: sex, uppity women, kids on the lawn. No, Barzun’s decadence is the end of motion, it is when scholarship becomes “the pretentious garbled in the unintelligible” and “the feeling of being hemmed in by rules matched that of being hemmed in by people.” Above all Barzun’s decadence is a failure of nerve: an unwillingness to face the future and what it demands of us.

For these observations and others, he has been often dismissed as a relic, a snobbish champion of the dead white male tradition. Even among his admirers, he might well go down in history simply as the guy who said that thing about baseball.

But it’s worth taking a look around, at the constant stream of imitative art, at politicians with heads firmly planted in the same tired sand — and at philosophies that serve mainly as elaborate excuses for doing nothing.

So, when Barzun sees things finally running down, with the grand ideas that have driven our culture since the Renaissance crumbling, it’s time to consider something else: he may be a curmudgeon, he may be old-fashioned, he may even be out of touch. He may also be right.

Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree,
If mankind perished utterly;

And Spring herself when she woke at dawn
Would scarcely know that we were gone.

– excerpt from There Will Come Soft Rains, a poem by Sara Teasdale, 1920

There Will Come Soft Rains is a Soviet era animation made by Uzbekfilm and based on the 1951 Ray Bradbury story of post-apocalyptic desolation. A fully-automated household is shown going through the motions of a daily routine in the year 2026. Service robots, with “faces” vaguely reminiscent of gas masks [or Storm Trooper helmets], prepare breakfast and declare wake up time as usual to the ashen remains of their masters.

One of those visceral experiences that has stayed with me until today, this beautiful vignette portrays the aftermath of senseless atomic destruction and human impermanence almost as well as the story it’s based on. Though the loneliness of the Ray Bradbury piece doesn’t quite come across as acutely, this animation never, ever failed to make me cry and substantially furthered that childhood Bradbury addiction. Edit: if by some chance you haven’t already, might we recommend reading the original story prior to watching the animation? You can do so by clicking here.

Zoetica’s solo art show (and birthday! woo!) takes place in Toronto this Thursday. The event unveils a new series of gorgeous monochrome ink and digital drawings, which began with our jetpacked Coilhouse poster girl and spiraled off into a new mythology. The subjects of the series – a team of “off-world cloud hunters” – posses high-altitude breathing devices, candy-shaped gravity-defying hairstyles and futuristic clothing that’s remeniscent of Plastik Wrap, the host of the gallery event. Adriana from Plastik Wrap and Zoetica previously collaborated on several fashion shoots, my favorite one taking place at the Bradbury Building in Downtown LA (most famously captured as J.F. Sebastian’s apartment building in Blade Runner). More information about this event can be found on Zo’s personal blog.

Just in case you can’t make it, here’s a cloud hunter – and three more after the jump.

Up here we breathe what we can.

How hot is this? Needs to be worn with a space helmet, though. Another lavish image after the cut, and more from this collection at Scherer Gonzalez’s site.

Previously in futuristic fashion:

• Be a Dear and Put on Your Pressure Suit
• Let Chen Zhun Take You To Fanboy Heaven
• He Came From Outer Space to Save the Human Race
• Artificial Luminescent Eyelashes
• Degenerotika
• The Jackson Space Adventure Continues

[thanks, Storm]

..is what I would say if this concept design for a fingernail timepiece were to actually make it into our daily lives. From the 2154: The Future of Time Design website:

TX54 is a disposable timepiece that is worn on the user’s thumbnail. While its translucency makes it blend seamlessly with the hand, a selection of text color options and a glow feature that activates on command make it easy to read.

Now, forget the finger. Wouldn’t you prefer to simply know the time, without having to think about it? On second thought, that might be a little maddening, especially for those as obsessed with the passage of time as your truly. In any case, here it is:

Sublimex is worn on the eye like a contact lens where it periodically flashes the time so quickly that the brain isn’t conscious of how it got the information. The user seems to simply know the time, raising a host of possibilities about how the nature of clockwatching would change.

But you see, we live in a time where designers make drooling lechers of us all. They flaunt their charts, mock-ups, concept art and shiny 3-D models without concrete promise of these ideas ever making it into our homes, laps, nails, etc. But I always come back for more, grateful to them for bringing this Future For The Home we dream of just a little closer.

[Thanks, Kris!]