culture – Page 12 – Content Catnip

Tech: A quaint visual voyage through the internet in 1996

Found in the David Rumsey Map Collection online, this poster entitled Ínternet Road Map from the magazine PC Computing dates from the quaint year of internet history, 1996. Back when I was a teen and when ‘surfing the web’ was something only geeks and introverts did, and therefore which I did with fervour using someContinue reading “Tech: A quaint visual voyage through the internet in 1996”

The Nihilist starter pack

Book Review: Cats Galore, prominent cats throughout history

Spurred on by my recent missive about internet culture and the cult of cuteness, I moved very quickly down the rabbit hole into the depths of cat worship on the internet. Cats Galore is an art book with a difference. It’s what happens when internet culture gets mashed up and combined with the prominent artContinue reading “Book Review: Cats Galore, prominent cats throughout history”

An exploration of the aesthetics of cuteness

The answer to why dogs and tiny horses can be used in therapy for PTSD and why cats rule the internet lays squarely in the pulling power of cuteness. But why do we find things cute and what are the commonly shared criteria for cuteness all over the world? According to psychologist Dr. Sandra Pimentel,Continue reading “An exploration of the aesthetics of cuteness”

An interesting holistic model for health according to the eight tentacles of the Octopus, Te Wheke in Māori culture

An interesting holistic model for health according to the eight tentacles of the Octopus, Te Wheke in Maori culture

The Maori (the indigenous people of New Zealand) which includes myself, have a very different way of defining health outcomes compared to western medicine. Te Wheke (the octopus) is often used as a symbol to define integrative and holistic health. This holistic approach to health encompasses ten elements in Maori life. Funnily enough this holisticContinue reading “An interesting holistic model for health according to the eight tentacles of the Octopus, Te Wheke in Māori culture”

Linden Frederick: Night swimming through urban landscapes

Linden Frederick paints ultra-realistic everyday scenes during the nocturnal hush of the evening. In the real world many of these buildings would be unremarkable, but in the hands of Frederick these shabby homes and plain looking commercial buildings take on a different form at dusk and night, there is a mysterious imagining of the building’sContinue reading “Linden Frederick: Night swimming through urban landscapes”

Marshall Berman: All that is solid melts into air

To be modern is to find ourselves in an environment that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world – and at the same time that threatens to destroy everything we have, everything that we know, everything that we are. Marshall Berman, “All that is solid melts into air’.

Postconscious: a web experiment

Every Picture Tells A Story: Techno Collective

POSTCONSCIOUS is a web experiment by Andrew McCarthy that extracts random posts from Twitter, and reads them aloud using Speech Cloud text-to-speech. The app uses a cute and kitsch reverb effects and a retro typeface called Space Mono. What results is a strange echo-chamber of vaguely familiar and yet alien sounding voices coming out ofContinue reading “Postconscious: a web experiment”

Lucy Sparrow’s Fantastical Felt Mountain of Consumable Goods

Lucy Sparrow is a quirky felt artist who mass produces felt replicas of branded goods like grocery store items, fresh fruit and veg, daily papers. She loves to recreate well-known and loved foods from British households and then sell them in quaint corner stores where people can purchase these reasonably priced and bite size piecesContinue reading “Lucy Sparrow’s Fantastical Felt Mountain of Consumable Goods”

<3 The Internet: Localingual the global language encyclopedia

Locallingual is the brainchild of a programmer named David. It’s a web-based app that allows visitors to contribute their voices and accents according to regions, towns, countries, languages, and gender. It’s a fascinating online archive of people’s voices and can allow you to hear nuances in accents in regions and it’s also a valueable languageContinue reading “<3 The Internet: Localingual the global language encyclopedia”