MetaFilter posts tagged with imaginary

A Digital Bestiary

Johnny Wallflower — Sat, 14 Apr 2018 17:21:31 -0800

Dogowls are the cutest and the Sharktopotamus is the most fearsome, and in between are many other magical hybrids. (h/t madamjujujive NO WAIT THE PUGILLA IS THE CUTEST)

Imaginary cities down to the square inch

huimangm — Sun, 25 Mar 2018 04:52:37 -0800

A Japanese graphic designer has made it his life's work to design an improbably realistic and detailed map of a city that doesn't exist. Nagomuru City, located in a country called Naira that very closely resembles Japan but isn't quite the same place, has everything you could want from the city you live in, from house numbers to subways to convenience stores to art colleges to 1970s housing complexes to ancient temples, except the possibly desirable quality of actually existing in three dimensions. Regrettably the text of the site is all in Japanese and I can't slap up a full translation here, but Nagomuru's creator, Imaizumi Takayuki, writes "...That sense of place you savor when you go somewhere: wondering what it is, how it came about, what surrounds the place...figuring that out through mapmaking is what imaginary maps mean to me." Is Nagomuru a utopia? No, it's just a city, as real as it can be made. At what address there does he reside? Everywhere there, as he focuses on each given location, and nowhere, as he wanders through the city at will. The city is created through imagining, imagined through creating, in loving detail. Imaizumi (a freelance graphic designer/cartographer) has been working on the map since he was ten years old. The first map, predating this actual city, is from when he was seven or eight and features a train line, the population of various neighboring towns/villages (poor Hase, or possibly Nagatani, Village, which only has 154 people), and the student distribution of a highly rural school with one classroom for students from first through eleventh grades. Then there are a series of well-colored bus route maps, with stop names betraying a child's limited knowledge of Japanese characters, as he points out (I feel for the postman who has to deliver to the neighboring 河部、何部、阿部、and 東部), and a contour map, followed by several rather beautiful hand-drawn maps of Nagomuru proper (dated from 1997 on). (The city was named after a school friend called Nakamura, with a twist on the pronunciation to spare the friend's blushes.) Click on each map for a larger window. You can see the whole map here, scrolling, in segments, or as a PDF. Here's a map of the city as it was in 1978 and here are the contents of some wallets lost in the city: a college student, a businessman, an old lady. If you are one of those weird people who prefer buses to trains, here are some buses and bus routes. Here is an exquisite bird's-eye view of the city in the 1930s, drawn by Nakata Takumi. There have been several art exhibits in Japan featuring Nagomuru City, and Imaizumi has published a book about it, including discussion of cartography both real and imaginary. (This page provides links to other people's imaginary city maps, in varying levels of detail; click on the maps or links to jump. Most are in Japanese, but there are also a couple of links to English-language imaginary maps: Jerry Gretzinger's vast and mysterious fantasia (previously) and stadtkreation, the latter sadly a dead link at the moment although it worked up until quite recently. While Imaizumi doesn't link to it, maybe also take a look at the related Google-maps style world full of lots of people's different fictional maps here (previously). I looked hard for anything in English about Nagomuru City itself and couldn't find anything; thanks taz for letting me know, with mod hat on, that this awkwardly explanatory style of post would be acceptable for, um, my first FPP.)

Understanding e to the pi i, reprise

kliuless — Tue, 14 Mar 2017 02:34:31 -0800

Euler's formula with introductory group theory [slyt] - "How some perspectives from group theory shed light on a way the formula e^(pi i) = -1 can make intuitive sense."

Speculating Futures

standardasparagus — Fri, 16 Dec 2016 15:36:57 -0800

Speculating Futures looks at past speculative narratives, like those of Ursula K. Le Guin, and past attempts at creating technological utopia, like Chile's Cybersyn. These readings examine the shortcomings that prevented these visions from being fully realized and how they may have been limited or exclusionary. These texts also tie these visions to the contemporary issues/present dystopias that need to be addressed in subsequent utopian imaginaries. To paraphrase Gibson, "Utopia and dystopia are here, they're just unevenly distributed." Feeling like there's a future is vital for moving through the present, so we'll also envision our own utopian futures to work towards.

The Imaginary Network

TheophileEscargot — Sat, 01 Aug 2015 21:18:41 -0800

The Imaginary Network rounds up under categories the various subreddits for imaginary art such as Imaginary Cityscapes, Ebony, Architecture, Ruins, History, Science, Starships, Aww, Weather, Armored Women and more.

lepidoptera automata

taz — Fri, 24 Jul 2015 06:09:38 -0800

@mothgenerator is a Twitter account from poet and artist Katie Rose Pipkin and game maker Loren Schmidt that shares their fantastic bot-generated digital moths. Boingboing article here. Mental Floss gives some details of the process, and adds that "Right now, the Twitter account is just churning out new moths, but the creators are considering adding extra features. One option could be tweeting out moth facts or letting fans "seed" their own moths by tweeting text at the bot to create them."

Auriculis midae non musica gratior ulla est

frimble — Thu, 16 Jul 2015 04:34:58 -0800

Cat Pianos, Sound-Houses, and Other Imaginary Musical Instruments "One might suppose that imaginary musical instruments, deprived of physical reality, have no place in the cultural histories and heritages that a museum of musical instruments aims to illuminate and preserve. Yet in their own strange ways, imaginary musical instruments exist. What's more, they have not merely shadowed or paralleled musical life; they have formed a vital part of it, participating in ways that show the fragility of the distinction between imaginary and real."

Necessary Fictophones

carsonb — Wed, 05 Mar 2014 22:22:28 -0800

Since the taxonomical work of Erich Moritz von Hornbostel and Curt Sachs* in the early twentieth century, organologists have classified musical instruments into four major categories, each distinguished by its primary sound-producing mechanism: idiophones (vibrating body), membranophones (vibrating membrane), chordophones (vibrating strings) and aerophones (vibrating air columns). Beyond these basic divisions, scholars have proposed such logically consistent additions as electrophones (for electronic instruments) and corpophones (for the human body as a source of sound). We propose a seventh category: fictophones, for imaginary musical instruments. Existing as diagrams, drawings or written descriptions, these devices never produce a sound. Yet they are no less a part of musical culture for that. Indeed, fictophones represent an essential if hitherto unrecognized domain of musical thought and activity, and it is in order to catalog these conceptual artifacts that we have established the first institution of its kind: The Museum of Imaginary Musical Instruments.

I am surprised to be in such a conversation.

Erasmouse — Tue, 11 Dec 2012 13:48:53 -0800

Ayn Rand, Jim Henson, Sidney Nolan, and Yoko Ono in Conversation on ARPNET. 17 April 1976 – The transcript presented here records a conversation between four figures from the broad spectrum of culture: puppeteer Jim Henson; Russian-American writer, philosopher and playwright Ayn Rand; painter Sidney Nolan; and artist and musician Yoko Ono. A few months after the fall of Saigon and the end of the Vietnam War, The Agency's tests with the ARPANET convened these four individuals, each with a distinct sense of, as well as the potential means for, a competing world-view.

Somewhere something incredible is waiting to be known

Lemurrhea — Mon, 23 Jul 2012 18:38:57 -0800

The Imaginary Foundation's blog showcases nature, science, art, art, science, and nature, showcased by the blog of the Imaginary Foundation.

The Book of Imaginary Beings, Illustrated

carsonb — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 14:58:25 -0800

Fantastic Zoology - A graphical interpretation of J.L. Borges "Book of Imaginary Beings" Lots more Borgesinalia at Pitt's Borges Center Via theodolite's best answer and previ ously, though the links are now broken.

Artistic Suburban Culture

netbros — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 16:33:58 -0800

Ross Racine's work may be interpreted as models for planned communities as much as aerial views of fictional suburbs, referencing the computer as a tool for urban planning as well as image capture.

The Sinister End-of-the-World Homerun

Miko — Thu, 21 May 2009 15:50:03 -0800

"The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved" .... and mad enough to play fantasy baseball. In the new book Kerouac at Bat: Fantasy Sports and the King of the Beats, a NY Public Library archivist considers documents revealing the author's detailed obsession with the imaginary exploits of players like Pictorial Review Jackson and teams like the "Pontiacs, Nashes, and cellar-dwelling LaSalles" in his finely grained, fictional Summer League.

Naive beach campers often fall victim while sleeping

taz — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 04:49:30 -0800

This a fast offensive predator. First described by Reinthal, 1993, as voracious and a threat to shipping. Diurnal, collecting in dense aggregations along reef walls at night to sleep. Oweni is an insatiable consumer of almost everything of animal origin. Suspect in many human "shark" fatalities, although remains of victims have never been recovered - Field Notes and Drawings of Marine Creatures Captured or Observed by Xisle Expedition Biologist & Artist William Russell Curtsinger, PhD. ......... I actually came across this page while searching for something about marine bioluminescence, and was taken in for a tick or two. I hope a lot of other people fall prey in the same way and are lured into the same delicious wtf?-moment, because I think it's kind of adorable. Based on the species names, I think these might be tributes to friends and colleagues. FF users, right click in images and select "view image" to see larger versions of the drawings.

Imaginary Places

dersins — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 09:31:17 -0800

If you like looking at maps of imaginary places, you should take a peek at the Fantasy Atlas, a German-language collection of maps of literary fantasy and sci-fi worlds. For a more obsessive (but just as interesting) take on maps of imaginary places, you can check out the work of Adrian Leskiw, who's been creating road maps of non-existent places since the age of 3. (Previously on Metafilter.)

The Amazing Career of an Imaginary Soul Superstar

veronica sawyer — Mon, 23 Apr 2007 09:25:18 -0800

Remember Mingering Mike? Dori Hadar, the man who found the amazing Mingering Mike collection, has written a book about his odyssey. Here is the spiffy, fleshed-out Mingering Mike official site. And here's an interview with Hadar. [Previously 1, 2.]

a word that belongs to the media-linguistic system

and hosted from Uranus — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 08:43:30 -0800

Subvertr. Progess.

Imaginary Girlfriend

Saucy Intruder — Mon, 09 May 2005 08:09:57 -0800

Tired of your friends and family telling you to get a girlfriend? With an Imaginary Girlfriend, you can carry on a completely fictitious, yet authentic looking relationship with the girl of your choice.*
* By "choice," I mean "Erica."

taz — Sun, 25 Aug 2002 05:52:05 -0800

The Invisible Library is a catalog of books that appear only within other books: in other words, a collection of imaginary books. With such names as "Growing Flowers by Candlelight in Hotel Rooms", "How Beautiful are Thy Feet" and "The Bitch Pack Meets on Wednesday", though, some of these books are just begging to be written. (more...)