think demux

Alexander Kosolapov, now based in New York, was born in Moscow.

His assaults on icons and commodity fetishism straddle these two axes with great intelligence and provocation.

(More on Alexander Kosolapov at Designboom.)

The twin dolls in this photographic series by German artist Monica Menez are heading to a picture postcard Russia.

(Via the beautiful blog We Make Money Not Art.)

From 1992 to 1994, Alexey Titarenko shot City of Shadows in St. Petersburg. His long black and white exposures dislodge time and the results are truly moving (via).

So - from Russia, to Russia, of Russia. A country that inspires, agitates and haunts, casting its spectral shadow over the 20th century.

I’d love to visit. And I hope these artists set you off on a journey of your own.

No one cares that Superman’s dead. Did you spot him in Chris Ware’s illustration?

Foot on the ground in big city, there are millions of things you don’t notice. Most are banal. Some incidental. A few, tragic.

But you keep on keeping on. As long as it’s not your tragedy. Tough luck for Icarus (he’s kissing the fishes, bottom right).

No doubt cursing himself on a design oversight. Wax for wings? To the sun?

That’s not the style of a Renaissance man. Gotta see outside the grid to plough on in the big city.

You can’t take pictures at Spitalfields, a funfair or a Disneyland car park.

You’re on shaky ground if you want to take pictures of children. (Though some are still doing it spectacularly.)

Should I have taken this picture?

I didn’t use a flash - no flash photography on the Underground. Just a straight, clear shot of another solitary person.

But I didn’t ask his permission.

And neither did the CCTV camera up high on his shoulder. Nor did it ask my permission on the way down the escalator.

Still, I could feasibly have been swept off on the grounds of “acting suspiciously and taking pictures“, and I wouldn’t be writing this now. They’re would be CCTV footage if it went to court, and a new government policy to back it up.

What does all this say about us? How does it affect the way we see each other?

Some things scare the waking shit out of commuters.

Improv Everywhere do lots of those things, including this recent stunt in Prague.

Transplant a living room onto the rush hour subway and something happens. Groggy bystanders get a little less comfortable. You’ve broken down the cosy, walled-in world of iPod shuffling and free paper flicking.

Do I want a free paper? No thanks. But chances are I’ll have to sit on one when I next board a tube in London.

The Decapitator has been lopping free papers off at the head to help save your ass. David Beckham and Motorola get the treatment here and, once again, commuters get a loud wake up call. (Thanks to Giles for the link.)

So, I put it to you: are we too headless on the underground?

What can we do to change it?

Chances are you’re bored of Facebook. It was too easy. You just studied the hip cats and robbed their essence of cool.

But the fraud was too successful. It rained spam. Everyone wanted a piece of you. People you barely knew were firing sawn-off Super Pokes from all angles.

Marketers caught up and brands wanted their own weapons. The best marketers started making useful applications for Facebook and MySpace (Paul Isakson is worth a read on this). But people were already migrating to Twitter to get out of the cross-fire.

Now you can search Twitter posts with Tweet Scan. That could be exciting for you. You might want to find other friends who are “bored”, “happy” or “bored”. Maybe?

But Paul Chaney has identified a sinister angle to this story. By using Tweet Scan, ad men can target the flock according to their mood. And that’s their mood as they’ve stated it. Live.

There’s only one solution: escape on a Segway.

That’s right. The Segway. You can speed to social victory on a Segway.

There was a lot of flapping about the Segway. There’s a lot flapping about social networking. Segway made their own social site for Segway users. Wow. You can almost hear the tumbleweeds rolling in cyberspace.

But we can hijack these empty brand spaces. Why the hell not? Flip it around. Take it to the advertisers. Let’s get social with a Segway. At least we’ll only be harassed by Segway in the process.

That’s not too bad, if you think about it.

Segway was, and is, after all, the future.

Pick, pack, pock, puck. Rain beats a rhythm and it changes the pulse.

Caught outdoors by the rain, people get wired. With a clear sky, they were flapping aimlessly like loose ends in the gentle breeze.

But steady rain snaps you into your circuit board. What were you doing? Where where you going? Well, do it quick and get going. Or it’s drowned rat o’clock.

Stand still in the street and you’re dead. Umbrella spokes zip past at guillotine height. Every man for himself. Selfishness rules the road. An electric chorus of angry.

I saw something different this time last year in Rio de Janeiro, staying on the Praia de Botafogo. It was Autumn and it didn’t rain much. But when it rained, you moved fast. Because it rained hard.

Everyone moved to the mall when it rained. It was the biggest sheltered public space.

Everyone was wet. Real wet. But they weren’t angry. Because it would just happen. It was relatively unpredictable, but they always knew what to do when it happened. Get to the mall.

Once they were there, and big numbers went there, it sparked random connections. Old friends would spot then snap each other with their mobiles in the glimpse of an escalator ride.

Click. Stop. The words are scampering too fast. What could any of this mean?

1. Running in the rain can make you a jerk-off (to bastardise an insight of Nassim Nicholas Taleb). Find shelter and watch the sparks fly. You’ll be constantly surprised.

2. Get drenched? It doesn’t matter when randomness brings you together with friends. And the black swan - the unpredictable high-impact event - can do that spectacularly.

(This post is available in very very amateur 3D, in case you’re still wondering about the doodles above.)