r0r0 sez, "Ping Pong Ball Suction Construction is a pneumatic delivery system for ping pong balls as part of an art environment that's actually on display in Lille, France."

In Spring/Summer 2012 both guys were invited to create an installation version of Ping Pong Country in Lille’s Gare St. Sauveur. They were a bit tired of doing the same thing for such a long time over and over again, so they asked me to contribute some machinery to the environment in order to make it a bit different in its actual version. I came up with the devilish plan to offer the audience an opportunity for sabotaging the game in a playful way. “Ping Pong Country / Edition Sabotage” was born.

While some people play ping pong (preferably more than two players which then have to run around the table) another visitor can confuse the players via a separate control panel which is part of the sabotage edition: This destructive master mixer lets you switch the music to Heavy Metal (accompanied by disturbing strobe light); you can turn on fans on the ceiling for an additional wind challenge; you can just add some funny train and animal sounds with a supercool children’s toy, or – and now it comes – you can spill plenty of balls onto the ping pong table which you collected beforehand with the “Ping Pong Ball Suction Construction”!

Ping Pong Ball Suction Construction (Thanks, r0r0!)

Liu Wei, an artist from Beijing, is currently exhibiting a show called "Foreign" at the Almine Rech gallery in Paris. Wei's art plays with cityscapes, and "Foreign" features cityscapes made from schoolbooks affixed with steel rods and clamps. To the right is Library No.4, above is Library No.6.

Almine Rech Gallery - Current (via Neatorama)

Jean Giraud, the comics artist who worked under the name Moebius, has died at the age of 73. Moebius defined the style of Metal Hurlant/Heavy Metal, a surreal, madcap, sometimes grotesque science fictional visual style that is often imitated but which Moebius himself produced to high spec and in such great amounts. On Tor.com, art director Irene Gallo remembers him: "He was a particular favorite among his fellow artists. Many creatives and readers will mourn his passing." Neil Gaiman also has words on his passing:

I couldn’t actually figure out what the Moebius stories were about, but I figured that was because my French wasn’t up to it. (I could get the gist of the Richard Corben Den story, and loved that too, and not just because of the nakedness, but the Moebius stories were obviously so much deeper.)

I read the magazine over and over and envied the French because they had everything I dreamed of in comics - beautifully drawn, visionary and literate comics, for adults. I just wished my French was better, so I could understand the stories (which I knew would be amazing).

I wanted to make comics like that when I grew up.

I finally read the Moebius stories in that Metal Hurlant when I was in my 20s, in translation, and discovered that they weren’t actually brilliant stories. More like stream-of-consciousness art meets Ionesco absurdism. The literary depth and brilliance of the stories had all been in my head. Didn’t matter. The damage had long since been done.

I recently reviewed The Incal, Moebius and Jodorowsky's bizarre, classic, lately reprinted science fiction comic.

In 1981, comics writer Alejandro Jodorowsky teamed up with French comic artist legend Moebius and created a new French comic serial called The Incal, (allegedly salvaging a bunch of material Jodorowsky created for an aborted film adaptation of Dune). The Incal's story is barely comprehensible, a mystical, satirical space-opera that anticipates many of cyberpunk's tropes. But the story isn't the point of The Incal. Reading Self-Made Hero's new English edition of Incal is an exciting and delightful experience for reasons having nothing at all to do with the consistency or comprehensibility of its plot.

Rather, The Incal is a triumph of glorious, self-indulgent, eyeball-kicking science fiction high weirdness. Jodorowsky's plotting strategy seems to have consisted of making up the weirdest stuff he could think of, getting bored, chucking in a bunch of new, weirder stuff, and repeating as necessary. New plot elements are conjured up from thin air without explanation or rhyme or reason. No pretense is made to any kind of underlying physics or poleconomy or philosophy.

Instead, Moebius just draws the hell out of Jodorowsky's fevered notions, producing a strong and curious aesthetic sensation that is quite pleasing and a little freaky. The creators of The Incal sued The Fifth Element for allegedly ripping it off (they lost), and Fifth Element is a pretty good point of reference for what goes on in The Incal: innumerable stylish, semi-erotic, high-tech incoherencies sprayed at the reader at a furious pace, fast enough that the fact that none of it makes much sense hardly has time to sink in.

I feel like I should try to summarize the storyline here, but in truth, there's not much point. Wikipedia says "The story begins in the dystopian capital city of an insignificant planet in a human-dominated galactic empire. (The Bergs, aliens who resemble featherless birds and reside in a neighboring galaxy, make up another power bloc.) DiFool receives the Light Incal, a crystal of enormous powers, from a dying Berg. The Incal is then sought by many factions: the Bergs; the corrupt and decadent government of the great pit-city; the rebel group Amok; and the Church of Industrial Saints (commonly referred to as the Techno-Technos or the Technopriests), a sinister technocratic cult which worships the Dark Incal. Animah (an allusion to anima), the keeper of the Light Incal, seeks it as well."

And yeah, I guess that's what happens. But it's not particularly the point of this volume.

Marvel previously collected these comics in English, and then DC did it again (censoring the nudity and changing the really excellent coloring), and this latest edition from Self-Made Hero restores the colors and the boobies, as Moebius intended. It's very good, very funny, very odd, and awfully silly.

The Incal (Amazon US)

The Incal (Amazon UK)

Read the rest

A French court has ruled that Google's free Google Maps application API is anti-competitive and has ordered the company to pay €500,000 to Bottin Cartographes, a for-pay map company, as well as a €15,000 fine. Bottin Cartographes argued that Google was only planning to give away the service for free until all the competitors had been driven out of business and then they would start charging. This seems implausible to me, and contrary to Google's business model (give away services, make money from mining the use of those services). Google says it will appeal.

"This is the end of a two-year battle, a decision without precedent," said the lawyer for Bottin Cartographes, Jean-David Scemmama.

"We proved the illegality of (Google's) strategy to remove its competitors... the court recognised the unfair and abusive character of the methods used and allocated Bottin Cartographes all it claimed. This is the first time Google has been convicted for its Google Maps application," he said.

I wonder what Bottin Cartographes will do when OpenStreetMaps finishes producing high-quality, free, public domain maps of France that can be used to create APIs of the same scope and utility?

France convicts Google Maps for unfair competition (via Engadget)

IFPI, the international trade group for the record industry, has trumpeted a study that allegedly shows that France saw a surge in iTunes sales following the institution of a mass-scale regime of "disconnection warnings" -- threats to remove you and your family from the Internet if you don't stop downloading. These warnings are the first step of the controversial HADOPI system, which is the first of a series of global "three strikes" laws pushed for by IFPI.

TorrentFreak had a look at the study, which was written by researches at Wellesley College and Carnegie Mellon, and they found that none of the benefits claimed by the record industry were in its conclusions: "What the researchers found is that in France, compared to five other European countries, more music was sold through iTunes. Looking at the graph below (from the report), it’s clear that the “uplift” in France before Hadopi was introduced (March 2009) is actually much sharper than the two years after."

“We also estimated the model for the 6 months before and after September 2010, as this was the first month that HADOPI began sending out first notices. In this case, the resulting coefficient was close to zero and statistically insignificant.”

Indeed, when the three-strikes warnings were actually sent out, there was no effect on iTunes sales compared to the control countries. This is unusual, because you would expect that the hundreds of thousands of warnings that went out would have had more of an impact than the ‘news’ that this could happen in the future.

In addition, if we look at the search trends for Hadopi and The Pirate Bay we don’t see a drop in interest for the latter, suggesting that the interest for pirated goods remained stable.

Anti-Piracy Warnings Have No Effect on iTunes Sales

There's loads to love about this 1947 ad for Air France's sleeper service -- just look at that cutaway diagram! -- but the chart-topping eye-grabber is that awesome sleeper-service bed. Man, if Air France was still flying planes with that interior, I'd never fly anything else.

Loads more mouth-watering vintage aviation luxury ads here.

CONTEST ENTRY: Air France is FIRST...

Sarkozy's official residence is a den of piracy —

Further revelations from the YouHaveDownloaded BitTorrent logger: six infringing BitTorrent swarms included computers logged into the network of the official residence of French President Nicholas Sarkozy. Sarkozy, of course, pushed for the HADOPI law that allows whole households to be disconnected from the net if their network is implicated in three copyright complaints. Note that there's no proof that anyone who was downloading these files got enough of them via the Sarkozy network to turn into a recognizable video or audio file; nor does it mean they were a member of the Sarkozy household. But the HADOPI law doesn't make this distinction, and who am I to argue with Sarkozy's favorite Internet law? — Cory •

Tory MP regrets attending Nazi stag party —

UK conservative MP Aidan Burley has apologised for any offense given by his attendance at a stag party in France where some attendees dressed up like members of the SS, chanted "Himmler Himmler Himmler" and "Eichmann Eichmann Eichmann," taunted French waiters by asking (in thick German accents) where in the Third Reich they hailed from, and toasted "the ideology and thought process of the Third Reich." — Cory •

EDF, the French energy company, has been fined €1.5 million and its head and deputy-head of nuclear operations have been jailed over its use of Kargus (a private security firm run by a French ex-secret service operative) to use illegal surveillance techniques against Greenpeace. I recently switched away from EDF at home and at the office (they were the energy company when we moved it) over their unbelievably awful customer service (we switched to Good Energy, who've been great) but I'm also glad to be shut of them now that I know they're run by evil crooks.

Adelaide Colin, communications director for Greenpeace in France, said the decision "sends a strong signal to the nuclear industry: no-one is above the law".

The Tribunal Correctionel de Nanterre heard that Kargus Consultants, then run by a former member of the French foreign secret service, had compiled a dossier on Greenpeace via means that included hacking into a computer belonging to former campaigns head Yannick Jadot.

EDF maintained that it had just asked Kargus to monitor the activists, and that the consultants had exceeded their remit.

But justice Isabelle Prevost-Desprez disagreed, handing three-year sentences to Pascal Durieux and Pierre-Paul Francois, head and deputy head of EDF's nuclear security operation.

EDF fined for spying on Greenpeace nuclear campaign