Hasta La Gadget!

The people of Ilfracombe, England have a lot of feelings about Damien Hirst, and you can’t blame them. To start with, the world’s wealthiest artist (who keeps a house in Ilfracombe, a resort town on the Devon coast) loaned his adoptive seaside home a not-exactly-longed-for gift in the form of Verity, a gigantic bronze statue of a pregnant lady with visible innards and questionable interpretive value.

Now Hirst is expanding his sights. His next step in Ilfracombe is to build a town on its outskirts, like some kind of art world version of Mr. Henry F. Potter.

The North Devon Journal has details on Hirst’s Southern Extension project, which was greenlit Wednesday. Dubbed Hirstville by critics (ahem), the 875-acre plot “will be home to 750 houses, shops, a new primary school and health care facilities. Sports pitches, woodlands and allotments are also planned.”

Remember this jolly addition to the Ilfracombe skyline? Photo by Getty.

As with Verity, whose prominent placement at the harbor entrance drew ire, Southern Extension is divisive. Some are calling it a vanity project that will disturb wildlife, destroy the aesthetics of the small town and put unneeded pressure on its road with an influx of rich Londoners (only 10 percent of the homes are designated as low income housing).

On the other side, Ilfracombe council members who voted in favor of the project cite job creation and population growth, both consequences sleepy seaside towns may not want, but often need in order to survive.

Perhaps the most scathing review so far comes from Daily Mail columnist and Ilfracombe resident Robert Hardman, who wrote about Southern Extension when it was still being debated over last December. Hardman attacks Hirst more than he does the project, but the two, he argues, are intertwined. Comparing Hirst’s latest endeavor to his flashy artwork — the pickled shark, the diamond-encrusted skull — he posits that Southern Extension is yet another “lucrative triumph of hype over common sense.”

Hirst does seem to see Ilfracombe as mere setting for temples to himself. Of the many institutions he’s already backed in the town, few if any seem to take residents into account — unless everyone in Ilfracombe is as obsessed with Hirst as he seems to be. Here’s Hardman’s list:

He’s got his own restaurant — with pickled fish on the wall in homage to that infamous pickled shark — and is in the process of building a café three doors down. In between is his art gallery, where £4,000 will buy you a limited edition print of one of Hirst’s trademark ‘spot’ paintings…Just up the road from the port, he has a hotel project underway…By far the most obvious Hirst imprint, however, stands at the entrance to the harbour.

Verity, that is, though her days as Hirst Imprint No. 1 are numbered. Detailed designs must still be submitted for Southern Extension before work can begin, but for all intents and purposes, Hirstville is a go. We’re betting that park holds a pickled shark or two.

Imagine a world free from war, terror and violence, where drones are stripped of their aggressive associations. What will become of these war machines once there’s nothing left to fight for?

Italian artist collective IOCOSE poses one possibility with “Drone Selfies,” a snarky photo series that proves drones are just like us — i.e., can’t resist snapping their best angle in the bathroom mirror. While we can’t quite discern whether or not said drones are making duck face for the camera, we can confirm the aerial weapons look damn good.

The “Drone Selfies” are part of a series titled “In Times of Peace,” which imagines potential activities for drones post-war. In an earlier edition, for example, they ran 100 meter races and logged their progress in a Nike app. “This series displays the daily activities of drones,” Paolo Ruffino, one of IOCOSE’s four members explained in an email to the Huffington Post. “What would they do if they were not involved in war scenarios, or used by human beings to deliver parcels, take photos of unreachable areas and so on? We think drones would probably keep themselves busy with very banal activities, repetitive tasks that do not need much imagination.”

Despite the glorious silliness of the project, there’s a tragedy to the underlying idea that drones, and perhaps humans as well, feel useless without war. In Ruffino’s words: “The merging of war and peace is at the centre of our project, but even more than that there is the difficulty of imagining ‘peace’ per se. The drones we have captured in our work cannot possibly imagine anything that is not boring and useless, as much as we are probably similarly unable to imagine how to live in ‘times of peace’. The banality of the selfies is a way of communicating an uncomfortable feeling.”

The drones are captured in the comforts of a domestic setting, surrounded by the trinkets, photos and commercial goods that often help orient a human selfie. One difference, however, between human selfies and their drone counterpart, is the dreaded “selfie arm” — the appendage that always gives your selfie away as such. Turns out drones are relieved of this burden.

“Most drones in commerce come with a built-in camera, so if they were to take selfies of themselves, their easiest option would be to use those,” Filippo Cuttica explained to Creator’s Project. “The fact that the outcome looks kind of awkward adds an interesting layer to the images, as it captures the (failed) attempt of technology to mimic human behavior. We imagined drones using their skills and potentialities in different and unusual ways, flying just for the sake of jogging and using their built-in camera for trivial purposes.”

As for the endless barrage of think pieces that come along with #selfielife, it remains to be seen whether drones too will self-photograph with such existential angst. “Our drones are definitely presenting their own images, taking photos to create and promote their public image,” said Cuttica. “We cannot really say whether they like themselves. They are not humans, after all.”

See the drones do their thing below and let us know your thoughts in the comments.

This Star Trek towel set will class up your bathroom and hopefully make it look a bit more like a bathroom on the Enterprise. They look like they are official towels issued by Starfleet.

You get bath, hand, and face towels. Each features the Enterprise and NCC-1701. The larger towel also has a larger Enterprise and the phrase “To Boldly Go…” They look like they belong in a luxury Starfleet hotel. You’ll want to pick up some Starfleet-issue bathrobes to go with.

You can get these awesome looking towels from ThinkGeek for $49.99(USD) for a set. Because before you boldly go anywhere, you need to dry off first.

 Apple has a new splash page welcoming Beats to its family, with a declaration expressing excitement that both Beats Music and Beats Electronics have joined the Cupertino-based company. The page includes a brief one-paragraph explainer about why the company was a good fit, and expressing optimism for what the companies can do together in the future. A link on the page, which features a… Read More

Slingshot, Facebook’s second swing at Snapchat-like ephemera , may be pretty to look at, but until now, it’s suffered from one huge problem: It didn’t make a lick of sense. Thankfully, Facebook’s finally remedied that by getting rid of its absurd reply-to-unlock feature. In other words—you can actually use it to have a normal conversation.

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