(Top still from Samparkour. Photographic details found here & here)

Cultural contamination cavorts to the tune of bassnectar/kraddy and the belly dancing of Rachel Brice in Snake charmer.

On the subject of seminal symbols, Lebanon's Jad Choueiri banishes bombers with an hymn to bling and botox and belly dancing in his video Funky Arabs.

(found here)

Versions 2009: A short visual dissertation on image manipulation, simulation and remix culture (beware: this turns totally NSFW at one point - via)

The New York Times carries an awesome photo-reportage on Somalia by Michael Kamber.

This image in particular breaks out of a broken down country to capture the connections behind some of the seminal symbols of our times.

"Where is the place where only with our silence we are sending our voices to the world?"

Takashi Murakami x Louis Vuitton makes marketing art the anime/anima of their collaboration. In Superflat First Love, cute civilization erupts from a monogram trunk and history dissolves across time and travel. The sweetness of superflat is so so apt.

Hell, heaven & the hotel elevator: civilization as video mural, in Marco Brambilla's filmic collage for the Standard Hotel in New York.

Is there allegory, ambivalence or titillation in the golden pig series from Carioca Studio?

Technophilia:

"I am one of them. I am no longer embarrassed to admit that I love the internet. Or maybe it's the web. Whatever you want to call the place we go to while we are online, I think it is beautiful. People love places, and will die to defend a place they love, as our sad history of wars prove. Our first encounters with the internet/web portray it as a very distributed electronic dynamo – a thing one plugs into -- and that it is. But the internet is closer to the technological equivalence of a place. An uncharted territory where you can genuinely get lost. At times I've entered to web just to get lost. In that lovely surrender, the web swallows my certitude and delivers the unknown. Despite the purposeful design of its human creators, the web is a wilderness. Its boundaries are unknown, unknowable, its mysteries uncountable. The bramble of intertwined ideas, links, documents, and images create an otherness as thick as a jungle. The web smells like life."

Does technology really want to be loved?