False landscapes and real memories
Dead lakes and seas have become romantic landscapes of the mind. By this we mean that imagery of these blasted environments are regularly served up as both parables and delights, a warning of impending disaster and a guilty thrill for those of us weaned on the romance of ruins and abandoned places. Few places better encapsulate this mix of emotions than Bombay Beach, by California’s Salton Sea. There’s more images here at JPG mag and at Polar Inertia, both of them with richly evocative images of twisted, rusted caravans, abandoned swings and the general aura of decay.
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The post-catastrophe landscape – scoured of the memory of real death and suffering – is now equivalent to the great romantic landscapes. Consider Victoria Ines Dobaño and Rodrigo Terren Toros’s series Villa Epecuen, a moody set of images of an Argentinean lakeside town that was partly submerged in 1985. The same place is captured in Greg Donikian’s flickr set and these photographs by Adrian Markis, where the moody skies and scattered rubble turn a catastrophe into a stage set onto which we can project our own scenarios (the site on Google Earth, a grid pattern marching into the lake).
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Landscape and narrative are interwoven. Increasingly, our imaginary landscapes are virtual ones, and increasingly these virtual realms have largely open narratives and a level of complexity that encourages reflection, drifting, wandering and sight seeing, rather than a linear focus on a task. Seeing these images of The Truffle (Trufa), by Anton Garc’a-Abril (more images), we were instantly reminded not of a real cave, but of the artificial and hugely open world of Minecraft. This is a game we haven’t even played, only read about playing (extensively) and watched oodles of gameplay and other videos.
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These games provide templates. The resulting spaces can be shaped to convey a meaning or mythology, in much the same way that a painting by Poussin or Claud served to both convey myths and legends in a broader context and provide the viewer with a frame for their own speculation. But where a painting induces an emotional response, the immersive quality of a game makes it more So can a sunset in Red Dead Redemption – brilliantly demonstrated in this time lapse video – have the same emotional resonance as a sunset in real life? Is it more of an experience than a sunset in a painting? Increasingly so. By existing in an entirely different space, one in which you are almost wholly immersed, your response to the qualities of landscape, be they romantic, post-apocalyptic or both, are heightened.
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Other things. Reelsoundtrack blog. Music and movies, a helpful resource / iPad as the new Flash / the Sony Walkman is no more. See also the Personal Stereo and Walkman history at Pocket Calculator Show, with plenty more reminiscences / a doll’s house for Clementine / Newell Classic, vintage RVs / photographs by Peter Cornelis / Greatest Hitstory, ‘a basic introduction to the history of music, from the dawn of time to the present day with an emphasis on the best, a kind of greatest hitstory of music – for the novice’.
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L’usine, a blog about architecture and shoes / E.St.Laurent, ‘observations on high art and culture’ / the British Transport Museum at Clapham, found at the extensive Science and Society picture library. See also this short film / Eye Magazine cover archive. Eye Magazine / Send me a postcard darling, an exhibition.
Random things
Random paragraph of random things today. Jenny Odell’s project The Satellite Collection (via Space Invading) is amazing. An Overpass in Iowa, Repeated is remarkably delicate, a contemporary tracery / the Troll Hunter, a new movie from Norway / Wallpaper handmade, nice appreciation / Johanna Lenander, an arts and culture blog / Sounds Like Home, a closer look at the UK Sound Map by Crying all the Way to the Chip Shop.
Archaeology of the recent past, revisited
Embedding traces of one technology into another rarely takes obsolescence into account. Back in the early 1980s, a small number of music acts used the then prevalent technology of the time, the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, as a conduit for a very early form of multimedia as bands slipped in games and what one might call applications onto the end of their albums. This post on the ZX Spectrum and rock, Satanic Messages in the computer era, at The World Won’t Listen, reminded us of the genre.
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From the comments we are directed to Kempa.com’s even more exhaustive list of such Vinyl Data: ‘there were a handful of records released in the late 70′s and early 80′s that contained computer programs as part of the audio. This is totally insane, and totally great’. Includes the Thompson Twins adventure game (‘The Twins have just drowned in the inviting blue water…. Another game (y/n)?’). Or play the Stranglers’ Aural Quest (‘two policemen insist that you are something to do with the Stranglers and must leave the country’) / Kempa is full of fascinating things like these covers from Chicago’s New City magazine from the 1990′s / related, probably, our thanks to Coudal for the kind words.
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HRP-4C dances and sings her way into the Uncanny Valley. Robots just shouldn’t have hair / the Brando bluetooth keyboard has a hint of the Spectrum about it. Useful perhaps for Marvin or ZXdroid / the z80-based laptop, a project at Retroleum (strapline, ‘Eight bits should be enough for anyone…’) / related, all about the Zilog Z80, one of the most successful processors ever made / watch films from the past, including London in 1926, at this me-fi post / related, the Shorpy community, a treasure trove of vintage photographs.
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Some Things Last a Long Time, a tumblr / Words and Pictures, the illustration program blog at Parsons The New School for Design / ‘Cabe-ism is not meant as a compliment‘ / The Death of Tintangel, a collaborative play / Centre for the Aesthetic Revolution, fine arts. Sometimes quite nsfw / UN v.20, a site documenting ‘nomadic and alternative lifestyles’.
Collections and theme parks
The Wellcome Museum has a new exhibition, ‘Things‘. No relation, of course, although things was peripherally involved in the earlier Wellcome show, ‘The Phantom Museum‘, all about Henry Wellcome’s Collection of Medical Mysteries. The introduction to Hildi Hawkins and Danielle Olsen’s book of the same name can be read here. The BBC has a short film on the new show, Public Contributes to ‘Things exhibition’.
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The new exhibition, which also has a flickr pool and a blog, is a ‘call to update Henry Wellcome’s curious collection.’ The selection criteria is pleasingly broad: ‘Bring this, bring that, bring the other, just nothing bigger than your head’. So is this call-to-arms a collision of two previously disparate worlds, one of which – the museum collection – is fossilised in the past, and the other – the private collection – is burgeoning like never before? Certainly, the emphasis on individual ‘things’, rather than collections of things means the Wellcome is unlikely to stumble across any exceptional new examples of private curation. This is a collection of ephemera, pure and simple, not a directed set of objects such as one would find at the Museum of Online Museums, for example.
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As the blog notes, the chief significance of the collection is the way in which meanings change with the environment and object is placed in. ‘Many of the items are of practical use, but taken out of their everyday context and placed on display they take on a new interest in terms of their appearance.’ This is the first lesson of online museology, that the monitor and browser window act as a cabinet, a space of presentation and contemplation. The simple act of uploading, of arranging a gallery, of matching things related and unrelated, is by its very nature curatorial. Add in the ruler, and the drop off form/retrieval receipt (‘Bought in Berlin while on holiday – the only souvenir I could afford! I’m soon emigrating to Berlin, so the keyring has become a kind of symbol of my new life. (That’s why I need it back!)’) and everything is flattened, ceasing to become an object in its own right.
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Adam Curtis’s typically far-reaching post (‘The Pope and the Axis of Terror‘, via haddock)) cites the life and work of proto-fascist Gabriele D’Annunzio, and includes a short film of D’Annunzio’s remarkable garden at Il Vittoriale in Gardone, by Lake Garda. This gloomy memorial is best known for the incongruous presence of the Puglia, an early twentieth century warship embedded in the hillside as a piece of landscape art and an undeniably evocative shrine to the machines of war. The site on google maps.
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The image of the beached Puglia brings to mind the wreck of the SS Cotopaxi, suddenly deposited in the Gobi Desert in Close Encounters (although the ship seen in the film was actually a miniature). The conceit being, of course, that the Cotopaxi had vanished in the Bermuda Triangle (link to wikipedia page as the online signal to noise surrounding the BT is horrific, although there are some good images at Tales of the Sea). Pre-Dreadnought bits and pieces charts scraps and fragments of battleships scattered around the globe.
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Ferrari World Abu Dhabi opens on 27 October 2010. Designboom has a set of images of the theme park under construction, but right now the satellite view of Yas Island doesn’t indicate very much going on (an opportunity missed, surely). This park is either the ultimate brand extension, or the most foolhardy; it’s hard to determine which. If anything, it marks the final break between Ferrari as an experiential brand and Ferrari as car-maker, with the latter a very niche concern of little or no interest to anyone except perhaps schoolboys and single bankers. If Ferrari were to stop making road cars tomorrow, would Ferrari World swiftly become an epic ruin? Or would our collective cultural memory of the ‘Ferrari car’ persist in order to give these places meaning?
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Citroen 2CV meet-up from 1976 (via an ambitious project collapsing) / Halloween short story recommendations / Bartlett Year 1 Architecture runs an excellent blog, with nicely compiled posts on, amongst others, Karen O’Leary’s maps, Chris Gilmore’s cardboard objects, Rachel Whiteread’s casts.
Billions and billions
Shrinking the World: How jetliners commercialized air travel—stewardesses and all / see also The Jet Age Compendium, a reprint of [Eduardo] ‘Paolozzi’s works for Ambit… [which] tackle the war in Vietnam, the acceleration of Japanese technology, and the utopias of mass advertising.’ / The Way Things Could Be, small, urban projects / climbing the transmission tower, just in case we need to find the link again / notes.husk.org, a tumblr / The Infinite Library, books, old and new.
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Greg.org on the photography of Michael Wolf / the Villa Savoye as a ruin (at Chaz Hutton / \\\, a visual/arts weblog / analysing the police tweets / more architectural spot-the-differences: Aren’t Expos supposed to show the world of tomorrow? / Kris Lane is conscious, a tumblr / house in the landscape, Sophie Munns on Make’s house for Gary Neville / HRL Contemporary, a new gallery with an exhibition of visceral paintings by Benjamin Cohen.
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Antilia is finally getting some press, most of it negative, all of it citing the $1bn dollar value attached to the ‘home’. From the Guardian piece, ‘It cost an estimated £44m to build but, because of Mumbai’s astronomic land and property prices, will be worth about 15 times that amount – £630m.’ As a result, it’s pricey, but not the world’s most expensive house, especially since the law of supply and demand dictates that as the number of people who would like to live there is precisely one, and they already live there, it’s barely worth £44m… The final product (by Perkins and Will) it’s also substantially less green (literally and environmentally) than the original concept by James Wines of SITE, although the design evolution is interesting: from this to this to this (see image below).
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ArchDaily on flickr / related, darrenjle15′s photostream, lots and lots of contemporary London architecture / Contemporary classical music on YouTube, a round-up / 1975 and the changes to come, a video / Lightning Bolt interview / 17 Seconds, indie music blog / the way the web skips from harmless manufacturing whimsy to egomanical infrastructure in a matter of clicks has always been an attraction. After Atilia, where better to turn than to the Romney, Hythe and Dymchurch Railway and the Hornby Visitors’ Centre, courtyesy of Fantastic Journal’s days in toyland. The parochial and unselfconsciously charming easily trump things that portend to operate on a more planetary scale.
The golden age of in-flight crockery
My Concorde Thing: ‘It’s not an obsession and it’s not quite a hobby. However, for almost two years, between 2004 and 2006, I checked Ebay nearly every day for Concorde in-flight service items.’ See also Speedbirds, imagery, and perhaps also Concept Ships. Definitely related, the last Concorde flights on Friday, October 24, 2003 / vaguely related: from AR Plus: ‘The solar system has been mapped to scale along the Kingsland Road, with shopkeepers being asked to become custodians for different planets.’ A project by Louise O’Connor: Walk The Solar System.
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True Stories Behind Car Company Logos / what are your employer’s secrets and how can we exploit them? / the London Archaeologist / For Years, Chronicling the Courtroom, the courtroom art of Marilyn Church (via Unequal-Design) / Towards and Beyond, the browser as space, an online artwork by Rafael Rozendaal. We also like his From the Dark Past and Into Time / An appeal to fans of 80s-90s era UK indie music – please help fund this film: Anyone Can Play Guitar.
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Marek Simko puts out CARR magazine, ‘The World′s First Car Drawing Magazine’. See also the cascade of drawings at his Sketchsite / related, the Daily Sketch / and the Sketchwall Ruff at Toyfon.com / a monumental collaborative Scrabble Game / How to be a Retronaut, if you really want to journey back in time / Picture Show: 500 Wrecks in the World’s Largest Ship Cemetery / The 12 Most Expensive Videogames in Tokyo.
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A nice story, widely linked: Parisian flat containing 2.1 million painting lay untouched for 70 years. Taps into many fantasies about the mysterious city, sudden untold wealth, abandonment, ruins and nostalgia (the Mickey Mouse doll cited in the story is a particularly nice touch) / fashion imagery and illustration at Osso / hand-carved wooden animals / timely and typically thorough post on Nairn’s London at City of Sound / Norman Foster’s back-to-front car and Foster rebuilds Dymaxion. Some debate as to whether the reborn machine is intended to be held up as a mysteriously neglected work of genius, or a quirky, characterful design cul-de-sac.
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What did de Botton do? The Balancing Barn is the first in a series of high-profile architectural commissions by Living Architecture. It’s problematic. The holiday house is a fairly flippant typology, with a transient use that accommodates one-liners like this. In particular, the Balancing Barn, commissioned from MVRDV, walks a very fine line between modernist kitsch and bold contemporary statement. There are plenty of precedents, all of which place drama over function. Ultimately, what results is soundbite architecture, buildings that can be summed up in a single image of a single idea.
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Conscientious has a tumblr, Conscientious Redux / well that didn’t last long / typographic maps (via), possibly inspired by London’s Kerning (previously) / 45cat, ‘an online archive dedicated to the magic of the vinyl seven inch single. Discuss, rate, research or simply admire some of the 73,790 UK released records we have on our database so far, or help add some more.’ Via haddock.
Zig-zags and hidden messages
The upcoming Balfron Project (via Blueprint), ‘a large-scale photographic event to be staged at the Grade II listed building Balfron Tower. Shot on film with a large format still camera, the event will result in a mural sized photograph presenting both this icon of 1960s New Brutalism and its connection to the lives of the people who inhabit it today. Residents are invited to participate by choosing how they wish to represent themselves within the larger picture.’ A project by Simon Terrill who specialises in cataloguing, assembling and erasing crowds.
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Alphabetical Autocompletes, a fun contemporary parlour game at Varsity Bookmarking. Through which we get the lovely Jacket Mechanical, concerned with book cover art in all its forms. Related, Why art books won’t become e-books any time soon. As long as we continue to fetishise feel, texture, grain and patina… / on Iwan Baan, the architectural photograph who pretty much dictates the contemporary aesthetic. Baan’s website / Depressive Robots, at entshwindet und vergeht, which also points us towards Found Objects (a ‘hauntological dumping ground’) / Matthew’s Drawings, a tumblelog.
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The post-Christmas haze is going to be extra special for those who order this little trinket: Edible Gingerbread Playhouse by Dylan’s Candy Bar. We wonder how many of these attention-grabbing, high-ticket items are actually sold through the Neiman Marcus Christmas Book. See also the Cupcake Car.
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We’re looking forward to this: Care of Wooden Floors, a forthcoming novel by Will Wiles / Art Deco in the UK, a weblog / Sociological Images, the visual presentation of politics / photography by James Pomerantz (via Lenscratch), especially the Agua Sagrada series, shot in a Mexican cenote, ‘a water-filled sinkhole’.
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Media, museum, at Butterpaper, which looks at the controversy surrounding the design of the Garden of Australian Dreams at the National Museum of Australia, by Ashton Raggatt McDougall. Described as ‘teeth-grating kitsch’ by the local media, the building is a rare splice of deconstructivist intent with po-mo borrowing – there’s a section that’s a breathtaking steal from Libeskind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin (see below). But it also courted controversy over alleged messages in the morse code relief patterns on the walls. Brings to mind Liam Gillick’s canopy for the Home Office building, which incorporates a message known only to Gillick. See also Secret Society: Cracking the codes of Conceptual art. And perhaps the ‘Mystery on Fifth Avenue‘, a splicing of Martha Stewart and Umberto Eco.
Hand standing
The subjects in Lyle Owerko’s Boombox project don’t look like real things – they have the lightly dusted sheen of props or renders. Pocket calculator show has a good Boombox Museum, with some of the more unusual models, including the great Sharp MR-990, disected at Retro Thing, which also has a great link to Joel Fletcher’s time-lapse vignettes and early experimental films.
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Task Newsletter (blog), via Sabrina Campagna / Claxton Projects, a photography tumblr / we’re struggling to think of applications for this augmented reality vanishing act / Swissair Logos at Wanken / a collection of interesting things / things on shelves, a photostream / The Disneyland Drawings (via a whole lotta nothing) / Psychogeographical Survival In The Sentient City / The Secret Gardens of Spitalfields.
Posters, patination and performance
‘ONE SUNNY SATURDAY IN MAY 2003, the majority of citizens in the Czech Republic village of Ponetovice (population approximately three hundred) went shopping at exactly 7 AM and spent ten crowns each on their groceries. They opened their windows at 9, swept their houses at 10, cycled around town at 10:30. At noon they had dumplings with tomato sauce for lunch. At 5 PM they all met up for a beer. And at 10 PM, in a final flourish of civic synchrony, they flipped off their lights and went to sleep.’ On Katerina Seda’s project ‘There is nothing there‘. The ‘rules’ are instructive:
1. There is no limit to the number of players. Recommended age 0-200.
2. All players start to play at the same time.
3. All players do the same thing for the duration of the game.
4. No one is allowed to spoil the game.
5. No one can be eliminated from the game.
6. No one wins and no one loses.
7. All players finish at the same time.
‘”While people in Czech villages feel that everything important goes on in towns, people in Czech towns feel that everything that matters is taking place beyond our borders,” Ms Seda told the BBC [in 2003].’ Generally, our acceptance and participation in such group performative events are shaped and steered by the internet and mobile media, hence the brief flurry of flash mobs back at the turn of the last decade, and their inevitable co-option by advertising. But the print-out on the noticeboard, as used by Seda, has little or no authority in modern society.
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It also made us think of David Kerny’s sinister ‘A Day of Killing‘ from 1992. This Guardian article (pdf) from 1992 evokes the chillingly sincere posters, with their banal typesetting and calm statements (‘For the duration of the DAY OF KILLING, it shall be allowed and recommended to kill anyone, anywhere’). Just 18 years on, this raw irony would not, we suspect, go down very well at all. Another thing about Kerny; his 1996 project for the World Trade Center (‘Not realized for technical reasons [sic]‘) has distinct parallels with Safdie’s Marina Bay Sands (2010).
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More ponderings on patination. In Patina, Provenance, Mass Production, a456 spectulates further on our fleeting comments about ‘signature guitars’ last week, and in particular how there’s an apparent dichotomy within product design between the ‘need’ for objects to elicit emotional response in their use and objects to elicit an emotional response – a desire – that spurs the initial purchase. Patina, it would appear, plays a role only in the former. Patina is the history of use and personalisation, something that is near impossible to create in a new object, hence the application of history and memory as per the SY guitars.
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Ninth Letter, an arts journal from Urbana / see also the weblog of things contributor Philip Graham / Perfect Worlds, a games blog / ‘Insane Clown Posse: And God created controversy: America’s nastiest rappers in shocking revelation – they’ve been evangelical Christians all along’. Entertaining Ronson read (“I did think,” I admit, “that fog constitutes quite a low threshold for miracles.”) / find articles and return to them easily with Instapaper.
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A city has many faces, beautiful urbanism tumblr / why does it take so long to mend an escalator? (‘There are 409 escalators on the London Underground. At present about 95 per cent of them are operational at any one time’) / The Morrisons’ anti-Eames / Wooden Giants, by Postler Ferguson (via Swiss Cheese).
Sound, space, demos
Photographs of University of Glasgow Library under construction, one of the library’s monthly posts from its Special Collections, including such gems as The Curious Case of Mary Toft (1726). ‘Mary Toft’s explanation for her strange births was that, in April 1726, she had been working in a field and was startled by a rabbit. She, and another woman, ran after it, and but could not catch it. They also failed to catch another rabbit that they had chased… The theory was that an emotional stimulus experienced by a pregnant woman (such as Mary’s rabbit dreams and her desire for rabbit meat) could influence the development of the foetus.’ The library also has a photostream, with maps and special collections.
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Archinect interviews photographer Nelson Garrido / Meth/Rad, a tumblr / pop culture nostalgia in its rawest form at I’m Remembering! / etymology of the video game boss / Worn Stories, ‘a collection of stories about clothing and memory’. From the other end of the spectrum of object-orientated reminiscences, perhaps / ceramic biscuits, and other things, by Robert Archard / the UK SoundMap. As yet, no-one has captured this ‘weird demonic chanting‘.
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At what point does the demoscene intersect with conventional technological innovation? There’s always appeared to be some vast disconnect between those who code new things into new hardware and those who push old hardware to the utter limits (this audio demo for the Commodore 64, linked via me-fi, might have piqued our interest). What is demonstrated, time and time again, is that the potential of devices – even devices that are getting on for thirty years old – is only now being fully exploited. One the one hand, it suggests that if technology production were to simply stop right now, the pragmatic tweekers and circuit board explorers out there could eke out centuries and centuries more use from all the silicon scattered around the planet. Some random demo links: raww.org, ZX Spectrum demos / C64.CH, Commodore 64 demos / Gij’s home page, homebrewed electronica / Critical Artware, glitch art.
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Interesting behind the scenes story of ‘Take on Me‘ / more on the Las Vegas Death Ray at BLDG BLOG / Wonderland of Decay, photographs by Suzy Poling / Wallpaper magazine’s tumblr / Facsimile Magazine is like a digital National Geographic (yes, we know such a thing exists). ‘Inspired by things underground that burrow interdependently, Facsimile is devoted to the reconstruction of yestermorrow’s collective copy consciousness’. The most recent issue is Underwater themed, and previous themes have been oil spills and art, but all are fascinating, a stream of imagery and text.
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MTAA-RR, artists’ weblog / a/v mapping, ‘research [that] looks at the city both from within and from above as kind of urban cat-scan’ / Photographers of Great Britain and Ireland, 1840-1940 / the secret department of the Moscow Aviation Institute. Many, many, knobs, buttons, tubes, pipes and thrusters / Richmal Crompton’s ‘Just William’ and the Jews, a fairly cut and dried case of casual anti-semitism in a children’s favourite. Related, 10 most challenged titles.
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The mistake by the lake ‘is a photographic record of the assortment of school bus stop shelters scattered across the greater-Buffalo, New York landscape. Local parents build these structures in order to protect their children from the notoriously brutal Buffalo winters’. At Lozen up books. See also L O Z and publishityourself / Steve Albini, Thurston Moore and the spectrum of indie. Essentially, does independence matter any more?
