Tuesday, June 15, 2004
The United Nations Environment Programme is having a photographic competition. Past winners / Lightningfield spies Fort Boyard, once home to a lamentable English reality TV gameshow thing / sparse, elegant, unsettling pencil drawings (via the cabinet of busted wonders). See also animations / bar code art, via the London-based hyperreal and supercool weblog.
Places From Worcester's Past, local history in Worcester, Massachusetts / Hammacher Schlemmer, a cabinet of mail order wonders - things you didn't know you needed / The American People - just what are they up to? This site keeps track / Netdiver, one for the sidebar.
What happens when plastic toys get bored of each other / naked fact or fiction..? / City of Sound on the cover art for the Beastie Boys' The Five Boroughs. When I first saw it, I thought of Steven Wiltshire, which led to this interesting page on Children's Art.
How to draw an unbuilt ship (via tmn). Another cutaway. How to dispose of a body (disturbingly thorough) / illustration at Once upon a forest / the Habanero homepage, all about peppers / The Apollo Prophecies considered at Giornale Nuovo. Sounds fascinating, the tale of the lunar discovery of 'a lost Edwardian expedition that may or may not be real.' / Magazine Art, 'a free visual database of magazine cover art from the 19th and early 20th centuries', via Bifurcated Rivets. French Humor.
k.i.s.s of the panopticon - "cultural theory for the rest of us!". Handy guide to theory, from Baudrillard to Cheers ('Bars designed to look like... Cheers have sprung up all over the country, most poignantly in airports, our most anonymous of locales. Here, noone will know your name, but you can always buy a drink or a souvenir sweatshirt').
Today there's the kind of dizzyingly flat blue sky that my camera thinks is a mosaic of speckles and flecks. Maybe it’s right. Stare hard into the blue and it dances around, unwilling to sit still for a second.
Breaking news. In the last ten minutes, Yahoo! Mail just upped my storage from 100MB to two gigabytes. Golly... I guess gmail has got them running scared.
Places From Worcester's Past, local history in Worcester, Massachusetts / Hammacher Schlemmer, a cabinet of mail order wonders - things you didn't know you needed / The American People - just what are they up to? This site keeps track / Netdiver, one for the sidebar.
What happens when plastic toys get bored of each other / naked fact or fiction..? / City of Sound on the cover art for the Beastie Boys' The Five Boroughs. When I first saw it, I thought of Steven Wiltshire, which led to this interesting page on Children's Art.
How to draw an unbuilt ship (via tmn). Another cutaway. How to dispose of a body (disturbingly thorough) / illustration at Once upon a forest / the Habanero homepage, all about peppers / The Apollo Prophecies considered at Giornale Nuovo. Sounds fascinating, the tale of the lunar discovery of 'a lost Edwardian expedition that may or may not be real.' / Magazine Art, 'a free visual database of magazine cover art from the 19th and early 20th centuries', via Bifurcated Rivets. French Humor.
k.i.s.s of the panopticon - "cultural theory for the rest of us!". Handy guide to theory, from Baudrillard to Cheers ('Bars designed to look like... Cheers have sprung up all over the country, most poignantly in airports, our most anonymous of locales. Here, noone will know your name, but you can always buy a drink or a souvenir sweatshirt').
Today there's the kind of dizzyingly flat blue sky that my camera thinks is a mosaic of speckles and flecks. Maybe it’s right. Stare hard into the blue and it dances around, unwilling to sit still for a second.
Breaking news. In the last ten minutes, Yahoo! Mail just upped my storage from 100MB to two gigabytes. Golly... I guess gmail has got them running scared.
Monday, June 14, 2004
3AM Magazine, and the related Joe Bloggs weblog / the Second Norwich Pop Underground Convention sounds like fun / Secret Stars, a band with a penchant for vintage electronica / The Red Saunders Research Association, music in post-war Chicago / Drummergirl, for women who drum.
Some art. The Homeless Museum / The Garden of Earthly Delights, eighteen artists create a series of installations in South London’s Brockwell Park next month / Gods Becoming Men, a suitably muscular exhibition to co-incide with the Olympics / we are mainly....
Design, architecture and more at Sensory Impact (Thanks, Adnan). We especially liked these amazing drinks packages / automobilia at the Willys Overland Knight Registry, all about the company who ensured their place in history by developing the Willy's Jeep / Nissan design / Toyota design / Bookbinding, a tutorial.
Some art. The Homeless Museum / The Garden of Earthly Delights, eighteen artists create a series of installations in South London’s Brockwell Park next month / Gods Becoming Men, a suitably muscular exhibition to co-incide with the Olympics / we are mainly....
Design, architecture and more at Sensory Impact (Thanks, Adnan). We especially liked these amazing drinks packages / automobilia at the Willys Overland Knight Registry, all about the company who ensured their place in history by developing the Willy's Jeep / Nissan design / Toyota design / Bookbinding, a tutorial.
Friday, June 11, 2004
Sometimes you put together a whole bunch of links but forget the mental glue that bound them together. Today is one of those days.
Fredric Jameson writes (at length) about Koolhaas's Project on the City series in the New Left Review and how traditional urbanism is, apparently, at a 'dead end'. Koolhaas himself, who doesn't actually write the books in question (he oversees and edits them), is described as 'certain versions of the deity, nowhere and everywhere all at once', a bit like the urban interventions the books chronicle; the architecture of an increasingly hectic everyday.
Lest one forgets, Jameson coined the term postmodernism, using it to describe such buildings as the Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles (by John Portman Associates), a structure so impenetrable that he complained it was near impossible to navigate - a 'spatial mutation'. Rather than a mere hotel, the Bonaventure became a symbol of the great, and ever-increasing, complexity of the modern world. Yet Koolhaas puzzles Jameson, with his paradoxical ability to relentlessly recycle imagery and generate new forms, not to mention his apparent (and usually cynical) mania for dystopias - 'Junkspaces'. Ironically, Jameson opened our eyes to the moebius strip-like quality of malls and endless consumption, a strip which Koolhaas and his acolytes are happy to travel. Jameson, however, now wants out.
Other things. Buy Michael Mandiberg's time (only $20/hour). Previously, you could buy Mandiberg's stuff, but it's either all gone or he's stopped selling it. At around the same time, Michael Landy performed 'Breakdown,' whereby he fed his worldly possessions into a crusher (in the inauspicious surroundings of the former C&A; store on Oxford Street). Landy's piece involved destroying other artists' work in his possession - a kind of personal Momart fire ('We aim to repay your trust', they say, inappropriately, on their site). Related: did this move cost him the Turner Prize? (scroll down). You can see Landy's new installation, 'Semi-detached,' at the Tate Britain.
Crimes of Persuasion, the low-down on con artists. Good to see that the speaker scam, the only one of these we've nearly fallen for, is a global thing. Actually, the only reason I spent so long listening to the scammers is that I thought they were going to give me the speakers, not try and sell them... They weren't amused / Refresh Reload, graphical goodness / Microsoft's XNA is a games development tool. This means nothing to us, but there's a big movie download on that page of two Saleen sports cars driving into each - the future of video games graphics?
Blogging Baby, should be useful / Zoe's World / Smoke: a London Peculiar - issue 3 out now / African Imagery (via milton / the Marx and Engels Internet Archive / Orwell Today / Ironminds, a weblog with a musical slant / what the Swiss are getting up to / Stigmata: In Imitation of Christ (not to be confused with this Imitation of Christ), an article on the origins of saintly stigmata.
Fredric Jameson writes (at length) about Koolhaas's Project on the City series in the New Left Review and how traditional urbanism is, apparently, at a 'dead end'. Koolhaas himself, who doesn't actually write the books in question (he oversees and edits them), is described as 'certain versions of the deity, nowhere and everywhere all at once', a bit like the urban interventions the books chronicle; the architecture of an increasingly hectic everyday.
Lest one forgets, Jameson coined the term postmodernism, using it to describe such buildings as the Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles (by John Portman Associates), a structure so impenetrable that he complained it was near impossible to navigate - a 'spatial mutation'. Rather than a mere hotel, the Bonaventure became a symbol of the great, and ever-increasing, complexity of the modern world. Yet Koolhaas puzzles Jameson, with his paradoxical ability to relentlessly recycle imagery and generate new forms, not to mention his apparent (and usually cynical) mania for dystopias - 'Junkspaces'. Ironically, Jameson opened our eyes to the moebius strip-like quality of malls and endless consumption, a strip which Koolhaas and his acolytes are happy to travel. Jameson, however, now wants out.
Other things. Buy Michael Mandiberg's time (only $20/hour). Previously, you could buy Mandiberg's stuff, but it's either all gone or he's stopped selling it. At around the same time, Michael Landy performed 'Breakdown,' whereby he fed his worldly possessions into a crusher (in the inauspicious surroundings of the former C&A; store on Oxford Street). Landy's piece involved destroying other artists' work in his possession - a kind of personal Momart fire ('We aim to repay your trust', they say, inappropriately, on their site). Related: did this move cost him the Turner Prize? (scroll down). You can see Landy's new installation, 'Semi-detached,' at the Tate Britain.
Crimes of Persuasion, the low-down on con artists. Good to see that the speaker scam, the only one of these we've nearly fallen for, is a global thing. Actually, the only reason I spent so long listening to the scammers is that I thought they were going to give me the speakers, not try and sell them... They weren't amused / Refresh Reload, graphical goodness / Microsoft's XNA is a games development tool. This means nothing to us, but there's a big movie download on that page of two Saleen sports cars driving into each - the future of video games graphics?
Blogging Baby, should be useful / Zoe's World / Smoke: a London Peculiar - issue 3 out now / African Imagery (via milton / the Marx and Engels Internet Archive / Orwell Today / Ironminds, a weblog with a musical slant / what the Swiss are getting up to / Stigmata: In Imitation of Christ (not to be confused with this Imitation of Christ), an article on the origins of saintly stigmata.
Thursday, June 10, 2004
The work of Albert Chubac is on display at Nice's Mamac (a strangely 1970s-esque building that was in fact built in the late 80s. More pictures here) / move over Angel of the North, Thomas Heatherwick's 'B of the Bang' will soon be the largest public sculpture in Britain. Follow the construction weblog. At the opposite end of the spectrum, a gallery of worst case scenarios at Cyburbia, the 'urban planning portal'.
From Abba-to-Zappa.com, test your musical knowledge courtesy of slick caricatures (designed by the folk at Flip Flop Flyin') / more fresh-stroke-ephemeral products at HerHouse / Tak, 'now people can relax like birds', says designers Tjepkema Studio. See also their Next Bling Thing, a 'cathedral of shopping.' Entertaining stuff.
The photography of Ruth Hallensleben / the Lessons of Lucasfilm's Habitat, an early Sims-style game / Banubula, excellent musings on art, comics and more / The Elements of Style / Double-Tongued, a 'growing dictionary of old and new words.'
The tagline for new website Ingenious is 'seeing things differently', so we wholeheartedly approve. The site is a collaborative venture between the Science Museum, the National Railway Museum and the National Museum of Photography, Film & Television, a portal for 30,000 images in various categories (communications, for example). As part of the ongoing digitisation of absolutely everything it's a worthy start, but 30,000 must be just a drop in the ocean for these three institutions.
Hotlinks is a new accumulative links blog, albeit one backed up by serious technology created by web developer types (not an increasingly creaky blogger template). By the way, does anyone have any recommendations for weblog/website software? At some stage in the next six months, we're going to redesign, so any tips, recommendations, warnings, etc., are all welcome.
From Abba-to-Zappa.com, test your musical knowledge courtesy of slick caricatures (designed by the folk at Flip Flop Flyin') / more fresh-stroke-ephemeral products at HerHouse / Tak, 'now people can relax like birds', says designers Tjepkema Studio. See also their Next Bling Thing, a 'cathedral of shopping.' Entertaining stuff.
The photography of Ruth Hallensleben / the Lessons of Lucasfilm's Habitat, an early Sims-style game / Banubula, excellent musings on art, comics and more / The Elements of Style / Double-Tongued, a 'growing dictionary of old and new words.'
The tagline for new website Ingenious is 'seeing things differently', so we wholeheartedly approve. The site is a collaborative venture between the Science Museum, the National Railway Museum and the National Museum of Photography, Film & Television, a portal for 30,000 images in various categories (communications, for example). As part of the ongoing digitisation of absolutely everything it's a worthy start, but 30,000 must be just a drop in the ocean for these three institutions.
Hotlinks is a new accumulative links blog, albeit one backed up by serious technology created by web developer types (not an increasingly creaky blogger template). By the way, does anyone have any recommendations for weblog/website software? At some stage in the next six months, we're going to redesign, so any tips, recommendations, warnings, etc., are all welcome.
Wednesday, June 09, 2004
Hardplace, tales and images from life in detention (via provenance unknown). Audio diaries and floorplans - worked up from sketches - of American detention centres, with all areas outside the immediate experience of the detainee blurred and guessed at. These spaces all appear to be embedded within buildings, almost as if there is no exterior to them at all.
Elsewhere. Gadgets for the modern urban lifestyle (i.e. things you don't really need) at apartment therapy / Shine Gallery want to sell you retro objects, like this Hollywood Finger Cigarette Ring display, the ultimate smoker's accessory / buy a Jeep / Soviet aviation and space collectibles, the place to go for Ekranoplan models.
Phantasmagoria, a weblog from the United Arab Emirates with excellent images. Via Massless / a collection of London Underground tube station maps (which we've linked to before, I'm sure) / Scott Snibbe's motion sketch / remembering the blitz at the Museum of London / Nüshu, a secret written language used only by women in China's Hunan Province.
Golly, Geoff Badner eats a lot.
Posting is intermittent this week, as backlogs clobber us.
Elsewhere. Gadgets for the modern urban lifestyle (i.e. things you don't really need) at apartment therapy / Shine Gallery want to sell you retro objects, like this Hollywood Finger Cigarette Ring display, the ultimate smoker's accessory / buy a Jeep / Soviet aviation and space collectibles, the place to go for Ekranoplan models.
Phantasmagoria, a weblog from the United Arab Emirates with excellent images. Via Massless / a collection of London Underground tube station maps (which we've linked to before, I'm sure) / Scott Snibbe's motion sketch / remembering the blitz at the Museum of London / Nüshu, a secret written language used only by women in China's Hunan Province.
Golly, Geoff Badner eats a lot.
Posting is intermittent this week, as backlogs clobber us.