Via the always interesting Web Curios, we are quite impressed with the comprehensive skill demonstrated by a AI museum docent called Digital Curator and its ability to instantly assembly a sizeable exhibition sourced from the collections of institutions in Austria, Germany, the Czech Republic and Slovakia to explore the evolution of the depiction of an object, artefact or theme across the ages, styles and movements. Of course one can select from a range of parameters and enter one’s own key terms (however disparate and juxtaposed)—or like this gallery generated for the nonce, ask for a random curation. Try it out and be sure to send us an invitation to your showing.
Saturday 19 February 2022
Tuesday 15 February 2022
6x6
taxon: vintage animal family cards
property values: Trump family accounting firm drops them as a client, disavows the validity of a decade’s worth of business assessmentsable baker: a collection of US museum ships—via Things Magazine
daily constitutional: map out one’s lunch-hour ambulations
wobo: Heineken breweries in the early 1960s produced brick-like bottles that could double as construction material, via Messy Nessy Chic
metamates: Facebook staff receive a new official monicker aligned with corporate branding
catagories: ๐ป, ๐️♂️, ๐บ, ๐ฅธ, ๐งฑ, ๐ข, libraries and museums, networking and blogging
Wednesday 2 February 2022
artificial scarcity
Via Hyperalleric, we have another update from Molly White on how great Web 3.0 is going (previously) with this dispatch from a New Zealand auction house that sold material contact prints and plate glass negatives from photographer and portrait artist Charles Fredrick Goldie—whose work is problematic, considered reductive and promoting the contemporary thinking that the Mฤori were on the verge of extinction as a culture and colonial paternalism though also a snapshot of heritage that might be otherwise lost to time—bundled with their NTF, which fetched much higher prices than they could otherwise garner, complete with a small mallet—inviting the winning bidder to smash the plate and render the lot digital only—see also. The sales were of a self-portrait of the artist at his easel and not of historic aboriginal elders so this provocation is not such an afford to museums and the art world, though one suspects that bidding was driven by investment and looking for a place to park one’s money rather than an appreciation for art or the subject matter.
Tuesday 1 February 2022
6x6
anagrams everywhere: the intrusive, obsessive thoughts of a Scrabble enthusiast—via Kottke’s Quick Links—see also
maths hysteria: a celebration of vintage calculator manuals
dishes for luck and prosperity: traditional Lunar New Year cuisine laden with word-play and symbolism
old brown ears is back: a cover album from under-appreciated Muppet character, Rowlf the Dog
nasm: Smithsonian Air & Space museum accepts donation from a tech billionaire—notably absent a “morals clause” which would allow the institution to disassociate itself with their benefactor should their values become misaligned
Sunday 30 January 2022
root directory
A happily reactivated Present /&/ Correct shop blog (do check out their sundries) brings us this interesting series of studies curated by Wageningen University of hand renderings of root systems (see also here and here) of trees and plants whose subterranean presences and connections can be far more substantial and wide-reaching than we surface-dealers can fathom.
catagories: ๐ณ๐ฑ, ๐ฑ, ๐ณ, ๐, libraries and museums
Monday 17 January 2022
from inca to excel
Via รon, we quite enjoyed this introduction to the system of knotted fibres called khipu (see also) as an accounting and record-keeping tool of the Wari peoples and spread across the Andean region some fourteen-hundred years ago. Decoded by specially-trained khipukamayuqs, these mobile ledgers were periodically recalled to court authorities to lodge tax-compliance, census numbers, commerce, genealogy and inheritance—and with only a small proportion of museum-holdings deciphered, some holdout the possibility that these data-points were a means to encode the fulness of language.
catagories: ๐, ๐งฎ, ๐งถ, libraries and museums
Monday 10 January 2022
6x6
curiosity cabinet: virtually explore the museum house of Sir John Soane (previously)—via Things Magazine
glitchy terrain: users and clients report bugs in fly-over features (see previously)—via Super Punch
debate club: let’s thrash out these ongoing arguments once and for all
low, heroes, lodger: a look at the Eastern European literature that influenced David Bowie’s Berlin trilogy and beyond
medico-mechanical gymnastics: the nineteenth century work-out regiment of Gustave Zander—see previously
ex libris: a look into some of the great libraries of Germany, Switzerland, Italy and Austria
catagories: ๐จ๐ค, ๐บ, ๐คธ, libraries and museums, networking and blogging
Friday 7 January 2022
poฤรญtaฤovรก hra
Via Things Magazine, we discover an emulator archive of computer and arcade games created by the Slovak programming community in the late 1980s—available for download in their original versions or as English translations. More at the links above including all exhibits at the National Design Centre in Bratislava.
catagories: ๐ธ๐ฐ, ๐พ, ๐พ, libraries and museums
Tuesday 4 January 2022
6x6
media archive for central england: browse tens of thousands of amateur films—via Things Magazine
el vaquita: a small town in Chile staged a fake protest to persuade a dog to visit the veterinarian—via Super Punchfluid dynamics: cloud waves in the skies of Tenerife
watery fowls: an unaired pilot (see also) for the 1978 US adaptation of Fawlty Towers, starring Betty White and Harvey Korman
different realities: American democracy in crisis—via Miss Cellania
public domain revue: hundreds of thousands of audio recordings made prior to 1923 are free to use as one sees fit
catagories: ๐ฌ๐ง, ๐ค️, ๐ฌ, ๐ถ, libraries and museums
Thursday 30 December 2021
achievable goals
Courtesy of our friend artificial intelligencer and Smithsonian’s designated futurist-in-residence for next month, Janelle Shane (previously here and here) we are treated to a neural network’s attempt at coming up with a New Year’s resolution. With a few prompts, it generated suggestions like, “Make broccoli the national currency and then paint that,” or “take photos of my toes daily,” and intriguingly “act like a cabbage for a month,” “dress in a way that only a ghost could love,” “throw a birthday party for a tree” and “attempt to find peace living with an army of puppets.” More at the link above and see if you can find a resolution that’s particularly resonant for you. “I will now treat every worm I see as if it is an old friend.”
catagories: ๐ , ๐ค, libraries and museums, networking and blogging
Wednesday 22 December 2021
muskelspiel
Born this day in 1867 (†1927) in the village Burkhardtsdorf in the western edge of Upper Lusatia, Osmar Heinrich Volkmar Schindler, demonstrating skill as an artist early on was with the support of his uncle enrolled at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts where after his education in portraiture and travels in France, Italy, the Netherlands and Belgium developed a signature style that mixed elements of Impressionism and Art Nouveau. In 1900, Schindler was invited back to the academy and given a professorship. Better known for his murals and interior decor for both secular and religious buildings of the fin de siรจcle throughout Saxony, works on display include David and Goliath, landscapes of the Sรคchsischen Schweiz and Lake Garda, as well as this muscle-flexing study that has the undivided attention of the art class.
catagories: ๐ฉ๐ช, ๐จ, libraries and museums, Saxony
Sunday 12 December 2021
card catalogue
catagories: ๐ฌ, ๐ญ, ๐ด๓ ง๓ ข๓ ณ๓ ฃ๓ ด๓ ฟ, ๐ฆธ, libraries and museums
Sunday 7 November 2021
facce di bronzo
Via the always superb Everlasting Blรถrt, we are not only introduced to the sensational discovery of the so-called Riace bronzes in the early 1970s but how the Italian mayor of the namesake town is planning a museum and further excavations on the fiftieth anniversary of their recovery from the waves off the Calabrian coast to see if there are more Greek warrior statues yet to be uncovered. Made in the fifth century BCE using the lost wax casting technique are among the few surviving examples of Greek artistry, most being melted down, and were found by accident by a snooping chemist called Stefano Mariottini in 1972 and are conjectured to be either anonymous Delphic soldiers as part of an ensemble monument to the Battle of Marathon or possibly as depictions of Erechtheus, foster son of Athena and legendary king of Athens, and Eumolpus, son of Poseidon and inventor of viticulture.
Tuesday 2 November 2021
in the stacks
Prising important insights into the professions of curation, conservation and circulation, a storage facility in Rotterdam is opening its doors to visitors to allow them to peruse the museum’s entire collection, the ninety percent of the art and artefacts that their formerly public-facing galleries could not accommodate, we discover via a thematic round-up from Messy Nessy Chic. We really liked this idea to invite guests behind the scenes and hope that this sort of programme expands.
catagories: ๐ณ๐ฑ, libraries and museums
Tuesday 26 October 2021
7x7
in the stacks: museum curators uncover what may be the oldest depiction of a ghost on an ancient Mesopotamian tablet
1928 porter: a look at the 1965 short-lived sitcom (see also) My Mother the Car this climate does not exist: visualisations of one’s neighbourhood under the climate crisis from Nag on the Lakeev: more outstandingly odd electric vehicles from the on-line market Alibaba—via Things Magazine
reasonable person: “a moron in a hurry” is codified in Anglophone legal statute—via the New Shelton wet/dry
graphics processing unit: glitch art in medical imaging—via Waxy
don’t go wasting your emotion: the ABBA classic, as performed by a vampire—via Everlasting Blรถrt
Thursday 7 October 2021
cyrus charter
Though in possession of the British Museum, the ancient clay cylinder bearing the declaration of king Cyrus the Great, outlining his genealogy and conquest of Babylonia as favourite of the god Marduk and documentation of the end of exile of the Jewish people and allowing them to resettle within the empire was loaned to Tehran on this day in 1971 for a period of sixteen days for the gala celebration of the two-thousand-five-hundredth anniversary of the founding of Persia—see previously, beginning mid-month ten days later. The artefact recovered in 1829 (in Mesopotamia, in modern day Iraq) is considered by many historians as the pioneering attempt to administer and multicultural state with universal human rights and was made the official symbol of Iran in absentia.
catagories: ๐ฌ๐ง, ✡️, ๐บ, 1971, libraries and museums, Middle East
Sunday 19 September 2021
make it another old-fashioned please
Thursday 16 September 2021
ivy league
Alumnus of the University of Cambridge and serving as an English minister of Colonial America John Harvard (*1607) made his deathbed bequest on this day in 1638 that his estate go to the “schoale or Colledge founded two years past by the Massachusetts Bay Colony” with the institution so gracious in receiving it, it was so ordered that “the Colledge agreed upon formerly to bee built at Cambridg shallbee called Harvard Colledge.” The clergyman left the university a personal library of around four hundred volumes (since grown into one of the largest academic library systems in the world) and seven hundred seventy-nine pounds sterling—now an endowment in the tens of billions. The school’s corporate charter was to train a literate Puritan ministry but offered a classic, core curriculum based on the English model.
catagories: ๐ฌ๐ง, ๐บ๐ธ, ๐, libraries and museums
Monday 6 September 2021
ฤlea iacta est
Via the ever excellent Everlasting Blรถrt, we are directed to this pair of Roman anthropomorphic dice, silver squatting figurines weighted (equitably presumably) to fall in one of six (tesserae, though usually in games in the Empire tossed in threes) positions.
The above phrase attributed to Julius Caesar by the historian Suetonius when the general brought his provincial army into the capital is like other quotations a likely translation from the Greek borrowing from the humorist Menander, «แผฮฝฮตฯฯฮฏฯฮธฯ ฮบฯฮฒฮฟฯ», let a die be cast in either form the phrase meaning metaphorically reaching a point of no return from whose juncture the decisions are irreversible.
catagories: ๐ฌ๐ท, ๐ฎ๐น, ๐ฒ, ๐, libraries and museums
6x6
circumhorizon arc: a rare Fire Rainbow photographed—via TYWKIWDBI
mars & beyond: Walt Disney’s robot pal Garco takes us on a speculative journey in search of extraterrestrial liferip: legendary NBC weather man Willard Scott has passed away, aged eighty-seven
escape artist: immersive exhibits speak to our communal sensory experience
valley of the dolls: Peerless Playthings pretend pills
cloudspotting: the World Meteorological Organisation added aspertias as a supplementary feature in 2017 Cloud Atlas—see also