blacklight special (13. 418)

The aesthetic associated with a certain lifestyle and very much of an individual age particular era, we are introduced to the ubiquitous output of a defunct company in Houston, Texas that was once the biggest producer and distributor of experiential and mostly ephemeral wall art in the blacklight poster, printed with phosphorus ink that fluoresce when exposed to the otherwise invisible ultra-violet spectrum. Though the Day-Glo Colour Corporation had produced the pigment in 1932 with mainly military applications, it was the Houston Blacklight & Poster Company founder in 1969 that solidified the technique’s association with counterculture and drug use, popular in dormitory rooms, garage hangouts and advertising in concert venues, as something that could simulate and stimulate the visual distortions and hallucinations produced by an LSD experience or marijuana high. Regarded as disposable and a relic of the 1970s—though seeing somewhat of a revival in recent years, the city’s university special collections library, aside from rare books and ancient manuscripts, also holds, as we learn courtesy of { feuilleton }, an extensive archive of the company’s posters, ranging from the puerile to the promotional to the truly transfixing, with a tour arranged by a docent or trip-sitter now that the the behaviour has been pulled from the fringes of society whose talent, influential, went on to work in the animation field, bringing their style to Star Trek: TAS among others after the company dissolved within a few short years.