copy shop (13. 948)

Through the lens of his 2001 short film—in correspondence with his next project, we are introduced to internationally acclaimed Austrian filmmaker Virgil Widrich considered a parable on the ease of duplication, with or without degradation and loss of fidelity, and identity at the cusp of the digital age. After a copy shop employee accidentally photocopies hand, the machine, either through magic or malfunction, begin to reproduce fragments of his life that eventually result in the clerk encountering clones of himself until the entire world is populated by his imperfect duplicates. Whilst not an animated feature, the technique behind its production does traffic with cartoons and is a recursive statement, footage shot initially on a digital camera, edited and then printed frame-by-frame and re-filmed as a succession of photographs. Though using modern office equipment, mimeographs, carbon-paper and ditto machines, means of reproduction that involved the destruction of the original copy were living memories and the reel captures the misprints and breakdown over the course of the film—early days but also speaking to the nature of democratised self-publishing awash in repetition and derivatives, cheapening the value of the information, experience or artefact with inexact replicas. More from { feuilleton } at the link up top.

synchronoptica

one year ago: a Bayesian analysis of Mambo Number Five (with synchronoptica), patent pending plus NYC elects a new mayor

two years ago: Saint Carlo Borromeo plus reimagining Slaughterhouse Five 

three years ago: worthless NFTs redeemable as grocery store coupons plus leap seconds

four years ago:  the discovery of King Tut’s tomb (1922) plus assorted links to revisit

five years ago: haikus on the Periodic Table plus a competition to replace Laocoön’s lost arm

six years ago: the folk etymologies of the hangover

seven years ago: a protest rally and ultimatum in East Berlin,  Pigovian subsidies plus the science of voting

eight years ago: back at the scent lab,  a love letter to the US Library of Congress plus more links to enjoy

 

 

es muß nicht immer kaviar sein (13. 932)

The best-selling novel by Austrian author Johannes Mario Simmel, prolific writer himself navigating post-war and Cold War Europe and must have certainly included some autobiographical elements in one of several works adapted for both film and a television series with something different on the menu for each episode to further the protagonist’s obligation, in exchange for freedom of movement and not returning to occupied Germany, as a double-agent, lauded as the first galloping gourmet spy thriller. Whilst perhaps not the last in the subgenre, it does have some if not perfectly aligned real world antecedents, for all the intelligence organisations we are still not sure how much of his writing was confessional, with this Berlin blockade cookbook or Julia Child’s covert work for the Allies. As the narrative unfolds, the protagonist switches feigned allegiances from one espionage agency to another, trying to save as many lives as possible by diffusing tensions with his seductive culinary skill, recipes included. The final assignment, on the orders of J Edgar Hoover is to neutralise a notorious Soviet spy in exchange for retirement, when the protagonist’s own death is staged and he is allowed to live in peace.

sterbeurkunde (13. 918)

In the hopes of silencing conspiracy theories that had circulated since 1945 and would so for decades afterwards, on this day in 1956 the district court (Amtsgericht) of Berchtesgaden, with jurisdiction as the Führer’s home of record, declared Hitler officially dead. Following the capture of the Reich Chancellery during the Battle of Berlin, the Red Army secured the remains of Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun and directed the NKVD (НКВД, the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs, the secret police and intelligence agency later responsible for carrying out the Great Purge) to carry out a comprehensive post-mortem. Fritz Echtmann, dental assistant, identified dentures and implants as belong to the deceased and collected testimony from other witnesses to the suicide.
At first publishing the details of this fact finding mission and initially sharing it with American counterparts, on orders from Josef Stalin, Soviet commander-in-chief Georgi Zhukov retracted the statements and launched a disinformation campaign, disappearing Echtmann and others present behind the Iron Curtain. In order to disabuse allies from the apparent confusion, MI5 conducted its own investigation, finding Hitler’s last will and testament, marriage certificate and generally corroborating the factual account, though doubts lingered due to the continued detention of important witnesses. The USSR was motivated to maintain these conspiracies in order to justify harsh crackdowns on those within their sphere of influence and suppress democratic reform through the legend of a useful boogeyman. Following their release and repatriation to West Germany, their narratives helped strengthen the case for remit of Hitler’s estate and assets to the state of Bavaria and the municipality of Linz—however, despite all this, the deliberate Soviet obfuscation fuelled alternative narratives well into the 1990s, championed by American tabloids positing notions that the couple were alive and well in Argentina or Colombia or Albania, only dispelled—mostly—with the collapse of the Soviet Union and release of the archives detailing the burial and reinterment of the remains of Hitler and Braun nine times in various locations in Berlin and Magdeburg before cremating them in 1970 with only a few fragments remaining, dentures and some pieces of skull as forensic evidence, with ashes scattered in a tributary of the Elbe.

8x8 (13. 885)

name shame: nominative-antideterminism—see previously here and here  

wiener werkstätte: the greeting card grotesques of Rudolf Kalvach 

three steps off the coast: ten adventures celebrating a decade of travel blogging  

most favoured nation: the Amazon listing policy that locks retailers into their marketplace 

the naked zoo: the 1970 sexploitation film starring Rita Hayworth gets the Poseidon’s Underworld treatment  

voiceless postalveolar fricative: Filipino municipality of Sexmoán changed its name—see also  

pebete: eating through Wikipedia’s list of notable sandwiches—this time with World’s Fair fare of the 1873 Vienna Weltausstellung  

his mayorship: Hitler Mussolini Simeón Flores of Peru’s centre-left Ahora Nación party wins election in Queropalca

synchronoptica

one year ago: Brazilian vernacular graphic design (with synchronoptica) plus assorted links to revisit

two years ago: an incredible Trump rally plus a creepy featurette 

three years ago: mortgaged-money to fight inflation, Adelaide Hall plus the Battle of the Sinai (1973)

four years ago: most popular Halloween candy by state according to AI, a UB40 classic from 1988, the cemetery of Old St Pancras plus a menu à la carte

five years ago: assorted links to revisit, more unaired television pilots, Mouldy Old Dough plus dialling up the fright factor with AI

six years ago: more obscure and choice insults, a musical selection from Bronski Beat, more links to enjoy, Jack the Ripper’s From Hell letter, word nuance in cooking plus The Great Dictator (1940)

seven years ago: high-energy cosmic rays

eight years ago: a fun Star Trek musical mashup, more links plus discovering the convenience of public transport

 

9x9 (13. 861)

the need to understand and describe a thing before applying ai to it is a bottleneck: theory free machine learning and broken causality 

 ν_e: Nobel prize in physics awarded to Belgian scientist studying neutrinos at the South Pole  

mirror-test: Freddie Yauner’s looking-glass mask  

verschlusssachen: former German spy chief arrested for espionage 

melpomene: Meta’s Muse agentic AI is a privacy nightmare for the masses  

october is the treasurer of the year: John Dunbar’s ode to the month 

reflecting pool: stepping stones across a shallow pond on the roof of a cable car station offer a view of the Austrian Alps  

optogenetics: physiology top honours goes to three German researchers studying how light pulse affect body and mind 

we are going to kill unalive: self-censorship for the sake of the algorithm

10x10 (13. 846)

john henry was a steel-driving man: the limits metaphor, transduction and the calcification of man vs machine trope  

baxian: the enduring popularity of the Eight Immortals and other Taoist mythology 

rheinstone cowboy: yodelling and its exports 

vienna model: solutions to the housing crisis across Europe—more here  

fandeliers: McMansion Hell (previously) wonders what’s going on with ceiling fans recently displaying drone-like ambitions 

tears in the rain: debate rages over the ethics of AI agent dungeon 

ticker-tape: a look at Bloomberg trading terminals and antecedent technologies of getting ahead of the markets

figures of tolerable disorder (if not used too often nor too thick): the virtue and vice of the parenthesis—see also here, here and here 

kidnapping of the sun and the moon: Hungarian pop art cartoonist Sándor Reisenbüchler  

from the performative gibberish department: Trump introduces meaningless “morally binding” guardrails for Super Intelligence in the same spirit as Big Tech’s self-regulation

8x8 (13. 736)

a comparison using like or as: a treasury of simile and metaphor from Ross MacDonald’s private detective Lew Archer 

mario v pareto: a scrolly-telling illustration of efficiency and optimisation—via Quantum of Sollazzo   

siamese wins: Thailand avoided colonisation through diplomacy and cultural synthesis  

world famous gopher hole museum: a visit to an usual tourist attraction in a tiny Albertan hamlet  

biblioclasm: Amazon’s AI book-pulping division has a cartoonish evil logo 

count coudenhove-kalergi: the Austro-Japanese politician and diplomat who championed the movement of European integration and was the inspiration for the character of Victor Laszlo in Casablanca—plus nominated Ode to Joy as the theme for the united continent 

balloon banjo: a 3D printed heuristic tool for experimenting with acoustics  

ounce dice trice: a garland ring of unusual words that ends up where it starts out

synchronoptica

one year ago: assorted links to revisit (with synchronoptica) plus a cache of vintage picture postcards

two years ago: a quick weekend get-away plus the Formosa Straits crisis of 1958 

three years ago: the US Republican primary debates plus more links to enjoy 

four years ago: even more links plus Ukraine re-establishes itself as an independent state (1991)  

five years ago: assorted links worth the revisit, ant architecture plus Bohemian Rhapsody (1975)

six years ago: cocktails for remote learning, superlative garden photographs plus re-sampling Soviet pop

mundaneum (13. 731)

Established in Mons in 1910 by the collaborative work of two Belgian lawyers Paul Otlet and Henri La Fontaine as founding pioneers of the discipline of documentation science, informatics or library science as the study of the recording, storage and retrieval of data, following the their first joint project of establishing the Institute International de Bibliographie in Brussels with the mission to classify and cross-reference all recorded knowledge with a card catalogue system with tables, indicators and connecting mark-up notation, originally as the Palais Mondial in the left wing of the government office complex Parc du Cinquantenaire, this programme of systematic and public-facing linkages, an archive of some twelve million annotated index cards and other documents provisioned the internet—see also here, here, here and here. Though the technical capacity of the peace activist’s time was not up to the challenge, Otlet hoped that people would be able to access his catalogue from their own home studies or the office and experimented with a pre-digital réseau (network), virtual communities of researchers that cooperated via telegraph. As the scope of the project grew, there were plans to move the Mundaneum (World Museum) to Geneva to be housed in an institution designed by architect Le Corbusier (previously) but failing to materialise, the collection was copied and with another branch in the Hague, championed by Otto Neurath in 1933, following the political economist’s flight from Austria after the defeat of the Social Democratic Party following the dissolution of the Hapsburg empire (here is another artefact from Otlet). Under Nazi occupation the Mundaneum was placed in storage with the area in the Cinquantenaire Palace used as an exhibition space for Third Reich Art. The collection was eventually reunited, restored and conserved in a large former department store in the Hainaut capital. On this day in 2015, the massive filing cabinets of the card catalogue were featured as the Google Doodle in tribute to its founders and forefathers of open information. More from Open Culture at the link up top.

rede an den kleinen mann (13. 144)

Having a passing familiarity with one of the more radical and controversial figures in the field of psychiatry, Wilhelm Reich, we were rather absorbed with his 1945 illustrated essay, Listen, Little Man!—call-out quotations limned by cartoonist William Steig (best known for his 1990 children’s book Shrek! and the basis of the animated movies) a personal friend and originally self-published by Reich’s Orgon Press. Aligned with overarching philosophy that neuroticism, self-destructive behaviours and fascism were rooted in sexual frustrations, the tract, translated with multiple reprintings and influencing the likes of Saul Bellow, William S Burroughs and Norman Mailer and Joan Didion among others as writers of creative non-fiction, documents the evolution of a psychoanalytical session from the point of view of the derided therapist, Reich himself as a stand-in for the whole backlash against the industry and skepticism towards expertise in general, from bemused naïvety, amazement to panic and horror about how resistant the patient can be to being disabused, esteeming his enemies and persecuting allies, becoming crueler than through grievance than the power structure one hopes to supplant. Much more to discover at the links above.

model village (13. 126)

Via the Blört Everlasting and Present /&/ Correct, we are directed towards the imaginary town of an “unconscious architect” in the papercraft district made by Peter Fritz, an Austrian insurance clerk reconstructing buildings from his home town from memory, running the range of every typology encountered from the residential to utilitarian as a pastiche of vernacular styles during the 1950s and 1960s. This all but anonymous collection of nearly four hundred structures was found a charity shop and exhibited at the 2013 Venice Biennale by Vienna-based artist Croy Nielsen, fine examples of the venue’s theme of an encyclopaedic palace. Much more at the links above.

synchronoptica

one year ago: deferred resignation programme (with synchronopticæ) plus who goes MAGA?

twelve years ago: crypto and money laundering, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership plus Dr Strangelove 

fourteen years ago: movie posters from a parallel universe plus botanical nomenclature

fifteen years ago: optical effects 

sixteen years ago: smoke-free workplaces 

pflp (13. 022)

After taking over sixty hostages, killing an Austrian police officer, a Libyan economist and and Iraqi security guard, six terrorist of the “Arm of the Arab Revolution” under the leadership of Venezuelan terrorist Carlos the Jackal (with assistance from West Germany’s Rote Armee Faktion), the energy ministers for eleven of the thirteen members of OPEC (the Organisation Of Petroleum Exporting Countries) present were taken ransom whilst attending a semi-annual meeting at the headquarters in Vienna. Delegates were separated into three groups in the conference room during the siege, with friendlies advanced towards the exit, neutrals cordoned off in the centre and enemy countries placed along the rear wall next to a stack of explosives rigged to detonate if the facility was comprised. Complying with the hostage-takers’ demands, Austrian broadcasters read a communiqué over the television and radio every two hours regarding the Palestinian cause and the group’s manifesto whilst transportation was arranged with an airplane bound for Tripoli with a layover in Algiers, lest captives be executed every fifteen minutes. Algerian foreign minister Abdelaziz Boteflika managed to de-escalate the situation, with all parties walking away unharmed forty-eight hours later, including the Iraqi and Iranian oil ministers, slated for execution before the raid began.

grand prix (12. 992)

Joining Spain, the Netherlands, Slovenia and Ireland, Iceland’s national broadcaster, RÚV, has voted to boycott the 2026 Eurovision Song Contest scheduled to be held in Vienna over the decision of the organising committee, the European Broadcasting Union, not to expel Israel for its conduct of the war against Hamas and occupation of Gaza. The announcement coinciding with International Human Rights Day, Iceland cites that “give public debate in the country…it is clear that neither joy nor peace will prevail” regarding participation. Members of the EBU voted in a general assembly last week to adopt stricter rules regarding alleged ballot manipulation favouring Israeli contestants during the last Eurovision but fell short of banning them, with the mounting walk-outs casting a pall over what’s supposed to be a feel-good cultural exchange (though it has never been wholly apolitical) with diminishing acts and those remaining seeming like a whitewashing of recent events.

10x10 (12. 973)

no time for dancing or lovey-dovey: David Byrne’s ensemble Tiny Desk concert—see previously  

bathing beauties: the nautical folk art of Kyler Martz—via Messy Nessy Chic  

ac/dc: the unlikely friendship of Mark Twain and Nikola Tesla 

warrior ethos: the Canadian publisher of the beloved children’s book series Franklin the Turtle strongly objects to US Secretary of War’s depiction of him firing on boats of supposed narco-terrorists 

the downfall of joann: the US craft and hobby economy ruined by private equity—via MetaFilter—see previously  

steerage: turned upside down, this grainy photograph of a third-class cabin appears to expand into a grand stateroom  

not even a squib of an entry: a steeple chase of an etymological mystery that may have arisen out of a case of mis-division—see also 

exalting the beauty of an overcast sky: Luke Howard (previously) on cloud-modification and his correspondence with Goethe  

nuns on the run: a rebel sisterhood who escaped from a nursing home to return to their abandoned convent refuse to give up their social media accounts as it would deprive them from the protection of an interested public 

chanson pour tout le monde: “Song for the Children” was by Jimmy Buffet, released on his 1979 album Volcano

7x7 (12. 878)

breaking rust: Billboard’s top country-genre song is AI generated slop—see previously  

crown jewels: Hapsburg family to display to the public a secret, personal stash of treasures hidden in Canada since WWII  

grist for the mill: all the commercial, off-kilter blogs were private-equitied out of existence—via Kottke  

mecces: visiting a McDonald’s in West Berlin in 1984 

s-money: a 1963 patent to replace US paper currency with square plastic wafers—see previously, see also here and here 

the call of the first æthyr: occult poetry by Aleister Crowley (see previously) delivered in his only known recording  

poice: Sora created videos of fake immigration raids in the US infest Facebook

9x9 (12. 836)

pareidolia: a massive rock formation outside of Sedona Arizona looks like Snoopy atop his dog house  

birch benders: tell-tale rounded type that AI seems to prefer  

chaotic evil: wildly popular Sultan’s Game has a labyrinthine narrative that evokes Borges’ The Garden of Forking Paths   

can you do facial: US customs and border protection forced scans and use of automated recognition to verify citizenship judged illegal 

faith ecosystem: ousted Intel CEO on a mission to create a Christian AI  

locofaulism: hyper-specific, hyper-local insults, mostly Dutch

ultracrepidarian: Chinese legislation prevents influencers from addressing important topics unless they are licensed professionals—see previously  

groked and pilfered: Wikipedia alternative (see previously) has a penchant for plagiarism and heavy citation  

storch und stag: concept power lines shaped as giant animals for Austria

synchronoptica

one year ago: the Park of Monsters (with synchronopticæ), assorted links worth the revisit, Ford turns his back on NYC, Trump and the stock market, the Rumble in the Jungle plus a poem for the battle-worn

twelve years ago: bridging the Bosphorus plus spying on the conclave  

fourteen years ago: goats and horses 

fifteen years ago: air travel security theatre 

slice of time (12. 786)

Whilst having been demonstrated through several experiments—the central consequence of Albert Einstein’s special theory of relativity—as an object accelerates close to the speed of light it experiences time differently and becomes stretched through time dilation, the Doppler effect, spaghettification, etc, one conjecture, independently concluded by physicists James Terrell and Roger Penrose (see previously here and here), evaded observation: that the fast moving object out to appear not elongated nor contracted despite the physical deformation but rather rotated. Utilising a battery of tricks to simulate light speed slowed down to two-metres per second in the laboratory, we learn via Damn Interesting, recording the flashes of a laser reflected off a target wire frame cube with an advanced high-speed camera, researchers at the Technical University of Vienna have reproduced the rotation for the first time. Despite the object approaching head-one, instead of seeing one face of the cube distorted, one sees a corner formed at the convergence at the vertices of two faces. This simulation is akin to photographing a rocket whizzing by at ninety-percent the speed of light with the resulting panoramic image twisted as Penrose predicted. It is a pretty nifty set-up and a way to magnify or minimise the unachievable but seems strange to have arrived at (not discovered) this anticipated effect through brute force of better lenses rather than by reason and the scientific method.

8x8 (12. 601)

field office: Trump withdraws the US from UNESCO for a second time 

vidi, quod aperuisset agnus: the Four Horsemen in art  

shoulder-top secretary: indirect communication, etiquette filters and letting the parrot speak for one  

symphonies of glass and steel: a century on, the spirit of Art Deco has shifted from enlightenment to oppression through the lens of a new property listing  

interlockers: chunky sandals that mimic zig-zag paver blocks 

game genie: a 1990 video game cheat cartridge for the Nintendo Entertainment System and its landmark legacy establishing reverse-engineering (see also) as fair-use and in-play premiums

velvet sundown: responding to the public backlash of AI slop on the internet, some companies are deplatforming or at least threatening to demonetise such tedious content crowding out everything else  

anamorphic sculpture: Thomas Medicus’ 2014 Emulsifier—the term, in the main, refers to the cinematography technique for translating the widescreen to narrower native aspect ratios 

national governing body: US Olympic Committee bars trans individuals from the teams in order to conform with Trump’s directives about protecting women on the anniversary of the 2001 found of the American Paralympics

opus 314 (12. 499)

To mark both the fiftieth year of the European Space Agency and the second centenary of the birth of the composer—as well to redress a glaring omission in the playlist of Voyagers’ Golden Records, the Vienna Symphony Orchestra performed the “Blue Danube” livestreamed for terrestrial audiences and beamed out to the stars from an ESA dish antenna in Cebreros, Spain, part of the array of the deep-space network. The waltz by Johann Strauss II had its association with the wonder and grandeur of the Cosmos cemented by its use in the score of Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey—see also—and broadcast at the speed of light, the single will have surpassed the twenty-four billion kilometres transversed by the twin probes launched in 1977, overtaking Mars in just four and half minutes, Jupiter in thirty-seven minutes and Neptune in four hours. ESA director general hopes that this concert will inspire future scientists and explorers and become the anthem of space travel.

synchronoptica

one year ago: outtakes from Dalí Atomicus (with synchronoptica) plus more on numbers stations

seven years ago: brutalist birdhouses  

eight years ago: a visit to Schloss Moritzburg plus bot armies

nine years ago: a trip to Berchtesgaden plus language and colour perception

ten years ago: the lifecycle of ladybugs

8x8 (12. 331)

fork in the road: AI misapprehension of a machine translated simple yes/no survey from Spanish rendered ‘i griega’ (upsilon) as a y-junction and all affirmative responses as the utensil   

hunter-gatherer: the handbag theory of human advancement—via Strange Company   

signature authority: after declaring his predecessor’s pardons invalid over the use of autopen, Trump faces scrutiny over unsigned deportation orders 

certificato di buona salute: pope discharged from hospital and sent home after five dicey weeks   

spring issue: the fourth instalment of the achingly beautiful HTML Review—see previously—is out, via MetaFilter   

vexatious lawsuits: mob boss Trump partially reverses executive order rescinding law firm’s contracts and security clearances for millions in pro bono services, prompting mass resignations 

schlachthof: ancient butchery for mammoths discovered in Austria   

cousin german: a comparison between English and Lower Saxon

synchronoptica

one year ago: assorted links worth revisiting, Cityspeak in Bladerunner plus The Grateful Dead’s Wall of Sound

seven years ago: the Ecosia web browser, an ancient passing red dwarf plus Cambridge Analytica

eight years ago: Trumpland, Trump’s triumphs, recreating the bedroom from 2001 plus more on concrete poetry

nine years ago: the christening of Boaty McBoatface, humorist Richard Littler plus a tubular tree house

ten years ago: God Bless You Mr Rosewater plus the crusades and the reconquista

take me to the river (12. 309)

Watching the Netflix production The Electric State about a retro-future dystopia where the thinking machines have been locked away in a no man’s land, under the leadership of Mister Peanut, and noticing stacks in a warehouse of presumably contraband Big Mouth Billy Bass, we couldn’t resist reposting this clever modification to this novelty animatronic trophy catch from Austrian hacker Charlie Diaz that greatly expands its vocabulary with the the help of ChatGPT, responding in a voice inspired by Arnold Schwarzenegger. This benevolent vision of things to come with AI shoehorned into everything is not yet commercially available but Diaz helpfully includes builds for all of his projects.

*     *     *     *    *

synchronoptica

one year ago: Stile Bertone (with synchronoptica),  a pronunciation guide to British surnames plus a walk in the countryside

seven years ago: more on Fluxus, US school shootings, Balinese New Year traditions plus propaganda and reality television

eight years ago: feline hybrids plus a constellation calligram 

nine years ago: the Mah Nà Mah Nà song, culinary mushrooms, outdoor classrooms plus the original vision for Star Trek: The Motion Picture

ten years ago: intermediate geologies, the sugar trade plus assorted links worth the revisit