eisbær

Though only producing four albums and disbanding after ten concerts together, we appreciated the introduction to the short-lived musical collaboration courtesy of Dangerous Minds to the Swiss Neue Welle group Grauzone (grey area) with their standout 1981 single Eisbär, their biggest hit charting at number twelve in Germany and number six in Austria.
Drummer and bassist Macro Repetto joined up with vocalist and led guitar Martin Eicher backed up by Eicher’s guitarist brother, Stephen (whom later went on to forge an accomplished solo career as a chanteur), and saxophonist Claudine Chirac and had their first gig at a club in Bern in the spring of 1980, their musical stylings were instantly recognised as something resonant that spoke to the mood of the times. Their songs were remastered in 2010, the accompanying video produced for that release. Much more to explore at the link above.

offset und verlag

Via Present /&/ Correct, we are acquainted with yet another publishing trade magazine this time in the form of the bimonthly then annual anthology editions of Graphis Press, originally founded in Zürich in 1944 and moving to New York headquarters in 1986. Featuring innovations in typography, formatting, layout, presentation, branding, logos and letterhead, past contributors include Milton Glaser, Saul Bass, Victor Vasarely and Herb Lubalin. Much more to explore at the links above.

pizolgletscher

Following a recent memorial service for a departed glacier in Iceland, a Swiss environmental group in the canton of Sankt Gallen is planning on holding a similar funeral for the small cirque glacier (formed in a bowl-shaped mountain depression) at the foot of the Pizol.
Effectively dead with no longer the ability, albeit at a geologically slow pace, to impact the landscape as it crosses the range and is now regarded as a patch of dirty ice and a massively popular hiking trail through five alpine lakes and moraines is much diminished by the loss of one of its attractions. Learn how you can pay your respects and stop further glacial melting away at the link above.

rütlischwur

Inspired by the Federal Charter dated to early August of 1291 when three Alpine cantons committed to a pact of allegiance, the Old Swiss Confederacy, something semi-legendary and romantically depicted in Friedrich Schiller’s William Tell—since 1891 and codified as a public holiday in 1994 Switzerland has set aside this day (Schweizer Bundesfeiertag, Fête nationale suisse, Festa nazionale svizzera, Fiasta naziunala svizra) to recognise its founding.  The Rheinfall waterfall is illuminated for the observance and the Rütli meadow on the shores of Lake Lucerne where the oath is traditionally believed to have been sworn hosts an organised celebration as do municipalities across the land.

konkrete kunst

Here is a tondo (a circular enframed work of art, from the Italian rotondo, “round”) from Swiss artist Fritz Glarner (born on this day in 1899, †1972). Heavily influenced by painters of De Stijl movement, particularly the geometrical studies of Dutch artist Piet Mondrian, Glarner’s style focused on “relational” schema as revealed through architectural patterns. Studying in Paris, Glarner spent most of his professional career in New York’s Long Island artist colony, before retiring to Locarno in 1966.

les horrible cernettes

Sharing their initials with the future Large Hadron Collider and with office chart-topping hits such as “Antiworld,” “Mister Higgs” and “Strong Interaction” the trio, the Horrible CERN girls, became the first music group to have its image on the world wide web when this cover became one of the first images (originally as a GIF) posted there—the photograph taken on this day in 1992 and then scanned at the request of Tim Berners-Lee so he could publish them on some sort of information system he’d just invented. Sticking together for two decades before disbanding, the members got back together five years afterward for an anniversary reunion concert in Geneva in the summer of 2017.

arterial road

Fusing anatomical studies with paper-sculpting, Berlin-based artist Katrin Rodegast has created several organs fashioned out of maps with roadways and watercourses meant to highlight the similarities of civil engineering (Ein – und Ausfallstraße) with the network of capillaries and arteries in our bodies as a series of commissions for Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (ETH) Zürich. The Swiss polytechnic’s 2017 chief research thrust was a big collaboration among twenty institutions to make a viable artificial heart—for which Rodegast’s cartographic anatomy was an important part of the outreach programme and partnership cohesion.

6x6

location scout: travel destinations that embrace the Wes Anderson (previously) aesthetic

digit-1: Ford prototypes a foldable robot that might be delivering your packages soon

homer’s phobia: a look back at the 1997 John Waters’ cameo on the Simpsons that helped shift attitudes

enhanced pat-down: the US Transportation Security Administration keeps the loose change it collects and is factored into its operating budget

wheel estate: already priced out of the housing market, Silicon Valley communities are moving to ban people living out of their cars who work supporting the industry

bodennutzung: a trove of historic photographs from WWII bombing runs over Switzerland show how the landscape has changed over the decades 

bedroom community

Aiming to draw people away from the comfort of home and back into the theatre, Cinema Pathé has retrofitted a couple auditoria with double beds in their movie halls in Spreitenbach in the canton of Aargau.
Beds are freshly made after each screening, the limited capacity lending an air of exclusivity to the experiment, and tests of the concept suggest that audience members would deport themselves in a respectable and courteous manner. What do you think? Laying in whilst consuming media experts tell is a bad sleep hygiene association and there’s no word on dress code.

heilkunde

Using the principles of divination and radiesthesia to guide her hand, Swiss spiritual healer and outsider artist Emma Kunz (*1892 - †1963) did not necessarily cultivate her art for art’s sake but rather as an expression and heuristic tool for exploring belief and to engender healing. Viewing these curated works on loan from the Emma Kunz Zentrum in Würenlos in Aargau is nonetheless still visually compelling and with symbolism and geometric harmonies to prise an insight from, the meditative qualities come through.
The site of the centre dedicated to conserving Kunz’ drawings and teaching is also the location of a Roman quarry (Grotto) where Kunz discovered a mineral she believed held restorative properties—naming it AION A, from the Greek for “limitless.” The benches for the exhibit were specially hewn from this stone and pulverised AION A is available from Swiss apothecaries. More to explore with Hyperallergic at the link above.

8x8

von neumann probes: perhaps autonomous, self-replicating interstellar explorers are destroying each other, accounting for their lack of evidence

bahnhofsuhr: the iconic Swiss train station clock designed by Hans Hilfiker

dactylography: an interesting survey of ancient latent fingerprints and the scientific rigour of forensics

incidental music: a cocktail party version of the main Star Trek theme exists in the Star Trek universe

parclo interchange: the elegant engineering of Japanese freeway junctions from above

a rabbit’s revenge: a further study of the prevalence of bunnies committing violence on humans (previously) in medieval marginalia

breakfast at mondrian’s: studio Brani & Desi translate the Dutch artist’s geometric works to floors and furnishings in a concept apartment

aerography: huge rivers coursed across the Martian surface for billions of years, via Slashdot

elf uhr

Via Strange Company, we find ourselves transported to the cantonal capital of Solothurn at the foot of the Jura Mountains to explore its long held affinity with the number eleven (öufi in the local Swiss-German dialect)—though no one quite has the definitive answer for the association that can be found everywhere—the 11th canton to join the confederation, home to 11 guilds, plus 11 churches and chapels, 11 towers of the former town wall, and a cathedral with 11 altars, bells and steps. According to one source it was adopted in deference to a team of work coach elves (Elf in German is both an Elf and the number) who came down from the Weissenstein, the promontory that dominates the city, and helped make the long-toiling inhabitants more prosperous.

breitling orbiter

After launching three weeks earlier from Chateau-d’Œx in the canton of Vaud, psychiatrist and avid balloonist Bertrand Piccard—hailing from a long-line of adventurers, along with co-captain Brian Jones, became the first team on this day in 1999 to successfully circumnavigate the globe in a hot-air balloon. With the help of a ground-crew of meteorologists, they accomplished this feat by negotiating atmospheric currents and jet-streams and had no means of forward propulsion other than being borne aloft by the winds.

käsecore

When I first caught the headline of this study, I assumed it meant that Hip Hop did something to stimulate the taste buds rather than having aged wheels of Emmentaler (hobby cheesemaker’s Beat Wampfler’s signature Muttenglück) in immersive soundscapes for six months. I was a bit sceptical about the claims that each sample, exposed to different musical genres, displayed a different taste profile but indeed sonic chemistry is a discipline that researchers are just beginning to appreciate and explore. Reportedly, the cheese aged accompanied by Hip Hop turned out zestier and the quintessentially Swiss cheese had bigger holes—eyes, in the trade.

overcranking

A team of researchers Lausanne Polytech’s Laboratory of Engineering Mechanics of Soft Interfaces are developing a method to reconstruct detailed slow-motion videos from blurry still photographs.
The title references the cinematic term for capturing extra frames, hand-cranking the camera at a faster than normal rate, but playing it back at speed. Whereas formerly blurred photos were chiefly caused by being out of focus, the autofocus speeds of modern cameras have eliminated that and instead the problem is one of shutter speed, with the smeared image captured as an action shot. As of now the method only can reverse-engineer high-contrast vignettes but could one day interpolate and forensically rebuild entire scenes.

www

While working at CERN, having helped established the world’s then largest networked node of computers, Tim Berners-Lee (previously here and here) recognised the opportunity to merge hypertext with their internet, in efforts to make his job easier and more transparent for his collaborators.
On this day in 1989, he submitted his proposal to the laboratory’s communications office, whose abstract contained the concept of the world-wide web, later distributed and received as “vague but exciting,” the abstract linking disparate but already existing technologies in ways no one else had though to beforehand. The image is the coat of arms for the British Computer Society—of which Berners-Lee is a distinguished fellow, and was founded in 1956 as a professional body and learned association for the advancement of computer science, receiving a royal charter in 1984.

textilkunst

Born 5 March 1897, Swiss textile artist Gunta Slölzl (†1983) had a formative and fundamental role in leading the Bauhaus school’s weaving workshop.  Find more posts about the movement and its principals here, here, here and here.
Having joined the movement just after its inception, she became a full master (the first female to achieve this level though the atmosphere was rather lacking in collegiality with most of the directors dismissing fabrics as craft and women’s work) in 1928 and revitalised the weaving and dyeing studios, mentoring many students and experimented with synthetic materials. A gallery of Stölzl’s works can be found here along with other Bauhaus disciplines cab be found at the link here.

8x8

shadow-boxing: more clever illustrations from Vincent Bal (previously)

a sid and marty krofft production: the Banana Splits (see also) may get a revival, possibly as homicidal maniacs

animal husbandry: falcon breeders wear special copulation hats to get donor samples (see also the Falcon Hive), via Super Punch

shelf-life: a book whose pages are slices of processed cheese

www: via Kottke’s Quick Links, we discover that CERN has rebuilt the original 1990 browser that Tim Berners-Lee invented as an in-browser emulation—how does your website look through the lens of three decades?

bauhaus: a collection of short documentaries celebrating the design movement’s centenary (previously)

prêt-à-porter: a retrospective look at some of Karl Lagerfeld’s greatest fashion shows

climeworks: the determined Swiss start-up that is working to stop climate change through direct CO₂ capture, via Swiss Miss  

frauenstimmrecht in der schweiz

Though the national referendum failed to pass with around sixty percent of the eligible voting population siding against it, on this day in 1959, the women of Vaud (Waadt) were enfranchised and could stand for public office. Other cantons over the ensuing decades eventually conferred suffrage to all residents, with the supreme court of the confederation ruling that the smallest, Appenzell Innerhoden (Appenzell Rhodes-Intérieures), must extend women the right to weigh in on local affairs in 1991.

einn af hjörðinni

The BBC Monitoring desk reports that one of the most anticipated annual registries among Icelandic shepherds (and we suppose among eligible sheep as well) has just been published with profiles of the country’s most sought-after ram bachelors, continuing a tradition of two decades of showcasing sires and obituaries for those who passed away since the last issue.
Seeing these impressive sets of horns reminded me that the release of the catalogue is coinciding with a plebiscite—direct democracy in action—taking place in Switzerland over the weekend on animal welfare, with voting finally taking place after an eight-year struggle to hold the referendum. At stake is the right for cow and goat farmers to receive special dispensation and compensation (due to the accommodations and bigger stalls required to safely rear the animals) who choose not to dehorn their herds. About a quarter of Swiss livestock are of the horned variety. The referendum’s human champion wants to take the question of economics out of the decision—which sounds rather ghastly and traumatising—and calls for subsidies instead of indignities.