8x8

actuation: robots will construct a new robotics science museum in Seoul—via Nag on the Lake

the way of flowers: an expanded look at the aesthetics of ikebana (previously)—the traditional art of Japanese flower arrangement

go transit: the vehicle just gets you there


high-intensity incidental physical activity: studies suggest that the most impactful forms of exercise aren’t exercise at all

gambay: an interactive map of Australia’s aboriginal languages—via Maps Mania

just want your extra time ... and your gif: a collection of officially-endorsed Prince animations

osborne bulls: the backstory of those iconic silhouettes that dot the Spanish countryside along freeways

beat of a different drum: a marching band with “robotic” music 

claroscuro

We appreciated Colossal’s introduction to Spanish artist and photographer Javier Riera through his series of luminous projections on trees and branches to tease out depth and perspective though his geometrical highlights. Nature tends not to admit hard edges but it’s sometimes that imposition that brings out the organic, like with these chequerboard forests that the project reminded us of. Learn more and see a whole gallery of Riera’s pictures and installations at the links up top.

wonder galaxy

Messy Nessy Chic directs our attention to the annual Madrid design expo Casa Décor with the fantastic future “childhood revival” aesthetic of interior designer Patricia Bustos de la Torre. Not only is the style informed by the hues of Millennial pink and turquoise to question why we tend to lose our sense of awe for what the future has in store but also reflects an inflection of Ettore Sottsass’ Memphis Group. The suite of Bustos’ instalation (among scores of entrants) includes a kitchen and a dressing room.  More to explore at the links above.

6x6

marenostrum: deconsecrated church in Barcelona houses Catalonia Polytech’s super computer

el helicoide: the dreadful-excellence of Caracas’ space age intelligence services headquarters turned into a sprawling prison complex

ectoplasm: nothing is prepared for the overwhelming slime of the hagfish

love you: we face our first Valentine’s Day bereft of classic Sweethearts candy, the company having folded back in July

accumulus nimbus: a gallery of skies and cloudscapes from arcade games, via Present /&/ Correct

visa-free score: limits of roaming without a passport and other quirks of international travel 

5x5

barra de atención: documenting the endangered and disappearing no-frills bars of Madrid

vetrai veneziana: exploring the storied village of Murano that once held the European monopoly on glass

treasured gaze: a look at the eighteenth century obsession with eye-portraiture—via Everlasting Blört

brannock device: a deep dive into the measuring instrument found in finer shoe stores—based on the barleycorn

futurelight: a collaboration between an automotive company and an outdoor apparel manufacture produce a featherweight camper

After considerable difficulty in finding a publisher for his manuscript—out of fears that criticism, however veiled, might distress the alliance with the Soviets under advisement of the Ministry of Information, George Orwell’s allegory Animal Farm was first released on this date in 1945.
The work, which is a retelling of the dismantling of the Czarist Russia and the violent Stalinist origins of the Soviet Union, informed by the author’s experiences of escaping Communist purges during the Spanish Civil War and realising how easily “enlightened people in democratic countries” can become gripped by propagandists and whipped into a furore. Originally bearing the subtitle “a fairy story,” the satire—removed from contemporary events and figures—does seem to become a clumsier way of getting one’s point across and might limit the novella’s scope away from dictatorships in general, but I think that such criticism—and we should have the wherewithal to question political relevance—re-enforces the need to study our history in order to avoid repeating it.

6x6

we don’t deserve dogs: a very good boy in Madrid demonstrates his life-saving skills

heat-exchange: we’ve crossed a critical climate point-of-no-return in the Barents Sea

german engineering: a proposal for a solar power plant that’s nearly a century old plus an even older printing-press that ran on sunshine

thinking you’re impervious to the dunning-kruger effect is itself an example of the dunning-kruger effect: more on the psychological observation (previously) that helps explain why we’re all confidently incompetent

pr’s pr award: the World Architectural Festival has announced its finalists for building of the year

the pearl of great price: plans to build a Mormon utopian community of microhousing (based on the biblical Enoch’s exceptional righteous, and rapture-ready city) poses a threat to Vermont’s historic village, via Super Punch

sónar calling

Celebrating its twenty-fifth anniversary, the music, creativity and technology festival Sónar that just concluded in Barcelona, as BLDGBlog informs, is sending transmissions, short samples of electronic music to a potentially inhabited exoplanet via a high-gain radio station in Tromsø, Norway. The second of two signal bursts, it’s projected to arrive at Luyten β (GJ 273b)—orbiting a stable red dwarf star and among the most Earth-like planets discovered to date—by 2030 with a reply another dozen years in the waiting. Listen to the message and playlist at the link above.

freixenet

This overview of medieval European microstates (micronations can be equally idiosyncratic but with severely limited recognition) that came into being either through omission, neglect or force, with nearly half still in existence, struck us a fascinating material and urged us to learn more. One favourite that we had not heard of was the outpost Fraxinet, a stronghold founded and held by Muslim pirates (a press-gang) sailing from Andalusia (al-Andalus) in the vicinity of Saint-Tropez in the late ninth century.
The settlement expanded and was as much a centre of trade and commerce as a place of piracy, if not more, and peace was negotiated among other Frankish ruling families in the area. The uneasy peace held for an astonishing eighty years with the Andalusis bringing all sorts of innovations to the indigenous people, including medical skills, tar, ceramics and the tambourine, but Fraxinet finally ended with the Battle of Tourtour when a group of nobles from Provence dispatched with the raiders, worried that they would seize control of an important Alpine pass nearby, conveniently spurred to action at the ransoming of an influential abbot.

le chant du monde

Early-career comparisons to Pablo Picasso are to be forgiven as he and fellow artist Jean Lurçat were virtual Dopplegänger and perhaps the albeit unique and pioneering abstract paintings of the later French artist and near-contemporary were passed over as derivative with Lurçat never achieving the renown of his Spanish counterpart, but the comparison (though importantly a point of access) does detract from the artistic merit of Lurçat’s later works, executed through his rediscovery of the medium of the medieval tapestry (tapisserie), and adhering to the craft’s stylistic horizons as much as possible. Limiting the palette of colours the artist availed himself of made monumental projects possible and after experiencing the Apocalypse Tapestry—for its depiction of the Book of Revelations—that the duke of Anjou had commissioned his residence in Angers, Lurçat realised that the format allowed for the hallucinatory abandon that he expressed in his earlier period when first decommissioned from fighting in the war.
Though off the battlefield, Lurçat and the members of his salon, a workshop of talent to operate the traditional looms and create the panels under Lurçat’s direction, were resisting tyranny in a multiple year, therapeutic catharsis that became The Song of the World, an abstract, contemporary to be inverted version of the Apocalypse, over-turned through a collective effort, hung in another wing of the same palace that displays the original. Learn more about Jean Lurçat and his vision at Messy Nessy Chic at the link up top.

key frames

We enjoyed very much being introduced to the Madrid-extract currently based in Toronto named Pablo Lozano. Having matriculated with London’s Golden Wolf animation studio and worked for clients such as Disney, Adult Swim and a couple of prominent sports apparel companies, Lozano is now finding his fortunes as a free-agent and a free-lancer. A key frame, incidentally, in filmmaking or animation is a rendering that defines the start and end points of a smooth transition. Be sure to check out more of Lozano’s personal work and commissions at the link up top.

gobierno en el exilio

Having already expressed displeasure with the idea that fugitive Carles Puigedemont attempts to take office in absentia, Madrid is now declaring that it will reinstate direct rule on the autonomous community of Catalonia and is summoning his physical presence.
Since the dissolution of the county government during its independence referendum, president Puigedemont has sought political asylum in Belgium, escaping charges of sedition and embezzlement that have resulted in the confinement of nine members of the Catalan cabinet, and is virtually guaranteed to be arrested should he return. During the dictatorship of Francisco Franco that began with civil war in 1939 and lasted until the restoration of the constitutional monarchy in 1975, the succession of presidents of the Generalitat (the executive branch) was maintained abroad in France, Switzerland and México. There is of course no hint of equivalence in this comparison and we’re trying to better acquaint ourselves with this topic but paternalistic tendencies always carry the best of intentions.

universal constant or halt and catch fire

Researchers in Bilbao and Salamanca proffer a rather radical theory that tidily dispenses with the need—surely not without controversy—for invoking dark energy to explain our Cosmos and the accelerated rate of expansion of the Universe.
The speeding up of the motion or retreat is only apparent and it’s that time itself is slowly, slowly winding down. The accelerated expansion is illusionary as we’re not further away from our galactic neighbours but light is taking longer to reach us as time drags on. Not being able to get my head around the idea, I am not sure how it stands up to scrutiny but we’ve gone to great lengths before for the sake of keeping up appearances. I wonder how this idea might be independently verified. The clock started with the Big Bang but as that burst becomes more diffuse, time over æons is degrading into a physical dimension (like the three were familiar with) and the Universe will freeze and coalesce into a dimensionless point, presumably ready to start the cycle all over again.

belenismo

We thought that this matchbox Nativity scene designed by Pepe Cruz Novillo in 1968 for the company “Fósforos del Pirineo” was a strikingly cute ensemble. Novillo designed logos and icons for the post office, railways, political parties and the police forces in his native Spain as well as designs for peseta notes and is worth the effort to seek out, recognising how Novillo’s ubiquity and style lent the country a sort of corporate brand. The safety match company is still in business and served as a canvas and experimental format for artists for decades.

in vino veritas (in aqua sanitas)

As a follow-up to last year’s reprinting of a most sublimely surreal cookbook, the German publishing house TASCHEN will re-issue Salvador Dalí’s liberally illustrated field guide to wine grapes, viticulture and history, The Wines of Gala, which was last in print in 1978. The artist’s pairings were emotional driven and classified his wines based on how the contrasted or complimented his moods, with groupings like the Wines of Generosity and Wines of the Impossible.

estelada

Although some seventy percent of the voting populace in Catalunya were in favour of holding a referendum on the matter of its secession from the Kingdom of Spain, prior to the police brutality and voter-suppression that occurred at the ballot-stations in Barcelona, Girona and a few other locations (prominent places surely but hardly not blocking all of them), the people were split on the issue with only some forty percent unconditionally voting for independence.
Spain’s central government maintains it is illegal and unconstitutional for a constituent region to declare its autonomy—and it is the government’s right and arguably its responsibility to try to kept its soverign borders intact and cohesive, like those currently strategizing over what a Kurdish homeland might mean for Iraq and Turkey (or for that matter, what the experience might be for the first US state to remove itself from the Union) or how the creatures of Brexit’s court rallied around Catalunya’s right to self-determination, but its violent response to stop voting altogether reportedly translated to an incredible outcome of over ninety percent—perhaps that show of might smacked too much like the totalitarian regime of Francisco Franco that came to an end a scant four decades ago. What do you think? In the aftermath of the plebiscite and the violence that marred it, Catalunya’s leadership have since softened the rhetoric of an immediate withdrawal and amid all this chaos it’s impossible to predict how things will progress moving forward.

bizarre love triangle

The Spanish commercial photographer that took the image of a boyfriend with a wondering eye, as Super Punch informs, is surprised but unconcerned (so long as decorum is maintained) by how one of his staged stock photos has gone viral and is fodder for the meme-mill.  The prolific self-taught entrepreneur has used the same trio of models in most of his compositions taken over the past five years, stringing their affairs into one epic soap opera story-board.

black jack

Though always eager to be the centre of attention be it through palace intrigues or disgraceful provocation and the news that Trump dismissed his chief propagandist to return to the managing the media properties that helped create the landscape that made it possible for this regime to seize power became the dominant headline, Trump’s doltish antics ought not to cause us to be distracted from his awful reaction to the violence in Barcelona with an appeal to a patent and self-plagiarised falsehood.
Ironically, the public figure who just the day prior berated the press for speaking before they knew all the facts (unlike himself) related a crass story that he was already told was untrue. Instead of condolences and statements of solidarity, Trump offered that Europe should study Pershing, most likely—although restricted to one hundred and forty characters, one has to fill in the blanks sometimes, to the military commander’s nation-building exercise in the Philippines and his tough stance on terrorism with an apocryphal account of executing Islamic terrorist in a defiling manner and how the example set ended insurgency in the region. Who is feeding this troll?  Do not make this tragic moment and movement about you.  While this libellous, revisionist and frankly criminal fable is unlikely to do anything other than cause more inflammatory feelings, the injunction to study General “Black Jack” Pershing might be illuminating in terms of understanding what America’s foreign “policy” might become going forward with a return to imperial aspirations and what sort of messenging (through a restored Bannon) that might entail.

6x6

underground sundae: recreating the lost psychedelic commercial that Andy Warhol made in 1968 for a Manhattan family restaurant franchise

lad culture: Sir David Attenborough narrates a typical British night out

dumpster honey: revisiting a disturbing requiem for Nature in the Anthropocene epoch—and yes, it was the insecticides all along

chiaroscuro: stunning night time photographs of Japanese playground equipment

cubismo: Spanish street artist Belin produces hyper-realistic graffiti portraits that evoke Pablo Picasso’s elements of cubism and the surreal

alive, son of awake: a look at the tradition of fantasy and speculative fiction of the Muslin world that precedes European Romanticism by centuries

nature morte vivante

In response to an on-going paternity suit raised by a professional psychic, a judge ordered the exhumation of surrealist Salvador Dalí from beneath the stage of his hometown theatre and museum where his body is buried in Figueres, Catalonia.
Notwithstanding speculation whether Dalí in fact was disposed or capable of sexual relations by the fact he had no offspring inside his long marriage to his muse, Gaia, the tarot card reader is claiming that the eccentric artist had an affair with her mother whilst working as a chambermaid in the province of Girona. With no heir, Dalí donated his artwork and estate to the Kingdom of Spain but presumably, if fatherhood can be established, his daughter would have a claim on the artist’s legacy.