Sunday 21 March 2021
the gallery of regrettable food
catagories: libraries and museums, networking and blogging
Friday 19 March 2021
7x7
centre of attention: country-focused map world map projections (see previously)
foia follies: celebrating the worst in US government transparency
double-bongcloud: top chess players making bizarrely risky openings—via Kottkethe positively true adventures of the alleged texas cheerleader-murdering mom: fifty year old charged with harassment for producing deepfakes to defame her daughter’s competition and get them kicked off the squad
letterlocked: using x-ray technology and artificial intelligence (see also) to read historical epistolary works without destroying them
house of the muses: a search engine that finds visual correspondence among masterpieces in world-class art museums via Open Culture
terra incognita: a sonic sea chart of phantom islands (previously here and here)—via Things Magazine
catagories: ♞, ⚖️, ๐จ, ๐บ️, libraries and museums
Thursday 18 March 2021
hodie mihi cras tibi
catagories: ⚰️, ๐ฌ๐ง, libraries and museums
Tuesday 9 March 2021
vostok-3ka no. 1
Also known by the designation Sputnik 9 (see previously), the Soviet spacecraft launched on this day in 1961 carried a complement and crew of mice, guinea pig, a dog called Chemushka (“Blackie”) and a realistic human dummy, mannequin called Ivan Ivanovich (the equivalent of Joe Doe or Max Mustermann) that was so distressing uncanny thus prompting technicians to affix a label to his visor lest someone finding Ivan after a mission might not mistake him for an incapacitated cosmonaut or extra-terrestrial. Ivan was auctioned off after the dissolution of the Soviet Union and purchased by Ross Perot, who subsequently donated him to the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum. The mission only consisting of a single trip around the world, it was deorbited shortly
catagories: ๐ท๐บ, ๐ญ, libraries and museums, ⓦ
Monday 1 March 2021
pflanzenwissenschaft
Friday 26 February 2021
6x6
affiche: early Art Deco posters of Renรฉ Magritte
dogs of war: a public service announcement issuing guidance on how to disable Boston Dynamics weaponised Spot units
whitewash: thankfully, President Biden is able to overturn “beautiful” architecture executive order that would mandate neo-classicism in federal buildings
clothes peg: the clothesline animals of Helga Stentzel
second life: exploring and conserving the abandoned spaces of the internet
mask media: brilliant Soviet Kazakh health promotion campaigns from the 1970s—see also
catagories: ⚕️, ๐จ, ๐ก, architecture, libraries and museums, networking and blogging
Tuesday 2 February 2021
6x6
pitch and pent: the rooftop illusion demonstrated by Kolichi Sugihara of the Meiji Institute for Advanced Mathematics
making sense of scents: the olfactory capacities are underestimated—via Messy Nessy Chic
have fun storming the castle: The Princess Bride re-enacted in its entirety as home movies under lock-down
matinee at the bijou: the Internet Archive (see previously) has digitally curated a massive cinematic history library
pyrophone: a flame organ that amplifies the tones of vibrating, burning hydrogen
10100:an individual engineers an analogue, modular calculator (see also) to count up to a googol
Monday 1 February 2021
๐️๐จ️
Via Waxy, we are referred to an expansive and growing and searchable collection of graphic design related items, materials and resources organised from and available at the Internet Archives (previously) by curator Valery Marier. Categories include font specimens, annuals, style guides, book jackets, infographics, data visualisations, various advertising ephemera and vintage branding devices.
catagories: ๐, ๐ฃ, libraries and museums
Monday 25 January 2021
collezionare capolavori
Though in stasis and awaiting visitors, the storied and seldom seen Torlonia Marbles from a private collection are gathered together for public viewing for the first time, resulting from an agreement four decades in negotiation and agreed upon four years before the exhibition was scheduled to open. Not only was the loan to Rome’s Capitoline Museum controversial and fraught with compromise and conciliation, there’s some intrigue associated with its collectors as well—the family once the bankers and economic advisors to the Vatican and master and model for the attainment of prestige and status through art collecting.
Saturday 23 January 2021
7x7
dog and ferret sundries, etc: a fantastic hardware catalogue from the 1930s
the roaring twenties: the Sea Shanty craze of a century before—via Strange Companymidori: the relatively modern distinction between blue and green in Japan—see previously
tag yourself: medieval owl alignment chart
arkaphones: a resounding retrospective to artist Terry Adkins, who created sonic monuments
for all the latest medical poop, call surgeon general c. everett koop: the fortune and failure of the post executive branch career of the doctor’s branded medical advice website
ghost signs: self-appointed guardian of fading signage, collecting it before it vanishes altogether—we can all do this
catagories: ⚕️, ๐ฌ๐ง, ๐ฏ๐ต, ๐ถ, ๐ฌ, ๐, ๐ฑ, antiques, libraries and museums, Middle Ages, networking and blogging
Friday 15 January 2021
presque vu, jamais vu
In the spirit of those spirit guides that direct the curious to something never before seen (see also here, here and here), a sort of negative view count, London’s Science Museum—with only about a quarter of its vast holdings documented—has a digital docent that scours the archives to bring forth an artefact, from the mundane to the mysterious, that has not really seen the light of day since accessioning and a suite of tools to curate and adopt these special exhibitions. Let us know what wonder you are the first to see.
catagories: ๐ค️, ๐, libraries and museums
Monday 11 January 2021
first fridays
catagories: libraries and museums, networking and blogging
Wednesday 6 January 2021
zusammenleben
We really enjoyed pursuing the extensive portfolio of images captured of East Germany in the photography of Ute Mahler, who embarked in 1974 for a decade’s long mission to preserve and convey his fellow friends, neighbours and strangers as they were authentically cool and collected—both candid and posed—and unmediated by geopolitics. Much more curated by the Guardian at the link above and at the on-line gallery exhibition hosted by La Maison De L’Image Documentaire.
catagories: ๐ฉ๐ช, ๐ท, libraries and museums, Saxony, Thรผringen
Wednesday 30 December 2020
8x8
persons of the year: more Year End lists from Miss Cellania—see previously
75x75: seventy-five superlative photographs captured by as many photographers
mys: the Swedish word without an exact translation compliments hygge when it comes to coping with the prospect of a long, dark winterbenedict donald: more fine art work (see also)—suitable for framing
the twenty most powerless: the disenfranchised and estranged of the art world
she said see you later, boy: McSweeney‘s most read monologues, vignettes and confessionals of 2020
dance, dance revolution: a dance number from a trio of Boston Dynamics robots—see previously
refreshing your feed: fifty superlative podcasts according to The Atlantic—via Super Punch
catagories: ⚕️, ๐ธ๐ช, ๐️, ๐จ, ๐️, ๐, ๐ท, libraries and museums, networking and blogging
Sunday 6 December 2020
nefertiti
Representing chief consort and Great Royal Wife of Amenhotep IV, the iconic limestone bust was discovered on this day in 1912 by a team of archรฆologists working under the auspices of the Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft (DOG—the German Oriental Society) led by Ludwig Borchadt in Amarna at site that housed the workshop of celebrated sculptor Thutmose. Since its first going on display to the public in a Berlin museum, Egyptian authorities at the bureau of antiquities have requested that the three-thousand three hundred and fifty year old artefact be repatriated, arguing the significance of the find was downplayed and had inspectors been allowed to fully examine the bust, they would have never allowed it to leave. Focus of aspirations for revanchism after the dissolution of the Prussian monarchy and defeat in World War I, Nefertiti was conscripted for a rather fraught political career of propaganda (see also) in the Third Reich in the years to follow. Presence in the Zeitgeist included the 1935 cinematic portray of the Bride of Frankenstein, patterned after the signature crown, and her role and cultural impact has now been rehabilitated insofar as she is considered the counterbalance to the figure of Tutankhamun and a good-will ambassador for representation, art and the field of Egyptology. The arguments against repatriation, characterising nations outside of Europe too unstable to properly care for their treasures and cultural heritage is particularly rubbished by the way Germany has torn itself apart, Nefertiti sent away for safe-keeping in a salt-mine and nearly lost to history.
catagories: ๐ฉ๐ช, ๐, ๐จ, ๐บ, libraries and museums, Middle East
Saturday 28 November 2020
the great bed of ware
Via Strange Company’s Weekend Link Dump, we are directed to one unusual artefact of the Victoria & Albert Museum collection in the monumental and for the time of its acquisition in 1931 for a princely sum of four thousand pounds budget-breaking piece of furniture.
Originally housed in the White Hart Inn in the town as sort of a tourists’ draw for the stopping off point a day’s journey outside of London to points north, the massive four-poster bed—at three metres wide big enough to accommodate four couples—and was built by carpenter Jonas Fosbrooke in the last decade of the sixteenth century with Renaissance style marquetry and ornament inspired by Hans Vredeman de Vries—and to add to its history and provenance, couples have carved their names or initials in the headboard to mark their stay and is mentioned by name in Twelfth Night (circa 1601) and works by Ben Jonson and Charles Dickens.Thursday 12 November 2020
gie
catagories: ๐️, libraries and museums
Saturday 7 November 2020
das wiesbadener manifest
Declared on this day in 1945 from their base of operations (collection point) in the occupied capital of Hessen, the officers that comprised the special commission of the Monuments Fine Arts and Archives organisation (the MFAA, the group also known as the Monuments Men) was a stern rejection that European treasure should be taken to the United States as plunder and the spoils of war. The recovery and restitution efforts beginning earlier that summer, the programme’s first director CPT Walter I Farmer of the US Army Corps of Engineers received a large shipment of Nazi-looted art and antiquities, and soon the enormity of the task was apparent, prompting the issuing of the manifesto, announcing: “We wish to state that, from our own knowledge, no historical grievance will rankle so long or be the cause of so much justified bitterness as the removal for any reason of a part of the heritage of any nation even if that heritage may be interpreted as a prize of war.” Over seven hundred thousand objects and artefacts were catalogued by the organisation, stolen from museums (works from the Berlin Gemรคldegalerie and Nationalgalerie including Botticelli, Rembrant, Rubens and Cranach), private collections, Jewish citizens and political dissidents and were kept safeguarded from reparation claims and trophies of war that had been taken back to America were repatriated, President Truman getting involved with the debate and ordering paintings and sculptures returned to Germany in 1948.
catagories: ๐ฉ๐ช, ๐บ๐ธ, ๐จ, Hessen, libraries and museums
Monday 5 October 2020
รคlmhult almanac
catagories: ๐ธ๐ช, ๐, ๐️, libraries and museums
glass microbiology
catagories: ⚕️, ๐, ๐จ, ๐, libraries and museums