croatia week

More on what we did for our summer vacation is coming with reflections on travels in Istria and along the Dalmatian coast. Više doći.

tiger beat or the sands of time

A new social networking service hopes to encourage participants to live more in the moment—whatever that means—by pledging to rake over the coals of any status updates, posing, shouts, blurbs and friendships fostered and erase them after twenty-four hours have passed. Users, without the nagging realisation that everything one thinks, does and says was in that pill that one took yesterday and will become an indelible part of one's permanent record—whatever that means—the start-up hopes, can be engineered to interact more spontaneously in this sandbox, this hour-glass and behave more like people do in real life.

Everything is wiped-clean, except those shared moments and impressions that users choose to keep alive by a continuous volley or as either points of departure (successful experiments) re-posted on more enduring servers. I don't know really what know how vanities in danger of slipping away reflected one place relates to living in the present (one read, excusing potentially embarassing behaviour) and not dwelling in some past that haunts one's future, unless one has some really incriminating skeletons—but this venture does pose a really interesting question about what it means to buoy up a moment, a memory, an encounter. Forget nurturing an interest or belabouring a subject in any virtual forum, and just consider one's manifest, artefacts, hearth and home. It does not do just to chronicle them, however they're shared; more over, as we all know—friends, family and even a place to live cease to exist without (and no proclamation is needed, just a private thought) naming them exactly that on a daily basis. What do you think? The internet is not going co-opt kindnesses and gratitude but might make a real mess of things trying to understand how to capitalise on that intelligence.

sretan put!

 

PfRC will be taking another sabbatical soon, so stay tuned to our little travel blog for continuing adventures. Zbogom!

aquatint, mezzotint

Nag-on-the-Lake discovered and invites us to peruse the wonderful collection of Mid-Century Modern linocuts of various tableaux and landmarks of London by artist Edward Bawden. The gallery is really amazing and it was interesting to learn what the linocut technique involves—like a woodcut but etched into the medium of flooring linoleum as relief, intaglio to produce a stamp.
Bawden certainly was not alone in experimenting with this material—the technique having been first employed by the Dresdener avant-garde collective Die Brücke and then tried by others, including Picasso and Matisse.  Linotype, as a process, on the other hand, means “line of type” as a single slug of text that spanned the whole page could be composed at once and then assembled, line by line. The invention of the linotype machine in 1884 revolutionized the newspaper business with quicker type-setting; before its introduction, no daily edition in the world offered readers more than eight pages.