sensory reparation

Dangerous Minds has a brilliantly curated piece on the psychedelic architects of late 1960s Vienna, Hans-Rucker-Co, who first appeared on the scene and began long quite long and distinguished careers (with installations and buildings in Kassel and Düsseldorf and long-time champions of design as the founding members of the documenta exposition) with their radical Mind Expanding Programme that aimed to place wearers, bearers and inhabitants in altered states of being through transformative environments. Their creations are iconic and certain the architecture that was their later legacy was not mainstream, but it strikes me as wonderfully anachronistic that these individuals came together and developed their art first around this project. In addition to these “fly head” helmets that atomized one’s outlook, be sure to check out the mind-expander loveseat, ball pit for adults and the primogenitor of the voyeuristic fishbowl experience in Oasis Number 7 and more at the link.

jötunheimr or planet nine from outer space

Orbital perturbations of the outer most planets of our Solar System and perhaps the mysterious and unexpected geologically active surface of Pluto suggest to astronomers that a Neptune-sized world sweeping out an elongated path nearly twice as distant as Pluto at its aphelion might exist.
That far away and with such an unimaginably long year would be quite faint and the marauder would only make itself know, possibly with great disruption, only once in epochs, and so is naturally elusive—even if one’s telescope are fixed on the right patch of sky. If such a ninth planet does exist (and that seems to be a pretty big leap as other theoretical place-holders have dematerialised in the past), astronomers propose that it is an ice-giant ejected from the Solar System’s core long ago—or, even more exotically, a captured “rogue” exoplanet. That would really be something if we had been harbouring a galactic hitchhiker all this time. Native or not, maybe the new planet should be named after Thrym, king of the Ice Giant realm of Jötunheimr—which is a nemesis to the realm of men and their gods.

party of one oder telefonzelle

A merry-maker and entrepreneur from Berlin has repurposed old public telephone booths into private discotheques, complete with a jukebox selection of dance music and a light show and even doubles as a photo-booth—delivering some mementos of one’s abbreviated party. This is a pretty keen idea and enhances the list of overhauls that the more or less obsolete telephone booth is receptive to: time machine, miniature library, insect hostel, changing room for super heroes—and it does not even matter if unlike the TARDIS, it’s not bigger on the inside.

6x6

peak curtains: Swedish furniture purveyor concedes that we’ve got enough junk

man on the street: Latin American media giant purchases a controlling share of the Onion

ladders of light: rare phenomenon projects one icy village into the night sky

algorithmic: beautifully elegant approach to filtering out prime numbers

il tempo sepolto: gorgeous art nouveau era daytime hotel below the streets of Milan

rewritten by machine on new technology: the output of presenting sitcom scripts to neural networks

how does your garden grow

First appreciated by the doyenne Nag on the Lake—with the interesting disclaimer that this is in fact not the first blossom in microgravity—this image of a zinnia in space is pretty inspiring and marks at least a symbolic step towards making interplanetary voyages self-sustaining.
Not only does the absence of gravity to hold down soil and define up and down present particular challenges so too did apparently the bureaucracy that accompanies growing a flower on the International Space Station. Things were looking rather bleak for the plants until the gardener decided to break with the established protocol dictated by Mission Control and care for them as you would terrestrial counterparts and took the plants outside of the laboratory and into the station’s cupola to bask in the natural light of the Sun.

heathenry or self-identification

The ever brilliant Dangerous Minds gives us a gentle but dazzling reminder that in between these cross-quarter days and geographically too we are in the midst of the perennial animistic cycle of death and rebirth in this gallery of photographs by ethnographer Charles Fréger, who trekked across Europe in search of the archetypal Wild Mann. The author is hesitant to put too fine a point on it, as well, so I am reluctant to be pedantic either but dressing up and the associated rituals (and though perhaps not to vouchsafe a bountiful harvest or secure favour from the elder gods) seems suspended somewhere between cosplay and national garb. Rather than being disdainful, I think that there is surely something in the ceremony and associates that transcends fandom or avid re-enactors. What do you think? Are we guilty of chauvinism to dismiss partakers as engaging in a weekend hobby? Be sure to check out the entire gallery of bizarre and transformative regalia.

quasi modo, desperado

Oslo’s City Hall (Olso rådhus)—perhaps most recognisable as the venue for the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony—also boosts a grand carillon that’s been chiming away the hour with musical intermezzo for quite a few years already. Through the end of May, the belfry will ringing out David Bowie and Motörhead songs to be added to the daily performance. Sadly, one can be certain that more immortal classics, like Tequila Sunrise and Hotel California, will be forthcoming repertoire with the passing of Glenn Frey. This is a touching tribute on the part of the kingdom’s capital, but 2016 is starting to wear out its welcome and will have to really work in over-drive to make amends.  RIP

bandwidth and broomsticks

Archivists and students of modern history—which I think reinforces that strange feeling of being ungrounded, of something being just out of reach because it happened prior to the spread of the internet’s meticulous and totum pro parte record-keeping—are finding that the teletext pages, the subspace of the airwaves, were also encoded and can be teased out of VHS recordings.
This service, which reaches back to the early 1970s, was invented in the UK but has apparently been phased out entirely by most broadcasters but is still quite prominently featured and utilized on German stations, but the technology remains in place, as it’s the carrier-signal for closed-captions as well—as the notices, headlines, weather, score-cards, schedules, page after page (“magazines”) of programme descriptions and supplemental material provided have been supplanted by the advent of the World Wide Web—which the scheme rather previsioned and anticipated, at least in popularity and accessibility as formatting and compatibility issues tended towards compartmentalization. Recovering this ephemeral—even though parallel and complimentary to what’s on the television in most cases, I think it’s nonetheless a fascinating little snap-shot of the everyday and pushes back the wayback machine by at least sixteen years.