8x8

home-grown: a design studio in Brooklyn grows gourds in moulds to create an alternative to disposable cups

hidden in plain sight: Greenwich’s secret nuclear reactor

mea culpa: social media turns to television advertising in an attempt to win back users’ trust—we’ve seen these on German prime-time too

the colour of pomegranates: rediscovering the suppressed films of director Sergei Parajanov

quiet skies: the US Transportation Security Agency directs air marshals to arbitrarily monitor frequent flyers

an der schönen blauen donau: a time-lapse of a bean germinating into a plant, accompanied by the waltz

king cotton: an art exhibit, referencing the Vegetable Lamb of Tartary, disabuses notions of American exceptionalism

clickbait: a shop sells tee-shirts that purposefully enrage pedants by getting movie quotes and titles slightly wrong, invoking Cunningham’s Law

four panel format

On this day fifty years ago, cartoonist Charles Schultz introduced the first African American character in his nationally syndicated comic strip Peanuts (previously), Franklin Armstrong.
In the wake of the assassination of Dr Rev Martin Luther King Jr and the general tumult of 1968, a school teacher in Los Angeles named Harriet Glickman began a chain of correspondence with the cartoonist, asking him to bring in a black person into the cast. Franklin’s appearances were sporadic until Schulz received a letter from a newspaper editor to the effect that they had no objection to having a black character but implored Schultz not to portray them in school together—which advanced Franklin to the head of the class, seated at the desk in front of Peppermint Patty. The previous year, Schultz introduced an occasional classmate named José Peterson, of mixed Swedish and Mexican heritage, who was possibly the first non-pejorative portrayal of someone of Hispanic descent in comics.

sandbox

NASA has announced the winners of its assembled in-situ Centennial Challenge competition to design and deliver advanced three-dimensional printed habitats for the Red Planet’s first colonists. The top honour goes to team Zopherus (we were team Marsha, one of the honourable-mentions, pictured above) whose construction concept strikes us as rather like the propagation cycle of a virus, with a lander scouting out an optimal print-area on the Martian surface and then deploying rovers to retrieve building materials to form a host of connected, modular units. Learn more and see conceptual demonstrations of the winner and runners-up at the link above, these picks being the second phase of a multi-year contest that commenced with exploring the technical viability of working with natural building materials (more here) in an arid and alien environment.

foley artists

Coudal Partners’ Fresh Signals directs our attention to the archives of Open Culture (with a nice preamble, segue worth indulging too) from earlier this year announcing that the BBC will make its library of sound effects available to all and can be downloaded, should one find a clever ringtone.
The collection is comprised of over sixteen thousands effects and audio samples that have been used and reused over the decades, and the network was motivated to share its library at the bidding of an organisation that cares for the elderly with dementia and Alzheimer’s disease in hopes that the familiar noises might trigger memories and strengthen new associations. Check out the archive for yourself here and let us know some of your resonant favourites.

das kleine fade gehirngefühl

We appreciated the distinct privilege of tagging along on Hyperallergic’s sojourn to the Outsider Art locus of Austria, the Maria Gugging Psychiatric Clinic on the outskirts of Vienna, known for its dedicated art therapy programme.
Unlike the Prinzhorn collection in Heidelberg that was began in the 1920s and hidden from the Nazis to prevent confiscation and destruction as degenerate art, the residents at Gugging were not encouraged to find creative outlets until the late 1950s when Doctor Leo Navratil (*1921 - † 2006) invited people under his care to express their feelings and state of mind through painting, emerging from the institute’s dark past during Nazi occupation which saw some of the most barbaric experimentation on patients. Having discovered many talented individuals within his empanelment, Navratil showcased artists in Viennese museums and galleries and went on to establish a permanent gallery and education centre on the campus in 1981 called Haus der Künstler. A separate pilgrimage, a visit to Gugging by Brian Eno and David Bowie informed the collaborators’ production strategy for the 1995 concept album 1. Outside. Read more about the artists and the institution at the link up top.

my beautiful laundrette

Our thanks to Plain Magazine for acquainting us with the portfolio of photographer Joshua Blackburn and his current obsession with the idiosyncrasies and common features of the estimated three hundred laundromats of London. Learn more about Coin-Op London and see a growing gallery at the links above.

fliteline

Dissolving and transferring the assets to its successor, on this day in 1958, Dwight D Eisenhower signed the National Aeronautics and Space Act into law, creating NASA out of its predecessor, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, which was primarily responsible for establishing US air supremacy during World War, as a wholly civil venture to promote exploration and peaceable application of space science.
The Advanced Research Products Agency (ARPA) and successor DARPA constituted earlier in the same year would continue to champion military applications of rocketry and telemetry for defensive and offensive drills and operations. Precipitated by America being caught nearly entirely off-guard by the USSR’s launch of the Sputnik satellite, the agency signalled the full faith and support of the government for advancing science for its own sake—even if the underlying motives themselves were not purely academic.

iot or dressed to the nines

Via Marginal Revolution, we’re given a not too nice taste of things to come in the form of a line of apparel that’s basically window-dressing for a brand loyalty programme—embedded chips that connect via Bluetooth to one’s digital devices monitor how often and where one goes with the clothes and accessories on.
People who buy the jeans, hoodies and fanny packs are incentivised to submit to tracking through an augmented reality experience, like past games, that allows participants to earn virtual tokens that somehow translate into discounts for more of this clothing brand and exclusive invitations to branded fashion shows, which strikes me as a little nauseating already. What do you think? The Internet of Things certainly has the potential to be innovative and help us make informed decisions about the use of finite resources, time and attention but this gimmick doesn’t seem to be leading us down the right path and I fear that there’s too much temptation to harness the vulnerable and tawdry (we’ve seen a lot of examples) rather than align with what’s truly smart.