artist depiction

Paleofuture recommends a new documentary on a trio of artists who while they might have been hitherto mostly nameless have played an oversized role in helping the public to imagine and envision not only space stations and orbiting colonies (previously) but also far off worlds that don’t quite neatly resolve.
Commissioned by NASA, the retro-futurist, Mid-Century Modern style of Chesley Bonestell, Don Davis, Rick Guidice has gone a long way to influence and inform our dreams and expectations of space travel and is a good heuristic tool for talking about science communication and outreach in general. Make some time to get to know better the artists who’ve helped engineer aspirations and imaginations. See a preview and read an excerpt of an interview at the link up top.

free to use & reuse

Via the always resourceful Kottke’s Quick Links, we are directed once again to the growing archives of the Library of Congress (previously), whose curatorial staff—like any of us—appreciates a good image of the feline variety (go here to read about proto-meme-maker and cat fancier Harry Whittier Frees) and expects the readership to put these cats back out into circulation. This is also a good gateway and point of departure for exploring the stacks and discovering more of the library’s collections.

no laughing matter

Contributing to the growing list of what can’t be unseen, we are treated—rather subjected to the terrifying perspective of a potential next meal that from beneath and turned around that makes proximity to a Great White Shark an even scarier, layered prospect, owing to the unsettling pareidolic effect of finding anatomy within anatomy.

atomic blonde

Singer, actor and animal-welfare spokesperson with a decades’ long recording and screen career, Doris Day (*1922 – †2019) passed away yesterday at the ripe old age of ninety-seven. Here is Miss Day—courtesy of Nag on the Lake—belting out a number about Geiger counters and the comparing the feeling of being in love to radiation-sickness during an audition for a variety radio show called the Hour of Enchantment in the 1949 Technicolor musical My Dream is Yours. Aside from showcasing Day’s talent, the film is also remembered for extended, animated dream-sequence, with cameos of Looney Tunes characters and directed by Friz Freleng.

wampum

Via Colossal, we are introduced to the impressive portfolio of First Nations artist Ruth Cuthand through her 2009 series of beaded, quillwork mats that depict Old World diseases that trade brought to the indigenous populations of the Americas, with the media of inexpensive beads referencing their high value as a barter item and representing their transactional relationship, accepted in exchange for pelts and land. Trade itself, aside from its expected trade-offs of convenience over tradition and a less than fair prevailing-rate, became a disease vector for these viruses, decimating many tribes ahead of the colonisation by Europeans. More to explore and reflect on at the links above.

administrative segregation

Acknowledging that upwards of eighty-thousand individuals in the United States alone find themselves remanded to solitary confinement on any given day, this decade-old participatory project—via Things Magazine—takes solicitations for open sky visions and images from the incarcerated and attempts to pair them with volunteer arts and photographers to deliver. In addition to sending the composition to prison where it can decorate the bare walls of the isolated, the range of requests conflated with the attributed catalogue of memories and hope paint an incredibly honest and exposed portrait of the imprisoned.

go-between

Arguably when technology so pervades and supersaturates markets, it loses its identity as an industry in the sense we want to attribute and the speaking of a sector becomes meaningless but it seems there’s a certain nuance to this departure when this declassification is not in service to progress but rather for the sake of much more retrograde forces that we’d do well appreciate.
Technology does not disrupt all industries has made forays into in the same ways and there are undoubtedly accrued benefits in new applications and practises. Like with other aspects of human enterprise, be it professionally pious or profane, the cutting edge also has embraced the role of middleman, quickly realising that that’s where the profits and protective inertia lie. Disruption only prised open the path towards democratisation and lowering barriers to market entry for a brief and glorious moment before disruption became deskilling and another means towards estrangement and alienation. Technology, rather than championing the momentum that makes people self-sufficient, pairs the slightly less precarious with the slightly more, without the leverage of experience and expertise, and plays score-keeper for one’s reputation as a consumer and service-provider. Exploitation comes draped in convenience or we are at the mercy of the constellation of gossipping peripherals that were formerly perfectly content to chug forward without supervision, intervention or input.

nugrybauti

It’s funny how we fail sometimes to appreciate the idioms of our own language until we see them obsessed over by outsiders, like discovering a new cuisine or particular vintage—and we were visited by one such example (courtesy the always excellent Nag on the Lake) in the title term, which in Lithuanian means going astray whilst hunting for mushrooms (grybavimas).
Apparently a common enough occurrence to merit its own word—though the Lithuanian language affords such poetic licence—it also means figuratively losing the thread of a conversation or going off on a tangent. The recollection cited brings the word to life, but my search for more information was necessarily limited by my lack of insight into the language—but apparently by dint of its frequency in automotive advertising copy, it can also connote “off-roading.”