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filling the frame: long-exposure photographs taken at a distance of the torii of Japan by Ronny Behnert 

kartellamt: Germany proposes law requiring interoperability to break up tech monopolies and hurdles to data portability

shortlisted: this year’s finalists for Comedy Wildlife Photo—see previously

button power: a century of pin-back badges as cultural iconography

playlist: enjoy the latest mixtape from JWZ and DNA Lounge

a splash of colour: artist Camille Walala on public works for London’s Mural Festival

wakon-yōsai: Meiji Restoration-era woodblocks present biographies of Western artists and innovators—see previously

i don’t want to live on this planet anymore: superlative atmospheric and astronomical images from an annual competition—via Miss Cellania’s Links

september 2020

Via Laughing Squid, here is more drone footage of the fiery orange skies—which many automated lenses and filters try to correct for to the frustration of those trying to urgently document and communicate the apocalypse—over San Francsico in a short clip set to the musical accompaniment of Hans Zimmer’s soundscape of Blade Runner: 2049. I wonder for how many more iterations that that dystopian sequel will be advanced—2099… Many more frightening images at the link up top, juxtaposed with this Los Angeles montage from earlier this summer.

deceptive cadence

Back during the early 1980s composer William Basinski heard a snatch of music on the airwaves and quickly recorded the melody that it inspired and filed it away for use in a later project. Sitting forgotten until the summer of 2001, Basinski rediscovers the recording and plays it back.
The tape, however, was old and brittle and playing it back, it began to disintegrate both visually and audibly—Basinski, fascinated, captured its vanishing. Nearly finished remixing his Disintegration Loops at his New York studio on 11 September, his epic became an elegy. Fast-forward to the summer of 2019, Robin Sloan just acquainted with the moving orchestral piece—we discover courtesy of Things Magazine—had a neural network interpret the work with some surprising results and invites others to listen and contribute to his Integration Loop project.

blick von williamsburg, brooklyn, auf manhattan, 11. september 2001

Captured by photojournalist Thomas Höpker with five people sunning, relaxing along the shore of the East River in the foreground while a cloud of smoke billows over the World Trade Center in the background—seemingly oblivious is not the callous portrayal that controversy after it was first shown to the public in 2005 as part of a retrospective of fifty of his works but is a chance juxtaposition caught at just the right moment.
View the whole frame here—respecting the artist’s rights and the fact that it again seems provocative without context. The composition has been compared to works like Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s 1558 Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (that is actually a trope and the subject of several paintings at the time—not of Icarus’ actual crash but of the 1560s). Höpker was en route to Manhattan, having abandoned his car and proceeded on foot, continuing to take pictures.

overseas logogram

The peripatetic polyglots at the helm over at Language Log direct us to a host of for the nonce Sinographs from Hong Kong which could be described as neologism—rather neographisms or visual portmanteaux inventing characters by mixing the component parts and meaning-bearers from different glyphs to form something nuanced and paraliteral.  The pictured example seems to borrow selectively from 鎮靜 (zhènjìng, that is combined calm, poised) but taking on a new context in this form as equanimous and not un-dispassionate, unshaken.
As one reader commented, this zhìzào (制造, making characters) is reminiscent of the 1987 publication originally to be entitled Mirror to Analyse the World: The Century’s Final Volume by artist Xu Bing but was instead ultimately called after the Chinese term tiān shū that itself originally was reserved for divinely inspired writing (akin to speaking in tongues) but came to signify gibberish in “A Book from the Sky.” Very much up to the interpretation of the reader, the bound edition limited to a single print run, the book is composed with a set of four-thousand characters (comparable to the lexicon of modern Chinese writing) and imitate natural language on the page in terms of diversity and frequency but are wholly made up, nonsense words, as if a book in a Latin script were filled with Wingdings. The above banners, however, have a meaning and message that can be puzzled out.

morgenrot schlecht wetter droht

Kottke curates a growing selection of arresting photographs of American western skies tinged an unreal red by uncontrolled wildfires fuelled and made more intense by climate change and global warming that is a direct consequence of human activity and mismanagement. These images were captured during the day, not at dawn or dusk though the smoke blocking out the sun might suggest otherwise. Abendrot, schlecht Wetterbot.

my life got flipped—turned upside down

From the always enthralling friend of the blog, Nag on the Lake, we learn that the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air is being rebooted as a hard drama, the news coming just in time for the just in time for the thirtieth anniversary of the show’s first broadcast on NBC on this day, according to our faithful chronicler, in 1990. The two-season arc won’t be available for streaming until next year, however.

the lesser apocalypse

Referred to as the above with the conviction it was punishment from God alternatively for the Ottomans’ perceived inhospitality toward the Eastern Christians or for the Turks tolerating them, a powerful earthquake, with its epicentre in the Sea of Marmara, and resulting tsunami devastated Constantinople on this day in 1509. Damage and death estimates vary widely but probably took ten thousand lives and destroyed homes and infrastructure, and reportedly Hagia Sophia (previously) withstood the quake virtually unscathed, only the plaster that had been used to cover the Byzantine mosaics was shaken off the walls, revealing the Christian imagery beneath. The month and a half of aftershocks that followed did not cause significant damage but delayed recovery efforts and rebuilding.