panorama

Among many other anniversaries of the great and good, on this day, as our faithful chronicler informs, in 1937, the Golden Gate Bridge linking the San Francisco Bay with the Pacific Ocean, was opened to pedestrian traffic—the longest and tallest suspension bridge in the world at the time.

First conceived in 1916, ambitious engineer and pontifex Joseph Baermann Strauss (1870 – 1938) answered the call having proposed a similar railroad bridge to cross the Bering Strait and connect Alaska with Russia and oversaw the construction of some four hundred draw bridges in a major infrastructure overhaul, and in collaboration (which ended unfortunately acrimoniously) with Charles Alton Ellis, completed it in four years (see also). During the week-long opening ceremony, more than two hundred thousand visitors crossed the mile-long span or foot or on roller skates. The particular shade of vermilion is called international orange, chosen to compliment the bridge’s natural surroundings and improve its visibility in fog, and is a unique hue differing from aerospace or safety orange.

font-size

Sets of letterpunches for type-setters had traditional descriptive names (see also) for presses on the continent, the Far East, the British Isles and the United States. Though point-size varied over time and there’s been more harmonisation among periodical publishers over the years rather than greater divergence of standards. A two-point typeface is called in the American system a “Saxon” and in German “Non Plus Ultra” or “Viertelpetit,” 2½ a “Norse” and “Microscopique” in French and German, three-points an “Excelsior” in the USA, a Minikin in the UK, Diamant in France and Brilliant in Germany, 5½ is an Agate in the American system and Ruby in the British one and so on. Six-points in Nonpareil, seven a Minion (Kolonel auf Deutsch), eight a Brevier, nine Bourgeois (though Petit-romain or Gaillarde in France) with some of the more common sizes being named Pica (12), the English (14), Great Primer (18, 1½ Cicero in Germany), Paragon (20), the Double English (28), the Double Columbian (32) and 48-point font called the French Canon, Gros-canon or Kleine Missal.

� or code point blank

Specials or replacement characters are shunted to the very end of Unicode allocations to act as a substitute for an otherwise unrepresentable glyph (see previously here and here). The garbled text that can result from bad decoding and false rendering is referred to mojibake (文字化け). Though the effects are most catastrophic across different writing systems, languages that use the extended Latin alphabet assigned the character set “Western” or ISO-8859-1 encounter problems as well with the Icelandic praise for outstanding hospitality þjóðlöð transmitted as the unintelligible mess þjóðlöð or some other character string likely to break one’s computer.

zones of immaterial pictorial sensibility

Via Super Punch and vis-à-vis the enthrallment and repulsion that the markets are experiencing for tokens—fungible or otherwise—we really enjoyed learning about these performative pieces from Nouveau réalisme artist and judo master Yves Klein (*1928 - †1962) called Zone de Sensibilité Picturale Immatérielle, who wanted his patrons to experience the void, offering vacant spaces in exchange for gold. The buyer received a certificate of ownership. Eight such invisible works were sold, some with elaborate rituals including throwing the gold in the Seine and burning the bill-of-sale.

6x6

moulted: people are crafting miniature monsters out of discarded cicada shells  

fantastica: music from outer space by Hollywood composer Russell Garcia (*1916 - †2011)  

project daedalus: the venerable British Interplanetary Society, founded in 1933—once chaired by Sir Arthur C. Clark (previously) 

 cais das artes: a retrospective look at some of the landmark projects of recently departed architect Paulo Mendes da Rocha (*1928)  

greenwood: a look back at the Tulsa massacre (previously) and race riots as we approach its centenary at the end of the month  

five-octave vocal range: dolphin responds with glee to Mariah Carey’s high note

i have a certain amount of homework to do and i’d like to get it done on time

Via r/Obscure Media, we are directed to the 1958 McGraw Hill educational short The Snob about pushing away friends and working on oneself with a bunch of cavorting middle-aged teens. Sarah’s just too high-hat, but it’s hard to frame these personality types in a contemporary, intergenerational milieu—who’s the model adolescent, and what was perceived as snobbery is internalised as social anxiety. “All the kids who get by on apple-polishing will be there too and I don’t like them!”

one year gone

One year on from the violent murder of George Floyd, we are reacquainted with the award-winning cover for de Volksrant newspaper’s Saturday Supplement from Noma Bar utilising negative space to illustrate people rallying in the streets over this injustice and inhumanity.  Indisputably a harsh and discomforting reality that many are made to cope with on a daily basis but a sobering and eye-opening experience for all.  Thanks to Duck Soup for the timeline of events that occurred in the aftermath of Floyd’s death and their enduring impact.

stack overflow

Released on this this day in cinemas in 1995, the Keanu Reeves and Dolph Lundgren dystopian science-fiction adaptation of the eponymous William Ford Gibson cyberpunk novel, the film takes place in 2021 with global population deeply and irretrievably engaged with an augmented reality internet which has a debilitating long-term effect called “nervous attenuation syndrome” (NAS) and transfer and transmission of data is closely controlled by mega-corporations who enforce their hegemony through the mafia.

Reeves’ character is a mnemonic courier discreetly transports data, avoiding traffic on the worldwide web, with an implant in his brain, and is entrusted with the safekeeping and eventually uploading into the public domain documents that reveal the corporations’ connections with organised crime and the computer virus that will return power and autonomy to the people, teaming up with the Lo-Teks under the leadership of J-Bone, played by Ice-T, a mysterious female projection of an omnipresent digital assistant and a genetically enhanced dolphin with abilities to break any encryption.