flag day

On this day in 1965, the Canadian Red Ensign—a rather unremarkable design approved for use when it was desirable to fly a distinctively Canadian flag—was officially replaced with the Maple Leaf (l’Unifolié) though the symbol had been used as a patriotic emblem since the mid-1800s in song, minted on coins and for regimental badges. Though the number and arrangement of the points on the leaf at one time corresponded with the number of provinces and territories, the design was chosen after wind-tunnel testing demonstrated that that particular arrangement was least blurry at gale-force conditions.
Adoption involved heated debate with much wrangling over the need to fly something other than the Union Flag which seemed to be working fine for everyone else and one early proposed version featured a blue border in accordance with the country’s motto A mari usque ad mare—from sea to sea.

draw me like one of your french girls

Through the lens of a controversial announcement on the recent acquisition of a Picasso “The Girl with the Red Beret and Pompom”—which is one of several depictions of the artist’s mistress and model Marie-Thérèse Walter—that the new owner will rename it Annabel after his Mayfair nightclub where it will be displayed, Hyperallergic takes a look at historic examples of the appropriation of works of art by non-artists, driven perhaps by the desire to give an otherwise unknown or forgotten figure (though not the case in the former) a backstory.
Mona Lisa (the wife of the merchant Francesco del Giocondo, whose surname happens to mean “the happy one,” like her French title, La Joconde, the jocund—referencing her enigmatic expression) is an interesting case as she was a historical figure—according to most theories—but was only identified centuries after its execution. What’s now known commercially as Whistler’s Mother was called by the artist “Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1” and while it is his mother sitting for the portrait, she was reportedly a last-minute understudy for another model who couldn’t make it, and Whistler never intended his “arrangement” to become an iconic representation of motherhood. I suppose it is a little pedantic to insist that we not use the broadly accepted colloquial names for works of art as consumers of it but it does seem a big presumption and imposition to actually give something a whole new name contrary to its identity out of narcissism. What do you think? I don’t feel that possession entitles one the privilege to rebrand the creation of another when no contractual arrangement exists between artist and patron.

key frames

We enjoyed very much being introduced to the Madrid-extract currently based in Toronto named Pablo Lozano. Having matriculated with London’s Golden Wolf animation studio and worked for clients such as Disney, Adult Swim and a couple of prominent sports apparel companies, Lozano is now finding his fortunes as a free-agent and a free-lancer. A key frame, incidentally, in filmmaking or animation is a rendering that defines the start and end points of a smooth transition. Be sure to check out more of Lozano’s personal work and commissions at the link up top.

6x6

screen time: a curated collection of flip-books that delivered movies that fit in the palm of one’s hand a century before smart phones

star wars, nothing but star wars: Meco Monardo’s disco remakes of Hollywood film scores

first ladies: gender reassignments for all the US presidents

blue planet: stunning underwater photography competition winners and honourable-mentions

dot-matrix: computer-generated artwork from 1969 by Frederick Hammersley

virtue signalling: White House budget proposal (again) is very disaspirational and sets the US even further behind in the sciences

odonym or diplomatic cul-de-sac

Via Tyler Cowen’s always engrossing Marginal Revolution, we find ourselves acquainted with the Cold War-era brinksmanship that’s currently undergoing a resurgence in the form of insulting street-naming. Though the provocation is probably best exemplified by Moscow’s proposal to re-designate the square where the US embassy is located as “1 North American Dead End,” Russia isn’t acting alone and not on the offensive.
A month prior, the US reflagged the block of Wisconsin Avenue in Washington, DC that hosts the Russian mission as Boris Nemtsov Plaza, after the opposition leader that was gunned down just outside the Kremlin in 2015. Moreover former Super Powers are not the only Titanics fighting over one iceberg—with Beijing having suggested to re-name the street passing in front of America’s diplomatic headquarters after Edward Snowden. While there’s enough petulance to go around, there’s apparently also sometimes a few overtures towards bridge-building—as it were—with Ankara calling the address of the US embassy “Olive Branch” ahead of a scheduled visit by the—as it were—top diplomat of the Trump regime, a rather backhanded welcome as it is the codename for the offensive against the US-backed Kurdish forces in Syria. It is doubtful anything good comes of that and the rebuke at large is bound to continue.

ux

Tip of the hat to The Awesomer for directing our attention to a group of retronauts at Squirrel Monkey who imagine how the user-experience would be for contemporary social media platforms (see other nostalgic examples here), applications and personal assistants had they had their debut in the early to mid 1990s.
How would interacting with Siri (which isn’t the backronym Speech Interpretation & Recognition Interface incidentally but rather the namesake of the Menlo Park Stanford Research Institute founded in 1946 under the auspices of the university to attract computation talent to the area and more directly as a spin-off from a DARPA programme) for instance be if it required switching out floppy discs and operating at a low baud rate?

secretum de thesauro experimentorum ymaginationis hominum

Having missed out on the earlier furore and excitement over speculation that Star Wars battleship designs might have been inspired by the work of a late medieval Italian draughtsman, we appreciated how Super Punch brought us up to speed.
While the pareidolia of seeing a fully-operational Death Star escorted by an array of Star Destroyers (plus earlier conceptions of the Imperial and Rebel fleets) is lure enough on its own, the imagination and career of the fifteenth-century Venetian surgeon and engineer, Giovanni Fontana (Johannes de Fontana), is pretty engrossing as well. Though only illustrations have survived the ages, Fontana invented and built functioning prototypes of what we’d recognise as the bicycle, the magic lantern, the torpedo plus many innovations in hydraulics and trigonometry and cryptography. Fontana’s overarching goal was to recreate those machines and devices of great antiquity, the stuff of legend, and some see a similarity between his style of illustration and the baffling pictures and text of the mysterious Voynich manuscript.