Tuesday 10 July 2018

highlighting the remarkable

I know it’s an advertising campaign but this series, found via Swiss Miss, from German marker manufacturer Stabilo takes a highlighter to historic photographs to help call-out the overlooked contributions of women to science and governance is pretty enlightening.

There’s just a few images in this print-run but surely there’s a lot of untapped potential out there. First Lady Edith Wilson, who assumed the roles and responsibilities of the US president after her husband was debilitated with a stroke in October 1919 (prior to the Presidential Succession Act and even before universal suffrage in the US) is included, as well as the pictured Austrian- Swiss physicist Lise Meither, whose celebrated career and academic recognition is overshadowed by the failure of the Nobel Prize committee to acknowledge her essential role in the discovery of nuclear fission in the 1930s.

Monday 9 July 2018

distracted boyfriend

English Rococo painter and portraitist Sir Joshua Reynolds is perhaps best remembered for his commission depicting celebrated theatre manager, playwright and Shakespearian company actor David Garrick. Reynolds’ Garrick between Tragedy and Comedy from 1761 and displayed at Waddesdon Manor in Buckinghamshire is an allegory of the Renaissance romancing of Hercules’ uncomfortable choice between pleasure over virtue and seems quite memetic indeed. How would you caption these characters? Do let us know.

master negotiator


saltern

For his upcoming coffee table edition of Habitat, Augsburger crop-dusting photographer and graphic designer Tom Hegen, we learn via My Modern Met, has scoured the Earth capturing one of humanity’s oldest forms of environmental interventions—harvesting salts and other minerals through evaporation. The intermediate and legacy effects of these pools and ponds yield vibrant and brilliant abstractions from a privileged perspective—hosting high concentrations of different halophilic algae and bacteria at various stages that looks like a Mondrian composition, and hopefully stirs the observer to consider our intrusions and mediations in a different manner as well.   Be sure to visit the links above more explosively colourful landscaped gradients.

spidey-sense

For hundreds of years people have observed the phenomena of ballooning or kiting behaviour by small spiders that allow them to launch themselves and glide for hundreds of kilometres over land and sea, suspended aloft on gossamer leads.
Even the German term for “Indian summer,” Altweiber-sommer, references the season when the winds fill with errant webs, but for nearly as long as people have noticed this mode of transport, we learn via Dave Log, something has also struck naturalists as aerodynamically incomplete about the explanation that they were just haplessly bobbing along. Researchers, experimenting on past suppositions, are discovering that spiders are not only harnessing the wind but also electrostatic forces to take to the skies, steering their course by sensing and negotiating the Earth’s inchoate magnetic field and the discharge of lightning.