Wednesday 3 October 2018

tag der deutschen einheit

To meditate a bit on Reunification Day, I went to the next village over, Hermannsfeld (previously), the first settlement just across the former border and visited the preserved ruin of a patrol tower (Grenzturm—elsewhere) and peace Cross (Weltfriedenskreuz—the inset lettering reads “may peace reign”) erected a top the Dachsberg.
Though surely not unsafe but surprisingly accessible, I was discouraged—owning to the fact that was by myself—from exploring too deep into the sublevel and it the tower itself, there was a chronology of World War II and DDR-Zeit and one could go up higher in the tower but again—out of caution, I didn’t think I could manage the heavy hatch and balance myself on the stairs, so I just peeked inside.
The Day of German Unity (Tag der Deutschen Einheit—not really the commemoration of der Deutsche Wiedervereinigung, though sometimes used interchangeably especially as a political signal like referring to the former East collectively as die neue Bundesländer, as goal had been realised previously) marks the formal accession to the terms of agreement in 1990.
Alternatives for the holiday were considered including the fall of the Berlin Wall in November of the previous year, but as that momentous event coincided with the German Fateful Day, marking a host of dreadful and pivotal happenings, this other administrative occasion was selected instead.

tarpaulin

It was a decade ago on this day that US President George HW Bush signed into law the Emergency Economic Stabilisation Act of 2008 with the provision for the rescue scheme of purchasing toxic assets and making distressed financial institutions flush with cash called the Troubled Asset Relief Programme (TARP), as proposed by then Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson.
The plan to bailout the banks and dull any painful consequences from their avarice had not curried much public favour nor did the covert and discretionary manner in the administration of the aide instil confidence that we all wouldn’t be trotte down the same path again. Though we can source the sentiment at least back to the speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr with “socialism for the rich and free enterprise for the poor,” the passage of the law did inspire a few choice turns of phrases and meditations on how paradoxically the aim of capitalism is to escape its bonds and the observation that the intervention allows corporations to “privatize profits and to socialise losses.”

Tuesday 2 October 2018

thumbnails

As his contribution for the Istanbul Design Biennial, artist Kerim Bayer, drawing from his extensive collection of maps and charts, decontextualized over five thousand snippets of terrain to create an atlas of atlases.
Images are selected and arranged at random to inspire people to think about what it means for information to be deconstructed, almost like the art of a miniaturist given the standard range of devices and representations, and elevated not as a key but data as an aesthetic of its own. Learn more at the link above where each cropped section is sort of a legend collapsed on itself, each primed to expand and fill the whole space.

bรผrgewald

It’s bad enough that the majority of human history is myopic and making a public declaration of it seems even worse—one shouldn’t be rewarded for being “self-aware” indiscriminately.
Consigning a small remnant of a primeval wood outside of Kรถln to axe to expand a lignite extraction operation seems incredibly short-sighted—saying that Germany’s immediate energy needs outweigh the patch of twelve thousand year old Hambacher Forest, home to a unique ecosystem and archaeological sites that have never been properly assessed. Protesters have occupied the forest in tree houses in order to protect it for the past six years but have recently been evicted by police, and activists and some panel members on the coal company’s board of directors (which own the land) believe any decision should be deferred until the terms of Germany’s strategy for withdrawing from the mining business altogether are finalised.

Monday 1 October 2018

mean streets

In 1876, journalist and social activist Adolphe Smith and photographer John Thomson undertook an unprecedented ethnographic study in documenting—with pictures and in depth interviews the poor of London, as Kuriositas relates.   The highly successful and best-selling book that was the product of their investigations stunned the upper classes and prompted the creation of some foundations and charitable institutions as a social safety net that helped to lift at least some out of the cycle of poverty was published as Street Life of London, released episodically beginning in February of 1877, and has been curated and released in 2012 into the public domain by the London School of Economics. Learn more and find a whole gallery of compelling images with an accompanying story about the people depicted at the links above.

apoplectic

A Syrian artist and activist, known only as Saint Hoax, debuts his latest performance piece called MonuMental—an inflatable tank with the bust of Donald Trump crowning the turret—is menacingly marauding through the streets of Beirut. Part of an overarching theme exploring how celebrity is a crisis of character, Saint Hoax hopes to reveal the underlying pathos that contrasts public faรงades. Learn more at Hyperallergic at the link above.

glissando

Digging into the discography of Scott Bradlee’s and his interpretation of the American Song Book, Miss Cellania treats us to a very jazzy merging of George Gershwin’s 1924 Rhapsody in Blue and Queen’s 1975 suite from A Night at the Opera. A talented composer and arranger, Bradlee is also a frequent collaborator with the rotating musical collective Postmodern Jukebox, an initiative he founded in 2011, the same year as he created this musical number, and has since amassed a huge following, attracted guest artists and has held concert tours, performing contemporary popular music in the style of Big Band, swing, cabaret, Dixieland, ragtime or doo-wop.

pdrc—you know, passive daytime radiative cooling

Slashdot refers us to a team of researchers at work at the Columbia School of Engineering who are developing a paint-like coating that can be applied to virtually any surface—rockets on re-entry, cars, pavements, roofs and entire buildings, that radiates and reflects heat far more efficiently than the pigments that we are used to without relying on cooling systems that ultimately contribute more to nascent heat and climate change.
These so called hierarchically porous polymers contain nanoscale cavities that redistributes heat along the surface, multiplying the effect of colour as a thermal mitigator alone and prevent energy from settling in and causing overheating that diverts resources to restoring a balance and demonstrate universal potential—especially for those areas heating up too quickly where traditional air-conditioning is impractical and a drain.