6x6

mixed media: Basa Funahara’s brilliant masking tape paintings

travelling matte: beautiful vintage postcards displayed on antique luggage

brightest london is best reached by underground: a look at some of the women artists who designed vintage Tube advertisements

a wave of whales: a campaign to inundate Japanese embassies worldwide with art and essays in opposition to their resumption of whaling

the rotten eggs: punk nursey rhymes that are your usual children’s musical fare

chime-in any time: Canadian radio observatory detects more mysterious repeating bursts 

it’s a gif to be simple, it’s a gif to be kind

Twisted Sifter treats to a small gallery of animations that elegantly and immediately illustrate how others might connect the same constellations of dots or interpret their relative motions in completely different and idiosyncratic ways. Though the specimen speaks for itself, there is also a couple nice articles linked at the source explaining what’s going on in terms bias and what’s called statistical underdetermination. Same otherwise.

showboat diplomacy

Keen to prop up and perpetuate its own fracking industry, the US ambassador to Germany (previously) issued threat of sanctions for domestic companies involved in and supporting the Nord Stream 2 pipeline project.
It is feared that Germany would become too dependent on Moscow and the importance of energy-transit countries, like Ukraine, would have less influence in the region. Existing infrastructure with cosmetic modifications to the pilot-lights can be made to heat homes with hydrogen, rather than drilled natural gas, so I suspect it’s all a last, desperate ploy to hold on to a baronet in the end, sort of like fracking above. The warning of the ambassador, whose been quoted in the media as supportive of “empowering” the ascendancy of right wing governments in Europe and of academies that are “safe-spaces” for fostering hateful, small-mindedness are regarded as rather toothless and the German business sector thanks the ambassador for the public interruption of reading his tweets out loud—delivered in his own voice, like the man who appointed him who happens to be currently under investigation for being a Russian asset.

daytrip: ohrdruf

H and I took a drive over the snowy Rennsteig (previously here and here) to visit Oberhof, the winter sports resort village but due to a ski biathlon happening this weekend, most the facilities weren’t accessible to the public and it was pretty crowded so we went on to explore the nearby small town of Ohrdruf—which turned out to be an astoundingly busy place. As an adolescent Johann Sebastian Bach resided there with his older brother Joh- Christoph who exposed him to organ music. From 1913 until 1916, bisque Kewpie dolls were made there and one can find moulds embedded in older façades—apparently but I failed to locate any—we’ll be back I’m sure.

Things get a bit bleak with the wars—a POW encampment on the edge of the city during World War I is converted into a concentration camp for World War II, though significantly, it was the first to be liberated by Allied forces and helped inform the wider world about the horrors carried out.
Shortly before that take-over, the original Wagon of Compiègne—the train carriage where the first and second Armistices were signed—was transported there from Berlin for safekeeping but was destroyed in an air raid. After the war, the site of the military training area was razed and command and control was assumed by the Soviet army until 1991, with their headquarters in the pictured baroque Schloß Ehrenstein. Afterwards, we went on to take a look at the nearby ruined Cistercian cloister complex Georgenthal. This structure with the impressive rosette window is from the twelfth century and originally was used as an infirmary before being transformed into a granary—presently used as a lapidarium, a place to exhibit monuments and architectural artefacts from the former abbey.

ohrwurm oder kleiner hai

Though there is not a definitive pedigree for the children’s tune that has gone viral and memetic for all its various tributes and celebrity renditions and it is believed to have been a traditional campfire song, but it’s strange that we’ve been here before—a decade ago—and have conveniently put the experience out of our heads, and was first popularised in 2007 as Little Shark by German artist alemuel. The beat in this slightly darker version (see bottom video, try playing both at the same time) of the earworm of a song is closer to the theme from Jaws and involves a baby shark devouring a swimmer but it’s essentially the same piece (although the reinforcement of gender stereotypes within the pleurotrematic extended family are also kind of disturbing) that reached a critical mass just within the past few months.

field notes

Though the verdict is still out on whether plants can vocalise, it seems that a research team has demonstrated that flowers act as ears and can distinguish the buzz of an approaching pollinator over the general din and sweeten its nectar. The less conclusive part of the study looked into whether plants communicated distress or well-being at ranges above what humans can hear and how this might be interpreted by arboreal creatures and insects.
Humans are being humbled all the time and we have far more empathy for the natural world and our place in than we did in the past—even a decade ago, most regarded animals as having no interior lives or feelings, but as the latter smacks a bit of the pseudoscientific methods that probably set back our collective willingness to examine and consider plant communications, it’s probably a bit of a treacherous claim that we are not quite ready for. For better or worse, regardless of the veracity and rigour, sometimes we are just not receptive to ideas that can change our world view, like the parable of Clever Hans, a stunt that set back the cause of animal rights significantly but no we not only know that bees can do simple arithmetic but that plants do communicate to and socialise with their neighbours through chemical signals and via a complex and poorly understood network that connects whole forests through their roots.

™

Grifter-in-Chief and accomplished beneficiary of the rentier economic model is poised to reform regulation at the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO, which accrues more funding the more patents it grants) to be more favourable for fellow parasitic copyright trolls.
Article One, Section Eight of the US constitution vests in congress the power “to promote the progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.” Reanimating the sort of legal framework that allowed such ransoming and trouncing on creativity, playing very loose with the concepts of invention and originality—which obviously hurts all of us—is a disturbing change of course and bears more public scrutiny and intervention.

404: page not found

The always engrossing Things Magazine refers us to a quite excellent essay composed by the consummate Kate Wagner (previously) on the manner in which the old grifter nostalgia is cannibalising and repackaging the old, aspirational internet and selling it back to us at a premium.
For the sake of sleekness and convenience, we’ve relinquished a lot of our agency for something that was not inevitable yet a natural consequence of the capitalist model made virtual perfect and instantaneous by ghettoization and other forms of corralling. The interregnal period between the transition from the scientific, professional internet to the interwebs of throttling and objectification is characterised as the age of Vaporware, Vaporwave—referring to items that are prototyped and test-marketed but never released—references Karl Marx’ (the thinker being the original arbiter of the free exchange of ideas—advocating that when “society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic”) other pronouncement “All that is solid melts into air.”