думай иначе

Curated by the always interesting Things Magazine, we are finding ourselves quite capitvated with the visionary, revolutionary prototype computer system conceived and presented by Soviet computer scientist Dmitri Azrikan of the VNIITE (ВНИИТЭ, Всероссийский научно-исследовательский институт технической эстетики, All-Union Scientific Research Institute of Industrial Design) campus in Leningrad in 1987.
Never commercially available, the device known as Project SPHINX would nonetheless prefigure the smart homes of three decades later and ought to be a recognised precursor and would have been a major industry disruptor had we been ready for the idea of mobility and collaborative computing, with the design to integrate automation into domestic life and the work place with tele-conferencing capabilities as well for use as home entertainment, expandable memory modules, the redundancy to support several terminals and a remote control that could be used as a handheld device, different wireless components connected via radio waves, but the whole system dialled up to the rest of the world via modem. More technical specifications and more to explore at the links above.

gashlycrumb tinies

Noted macabre humourist and illustrator, Edward St John Gorey (*1925 - †2000, previously here and here) was also quite the fashion plate and his eye for style would have translated well to the rack and runway.
Though the overview focuses on costuming and his person sense of style it reinforces how all aspects of his the artist’s personality and outlets brought forward the anxieties and preoccupations (fantods—from the Welsh) of the Victorian and Edwardian Eras through unsettling, vaguely (or rather explicitly) menacing situations.

7x7

bathdoom: interior remodelling as a first-person shooter game

philosophical zombies: the Turing Test for AI consciousness

waste management: budget cuts are rubbishing recycling programmes and good intentions on the municipal level in the US and elsewhere, via Digg

das botenkind: a radio host who broadcasted for the US Army in West Berlin had her sobriquet translated as “Newsbabe”

human hoberman: an mesmerising synchronised dance on a slick floor

brick-and-mortar: gorgeous letterpress posters of artful arranged Lego reminiscent of printed circuit boards

lotus eaters: parrot junkies are having the poppy harvest in Madhya Pradesh

covalence

On this day (Old Style, 18 March 1869 on the Gregorian Calendar—it’s nice that this anniversary comes around again), one hundred fifty years ago, Professor Dmitri Mendeleev having previously formulated the Period Laws formally presented his Periodic Table as a way of arranging and understanding the elements to the Russian Chemical Society, titling his presentation The Dependence Between the Properties of the Atomic Weights, positing that the element arranged according to their mass exhibit an apparent periodicity of properties and to expect the discovery of yet unknown elements from gaps in his schema.

always-ready absent present

Our sincere thanks to Things Magazine for the bit of disabuse that comes in knowing that we are not so alone in begrudging our sense of nostalgia and feeling conflicted over it through the knowledge that the concept and discipline of hauntology did not originate with its champion and evangelist Scarfolk Council but is rather an invention with some provenance as being coined by Jacques Derrida.
Though dating back to the early 1990s, the term has really flourished lately with the recycling of familiar and retro themes that feels sometimes to the exclusion of anything risky or original, the concept is the ontological burden of disjointed time, as a ghostly apparition is only properly so in the moment it manifests and separated from its historical association though we as the haunted might see past relations as persistent things. What are some examples that have awakened in you that fit this category? Please do share.

port-of-call

In a delightful piece for Lapham’s Quarterly—which comes to us via Coudal Partners’ Fresh Links—Elizabeth Della Zazzera ponders that: “The Odyssey, if you strip away enough allegory and myth, might serve as a travel guide for the Ægean Sea: which islands to avoid if you hate escape rooms, which cruise to skip of you always forget to pack earplugs, where to get that beef that angers the gods. But how does Odysseus’ trek across the wine-dark sea map onto an actual map of the Mediterranean?”
As much as scholars might debate the merits of trying to map a myth, the places mentioned along our hero’s circuitous route for all their fantastic inhabitants and the weight of allegory and iconography are real and readily identifiable. Though an abundance of wholly serious academics have undertaken the task of creating gazetteers (long before Troy was rediscovered as a real place and not some Homeric conceit) and more recently cruises commissioned only semi-cynically for the literary criticism crowd that trace Odysseus’ odyssey and journey home exist to attest to the allure of charting a narrative, one has to wonder what one misses with interpretations and readings that adhere too closely to the text and correspondence to places one can visit.