The attraction of the technological failure, and how the internet serves as a dispensary of extended footnotes to otherwise forgotten history. Take the Sinclair C5, now firmly established in the canon of entrepreneurial also-rans, an idea not so much beyond its time, but out of time, the answer to a question that no-one was asking. But were it not for the internet, the C5 would languish in the very marginalia of cultural commentary, the nuts and bolts of its brief existence papered over by snide remarks, quips and references. Now every little dead end and half-baked idea is glorified and celebrated with its own chapel of rememberance or mausoleum, turning the internet into a repository of abandoned strands of human ingenuity.

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A forthcoming exhibition at the V and A celebrates small spaces, including 1:1 structures by seven international practices: Rintala Eggertsson, Terunobu Fujimori, Helen and Hard, Studio Mumbai, Sou Fujimoto, Rural Studio and Vazio S/A.

Art saved from the Nazis / art saved from itself / the second video ever posted on youtube was of someone falling over / the greatest extended takes in movie history / rounding up consumption, the Amazon Filler Item Finder / Linefeed, a design weblog / photographs by Rob Hann / amazing model village.

Wooden toys by Take-g / Tin Trunk, fashion history / paintings by Steven Pennaneac'h / Angry People in Local Newspapers / Vintage Headlamp Restoration / AE Worldmap, architecture aggregator / Grange Hill then and now (via haddock) / photography by Marquis Palmer.

The RV Hall of Fame (via BBC) / Sell Sell, a weblog / Volume, an architecture magazine / urban exploration: cathedrals. Great rooftop shots of Paris / A decade that was not: in architecture too, on the aughties ('noughties'?) as ten years of architectural destruction and the failure of the profession to offer anything more than hollow symbolism in response.

Curiouscurious, a tumblr / Every Bell That Tolls Me, a tumblr / Baubauhaus, imagery cascade / Exit Magazine's minimal YouTube presence is like the anti-iPad / aKun, a tumblr, which introduces us to the work of Chris Kenny and the concept of desire paths / Eventual Ghost, a weblog / Annalogs, a weblog / the Guess Where London? pool / In Pictures: House Moving in Chile.



A selection of editorial headings by Winsor McCay, 1867-1934 at Golden Age Comic Book Stories (via number61). What an absolutely marvellous website. The richness of the illustration on the following pages is breathtaking, all the more so for being scanned at half decent quality in epic quantities. The work of Arthur Rackham; Dugald Stewart Walker; Kay Nielsen

Labels: illustration, museums, technology

posted by things at 23:00 / 2 comments

The age of cross-pollination. Curation Culture, for want of a better term, thrives on cross-pollination. Everything is interesting, and what's more, we've developed the tools and the aesthetics with which to create the deep levels of analysis that would overwhelm a masters thesis from the 80s or 90s. Take this, the Samizdat Drafting Company's One Book, Many Readings loving, obsessive examination of the 'choose your own adventure' books of the 1980s, complete with a remarkable set of animations and the ability to 'play' a book.

It's beautiful and fascinating. Yet content is practically overwhelmed by presentation. The contemporary digital toolset rips the books into their constituent pieces, making kinetic art out of what would once have been created with a set of index cards and an eraser. The site cross-pollinates modern obsessions - retro style and gaming and infographics - to create a dataset that is ultimately more than the sum of its parts, reflecting not so much our interest in the original books but in their role as a source of data.

(There are plenty of places online to find out about CYOA, Fighting Fantasy, etc., including the original company. The Samizdat project's conclusions were that the CYOA books gradually decreased in complexity over time (perversely going against Steven Johnson's contentions in Everything Bad Is Good for You that pop culture is increasingly multi-threaded and dense).)

As part of the analysis, Samizdat draws parallels with the typographic chaos of early web pages gradually giving way to restraint, concluding: 'When a world of new possibilities has just opened, it's hard to find the will for restraint. But, in time, people scale back the more gratuitous uses of this sort of glitz, moving from what's possible to what best suits the material.' In typography, perhaps this rings true, but in all other aspects of online culture, scaling back is not the dominant trend. Instead, information density and manipulation are pushed to the fore, their complexity a virtue and the brave new worlds created by statistic-saturated infographics form yet another spoke in the cut-and-paste culture celebrated by the visual weblog.

Sites like information aesthetics and cool infographics focus on contemporary graph fetishism; the data is almost a secondary consideration to the presentation. Nicholas Felton's 'Annual Reports' are a classic case in point, not only the ur-form of the personal infographic, but a clear precursor to the proliferation of Apps for tracking every aspect of your life.

Up until a few years ago, the information-saturated environment was a visual cue for extreme, dystopian futurism - Blade Runner's looming airship/billboards, or Minority Report's highly targeted augmented reality advertising. The logical conclusion of such a future is rendered in the speculative 'augmented hyper reality' video by Keiichi Matsuda, currently doing the rounds ('Augmented reality may recontextualise the functions of consumerism and architecture, and change in the way in which we operate within it.'). For fans of data density, augmented reality is truly a blessing, a means of overlaying the modern world with the many layers of extraneous data that would otherwise continue to go unseen.

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Other things. Error Gorilla, a tumblr / The Brown Car Blog, pretty self-explanatory / Daniel Simon's work is unashamedly romantic, almost old-fashion in its shiny, fetishistic futurism / Cloudberry Cake Proselytism, cheerleading for old school indie pop / BooBooGBs photostream, old school Hollywood glamour / Burning World, an mp3 blog / make tracks on train tracks. Reminiscent of the great Fisher Price Music Box Record Player (not to be confused with the Fisher Price Phonograph, which could play actual records. More info).

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England's most hated building to be demolished. Surprisingly this is the 'IMAX' in Bournemouth, a piece of waterfront regeneration tat that has long since lost the cinema that gave it its name and currently houses only a KFC. Here's hoping Plymouth's Drake Circus isn't too far behind / related, Confessions of a Conservation Officer / it's nice when ephemera is dovetailed with contemporary practice. Delicious Industries' Reference Box is a good case in point.

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A collection of trade secrets / Photos of 24 abandoned and decayed hotels from around the world / The Soviet Heritage and European Modernism / squatting culture in Barcelona: Squat Barcelona and Usurpa / paintings by Gigi Scaria / Guitars for OK Go by Moritz Waldemeyer.

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British high tech architecture as evidence of 'a na•ve dream of an America which never existed', and now the epitome of contemporary cultural banality, at entschwindet und vergeht. Response at NB and S, mostly on the same page / more commentary: melancholy, sadness and Zaha: 'And this futility just deepensÉ the building is an example of 'Google Earth Urbanism'. That is to say; all this complexity can only really be seen from directly above.'

Labels: computers, curating, design

posted by things at 23:11 / 1 comments

A bit of everything today, with no obvious connections / short car-bound interviews at LlewTube / 'Ever wanted Joey Santiago or David Lovering to play on your song or album? The Everybody wants you' / London, Spite as Snow / dwbl.ldwb, a tumblr. Occasionally nsfw / photographs by Kirill Kuletski / The Wallpaper Tragedy / Flip Flop Flyin's iPhone drawings using Brushes.

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Making Maps at Cosmopolitan Scum / Sir John Soane - The Furniture of Death, a reprint of a 1978 Architectural Review piece on Soane's fascination with all things funerary, but also his playful spirit that never descended into gothic mawkishness (a shame the article is broken up into separate pdfs, rather than just one) / cast objects at Heavy Metal Design.

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Sign up for the Helsinki Design Lab 2010, hoping to recreate the spirit of the 1968 event / photography by Sven Hamann / From the Pocket, an experiment in 'iphoneography' / Nest of the Skeletons, a creepy little animation by Tessa Farmer and Sean Daniels (via Strange Attractor) / Nemesis Republic, a fine weblog / Daily Tonic pushes design porn / the best of the unbuilt, competition competition 2010 at Architizer.

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Joe Queenan explores the weird world of movies on YouTube / Insert Clever Title, a tumblr, yet more proof that editing is now the most critical skillset on the internet / Chris Etchells' series on the decline of the pub / art by Maarten Vanden Eynde / Are2, pop culture is a many splendoured thing / 50 cars or 1 coach.

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Free Love Records, a new enterprise set up to reissue the majesty that was World Domination Enterprises. Interview at The Quietus / drawings by Alison Moffett / on Japan's 80s boom: 'A 10,000 yen note folded as tightly as possible and dropped in [Tokyo] city centre was worth less than the land it covered.'

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Simple Style, a weblog / Gunsights' biblical references concern US and UK forces, 'the markings [on Trijicon products] include "2COR4:6" and "JN8:12", relating to verses in the books of II Corinthians and John.' / Professor Olsen @ Large, a history of science, day by day / beautiful photography by Ana Himes.

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Hannover Expo 2000, then and now, a flickr set. Especially this image of MVRDV's NL Pavilion, which is marinating nicely, with the original planted levels withered and dead and the surrounding trees growing fast (see below for before (l) and after (r)). Another image, and one from within at Vacant Plot (see also Facadomy).

Labels: linkage

posted by things at 10:00 / 2 comments

CEBRA_toons is a site by architect Mikkel Frost, a partner in CEBRA Architects, breaking down completed projects into a single watercolour image, creating a 'wordless manifesto': 'if you can't tell the story in an A4 sheet (21 x 29.7 cm) you are either doing too much or too complicated stuff'. The pictures have a hint of Aldo Rossi about them, a willingness to play with colour and form and caricature, the building used as a playful piece of symbolism rather than a stern immutable object.

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The La Brea Matrix, a project wherein six German photographers use Stephen Shore's classic Chevron gas station shot as the basis for their own works. Developed with independent publishers Lapis Press, there is more in-depth information here, describing Shore's new landscape vernacular as 'one in which the details themselves – their density and abundance, rather than the entirety – were intended to be the focal point or subject. Each image is so sharp...'.

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Blast Books 'publishes illustrated books on cultural and historical phenomenons' / Duke Press is a new publishing house focusing on artist's and designer's books, including Risograph, a homage to the adhoc nature of material printed using the Risograph digital printing process. It's by New Found Original, 'a new online shop, selling NEW, FOUND and ORIGINAL items from the very simple to the rather special.'

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The Fuck Yeah! phenomenon doesn't exactly endear us, nor does it hint at tumblr being in it for the long run as an archival-quality resource, but some are very entertaining. FuckYeah Dioramas is testament to countless obsessions, for example / there's something about 2010 that induces large scale retro-futurist introspection, with everyone dipping into their grab-bag of remembered tomorrows, dusting them off and looking nostaglically at the way we should have been by now, e.g. 2010: Living in the Future by Geoffrey Hoyle (via Ballardian).

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If You Could, an ongoing collaboration project. The latest version, If You Could: Collaborate, has resulted in some interesting projects, including this alphabet, created by the Rogers Stirk Harbour Model Shop and Design By Praline / Tin Man Toys / Mustard Plaster, a weblog / worth exploring: OurGoods, 'a peer-to-peer online network that facilitates the barter of goods and services between artists' / Database: Injuries reported by emergency rooms / the year's 10 best cover lies / Did aliens play a role in Woolworths?, at Bad Science.

Labels: architecture

posted by things at 21:46 / 1 comments

Simplistic Art brings together good reading and links / Good Type, Bad Type, a tumblr / the purest of treats, a weblog (occasionally nsfw) / pentimento / polarama, a weblog (usually nsfw) / we haven't scoured Strength Weekly for a while, but this post on Fairy Liquidity is an entertaining look at how the sprite disappeared from folklore and legend before rematerialising in the ad industry: 'It's odd that even today advertisements for all sorts of products are adorned with snappy, winsome little homunculi'.

R-O-B, 'Flexible Production of Building Elements', a robotised bricklayer and a winner at Wallpaper's 2010 Design Awards / Mockitecture, a weblog, especially the post on Extra-Ordinary Architecture, 'terrible and naughty' / Forgotten Ohio, via Guy.

Indian Book Depot, which produces some superb posters (via The Estrangement Gallery / Strength Weekly, a weblog / Metaltype, 'the place for Printers and Typesetters who remember the old days of Letterpress Printing to come and reminisce'.

FOOL, 'the transformative potential of objects' / World of Warcraft, an architectural perspective / Susanna Blasco's weblog / theGAME, the world of the highly desirable Casio Game Calculators.

Mountains of Paper, music related ephemera / Cumbernauld Town Centre, long celebrated by modernists and blasted by traditionalists, has held a design competition that will 'transform and develop the existing situation into a coherent town centre.'

Me Studio on the graphic evolution of The Highway Code: 'they also clearly show an evolution in design, fashion, automotive, typography and printing technology between those nine years... whereas the first one still displays some of the 'homely' naivety of the late fifties with kids sat on fences and young men in open-top sports cars etc. the second has a certain serious, more business like tone of voice to it, to me they represent and nicely illustrate the end of one era and the birth of the following one'.

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Archive and Conquer, a tumblr, tapped into the new vogue for curation culture, linking to this essay, 'A Complimentary Rant on the State of Convenience at Repository. From Archive and Conquer, a paragraph that's worth quoting in full:

Labels: archives, collecting, things

posted by things at 20:41 / 2 comments

We seem to be entering a new era of speculative megastructuralism. After Miami's Miapolis City comes the Boa (Boston Arcology), a sort of cowboy-built conservatory for the city. See also Monstrous Carbuncles, a fine tumblr / architecture as performance, Karrie Jacobs on the 'voyeur's delight' of the new Standard Hotel, New York / what are the best internet forums? / Universe Sandbox, an interactive space simulator.

Concrete Britain, short films / The Big Picture has a set from the Dakar Rally / antipodr - 'find the other side of the world' / seen everywhere, still fun, First Person Tetris / sobering stories of design magazine publishing: former editor Julie Lasky on I.D.'s Executioners at Design Observatory. Key quote: 'And no one who had any serious power over I.D. seemed to understand anything about design.'

More fun with toys: the Ikea LILLABO Train Set: 'What I wondered was... how many possible looping train tracks can be made using all 16 pieces?' / Detonate, a demolition simulator / image at top comes from Thomas Wrede's photographic series 'Real Landscapes'.

Labels: architecture

posted by things at 10:51 / 2 comments

Aussie homes three times bigger than British (via super colossal). From the article: 'NSW has the biggest houses in Australia and by a large margin. The size of the average new house built in NSW in 2008-09 was 262.9sq m, followed by Queensland with 253sq m. In Europe, Denmark has the biggest homes (houses and flats), with an average floor area of 137sq m, followed by Greece (126sq m) and the Netherlands (115.5sq m). Homes in the UK are the smallest in Europe at 76sq m.' See also Hometta

Slowly she turned, 'Living the Slow life in North Carolina' / build Bill Gates' house in paper / Photographs of Afghanistan, mostly in Kabul in 1967-68. Especially Diplomat and Apartments and stores / Tin Trunk, a weblog / photography by Stefanie Gratz / photography by Isabelle Pateer, including 'Unsettled', a portrait of the Belgian city of Doel, 'threatened by the vast expansions of the port of Antwerp'. More images. See also Doel, The Village That Does Not Want to Disappear and KunstDoel, a plan to turn the abandoned village into an arts centre.

Moomin Valley for the home (via) / The Known Universe, worth bookmarking / on colour via Boars and Fury, a tumblr / Logos, a good-looking book shop. See also Abebooks's> 'Weird' section / endless amounts to browse at the Noughtie List, the kottke-hosted round-up of every list imaginable.

Labels: photography

posted by things at 00:45 / 1 comments

It says a lot for our disconnection with the world around us that walking can be considered a creative, even subversive act. For the men of the post-impressionist era, the flaneurs for whom ready income and social status acted as an access-all-areas pass for the rapidly modernising metropolis, the idea of promenading without intent or purpose was, in some senses, radical behaviour. The modern city had never been explored in this way before.

Now there's Mythogeography: A Guide to Walking Sideways, a guide book that accompanies the rediscovery of slowly traversed space. From the blurb: 'In a city, for example, walkers become aware of their urban home as a site, a forum, a playground and a stage: all there to enjoy, understand and provoke on multiple levels'.

The walking history has been reclaimed from its earlier rural focus (see Nicholas Crane's Two Degrees West) through the suburban, post-industrial psychogeographical meanderings of Iain Sinclair (predated by the work of the London Psychogeographical Association), to concentrate explicitly on the city, a fulfilment of the Situationist playground, the home of drift. In a sense, even a click and drag around Google Streetmap is a form of drifting, but who are we really kidding; without the smells, sounds and textures of a real city, the fruitless zoom, enhance, pan and scroll of such virtual exploration will always be a poor second place.

Phil Smith's Mythogeography decribes the role of walking thus: 'as performance, as exploration, as urban resistance, as activism, as an ambulatory practice of geography, as meditation, as post-tourism, as dissident mapping, as subversion of and rejoicing in the everyday.' It's not strictly urban, of course - see Drift, for some rural wandering, or explore Smith's own starter kit for drifting, a way for 'opening up the world, clearing eyes and peeling away the layers of spectacle, deception and that strange “hiddeness in plain sight” that coats the everyday.'

There was a flurry of activity in GPS-created art a few years ago. GPS Traces on OpenStreetMap, or GPS drawing, or Waag's Amsterdam RealTime project, collated on this Me-fi post, where the antecedent of forms created from urbanism in Paul Auster's New York Trilogy is noted. This was walking as exhibitionism, the inevitable dovetail of technology and showmanship, venturing forth because we could.

It's a relatively bloody-minded pursuit, mythogeography, an attempt to absorb esoteric information from every conceivable source and to invest ulterior meaning in the transient and everyday. This obsession with static drift is, it has to be said, very much contrary to the screen-filtered world that has spilled out of the home and office and onto the tube, bus or pavement.

Mythogeography doesn't have much truck with technology. Like Nicholas Crane and his carefully hand-assembled strips of meridian, it is a discipline that demands paper maps, missteps, dead ends and an overall sense of not knowing exactly where you are. Nowadays, we're all concerned with our time to first fix, a suitably drug-laced term for a craving for instant location identity. It seems sad that we have to be instructed in such mythogeographical practices, that our default settings aren't to 'follow instincts not maps', but to plug in.

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Another pertinent set of links: iconic architecture destroyed in movies / a shape book at Miller Goodman's flickr stream / more shapes: contemporary Portuguese architecture at Ultimas Reportagens / fine Penguin Book Cover wallpaper.

We're really struggling to work out where the whole 'ninja' thing came from in relation to architecture blogging, e.g. Archi Ninja, Architecture My Ninja Please / MIMOA's review of the year.

Sign off and out forever with the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine: 'This machine lets you delete all your energy sucking social-networking profiles, kill your fake virtual friends, and completely do away with your Web 2.0 alterego.'

Labels: cities, esoterica, technology

posted by things at 23:02 / 2 comments

A short history of the amateur amusement park. Backyard roller coasters have become a staple of internet round-ups, as private ingenuity has created increasingly elaborate tracks - see Jeremy Reid's Oklahoma Land Run or John Iver's Blue Two, for example. Yet the genre is relatively old; this homemade coaster seems to date from the early C20, while in the late 60s, occasional gems like this private cable car (one of 'The Most Exciting Outdoor Toys You've Ever Seen') were built to delight. Traditionally, the domestic thrill ride was limited to train tracks: Busplunge has a nostalgic post on back yard train ride, which clued us into the existence of the Miniature Train and Railroad Company of Rensselaer, Indiana. More at the MTC Trains Owner's Web Site.

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The small scale print revival continues apace. PWR PAPER is a freesheet including collaborations with numerous artists and writers (Max Ronnersjo, Inka Lindergard and Niclas Holmstrom, Matthew Feyld, Thobias Faldt, Natalie Rognsoy, etc. While zero profit, info-dense, creativity-driven publications like PWR PAPER are thriving, the commercial flipside is presented by Newspaper Death Watch.

Monster Practice, on architecture and creativity in general / Slack-a-gogo, a music blog / homage? things and things. Cleverly venturing into the world of the retail portal / Poetix, a weblog / Veronique, a tumblr / n+1 magazine / glass pope, a tumblr / all about the Victorian Turkish Bath.

Secret Projects, unbuilt projects and aviation technology / thetimbrown has created a graphic entitled Namco's Visual Arcade History, 1978-2009. A shame it's not larger / online Rollercoaster Creator / roller coaster image above from a selection of coaster patent drawings at the wheeled vehicles section of the Jitterbuzz page / My mouth still looks asleep, a weblog about 'mental ill-health and its possibilities' / moominsean, a weblog all about old cameras.

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in search of the Swiss Cheese building: 'Oh my God! In Chicago, we get bent out of joint because two supertall towers - the Chicago Spire and the Waterview Tower - are unfinished because of the real estate crash. But this section of Dubai, which is called Business Bay, is the crash on a whole different order of magnitude. I counted at least 20 unfinished towers, and they came in every different shape and size--some with V-shaped, folded facades, others with belly-like fronts, still others that splayed outward on both sides. This is an entire district of unfnished buildings--a ghost city, with just a smattering of construction workers on the job.'

Perhaps modern ruins will become an integral part of the contemporary cityscape, just as parts of rural Spain and Greece are dotted with half-finished quasi-agricultural structures, filling time as storehouses and sheds until their concrete frames can be finished (see the work of Sam Appleby, for example). To think of ruins in advance is to have a suspiciously vainglorious eye on posterity. For example, the epic historical essay Losing the War (via Me-fi) has a section on Hitler and Albert Speer's concept of 'ruin value': 'Maybe it was possible to factor a certain decay mode into their designs, to ensure that some picturesque element of each structure would survive. Arches or pediments or rows of pillars could be reinforced far beyond the requirements of the load they would carry, so that they would still be standing after the rest of the structure was dust - ensuring that even the wreckage of the Reich would inspire awe.'

Awe is not the dominant emotion associated with ruins. Nostalgia, perhaps. Right now, the embedded potential of a half-finished, abandoned or decaying building isn't the first thing that comes to mind. This might be changing. A few years ago Domus magazine ran an ideas competition around Pyongyang's Ryugyong Hotel, now finally nearing completion, transformed from a concrete shell of limitless potential into a gaudy po-mo spike. And according to this Bloomberg report, it was the first fevered splurges of jagged creativity at Ground Zero that inspired the even larger splurge of jagged creativity that is Las Vegas's CityCenter ('The Capital of the New World'), larger, swifter and with far more avant-garde angles than the smoothed off GZ will ever have.

Perhaps the emergence of the modern ruin - whole cities of ruins - will come to represent a shift in cultural production, a more contemplative, romanticised notion of progress whereby things take time and the relentless boom is forever banished. Already, abandoned technology and stifled progress holds a place in popular culture, be it Noah Sheldon's atmospheric images of Biosphere 2 (via me-fi) or Adam Bartos's 'Kosmos: A Portrait of the Russian Space Age' or the post-Chernobyl landscape of Pripyat. All are powerfully emotive spaces.

Labels: architecture, ruins

posted by things at 23:30 / 0 comments

An artificial kingdom, Joakim Dahlqvist's epic pen and ink drawings of imaginary lands - Aristide and Podalida - two extraordinarily complex cityscapes that blur the forms of contemporary architecture (he has worked with OMA/AMO, amongst others) with intense doodling. Dahlqvist describes the images as part of a 'self-initiated study of superdense cities', and they belong to that literary and artistic tradition of the utopia, a place defined through the eyes of am unfamiliar visitor.

Density also appears to be one of the defining conditions of the modern age, a state that demands a constantly shifting veil of shallow complexity to be drawn across every medium. The aggregation of news, information, objects and opinion is just one manifestation of this complex veil, the myriad patterns of parametric design are another. This is a new topography of information, one which we must navigate using new methods. Studio Kinglux is a 'trends and culture bureau', just one of many guides to post-post modernity.

We wonder what the first example of this genre of research specialisation was? At what point did 'creativity' become a commodity that could be surveyed, mined, refined and distilled as if it were something physical? There are clues. At the turn of the century, the newly-elected Labour government set great stock in Britain as a manufactory of ideas, spearheaded by former Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport Chris Smith's Creative Britain, a sort of manifesto of nothingness that proclaimed the new age of creative economics.

In order for creativity to impact on the economy, it must be consumed. Complexity and density is our new planned obsolescence, an abstract replacement for the physical act of incremental changes and upgrades. Perhaps we've been jaded by several years of watching 'creative work' flashing before our eyes online, a conveyor-belt of loveliness that translates not into a new kind of commodity fetish but rather a fetish for novelty and invention.

Trends and culture is now shorthand for the kind of entrepreneurial, cultural-industrial process epitomised by Damien Hirst's Spin Paintings (used on the cover of Smith's book), through to personalised apps or the micro-economic culture of Etsy (coffee cup art) and eBay, the portfolio face-offs of ffffound.com and the relentless cascade of tumblrs.

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Majuscle, a zine by Brad Walker / see also the SameTime2010 project / say no to cynicism in 2010 with the Succeed Blog / watch B-movies in your browser with AMC TV / fashion imagery and more at Phicto (regularly nsfw) / how to make an imaginary flag into a county emblems / Bootlegs from Buckleberry, live sets / Lunch Money throws imagery at you (occasionally nsfw) / What type are you? Password: character / Curious Pages, 'recommended inappropriate books for kids'. The Winter Blast! post is fun / the FoundFootageFest. Mostly very depressing snippets of a more earnest, unfiltered, unselfconscious time.

Paris, 1962, via Kottke. More on the sad saga of Les Halles at this Metafilter post from 2004, with a few historic images of the original 'stomach of Paris'. Chris Heathcote has a set of image grabs of Covent Garden on his flickr stream, the demolition of which was contemporaneous to Les Halles but which was saved rather than flattened in the early 70s. Vaguely related, a gigantic panorama of Prague, so big as to be entirely unusable when zoomed in.

The Artificial Marketplace, a second hand store in New Bedford, Massachusetts, that nods to Celeste Olaloquiaqa's classic of kitsch iconography, The Magic Kingdom (reviewed in things 11 but not yet online). See also Scott Teplin's beautiful Alphabet City.

Labels: architecture, objects, things

posted by things at 10:00 / 1 comments