There has been a flurry of weblog interest in MINExpo ('the world's richest deposit of mining technology, services and products'), including this post at Telstar Logistics. Why? The internet serves us well as a repository for the unusual, the gee-whiz aspects of technology that would otherwise remain hidden away, available only to specialists. But now we are all esotericists and fetishists, as TL's post makes clear, unable to tear ourselves away from 'giant dump trucks, esoteric drilling machines, and industrial explosive'. There is no arcana any more, at least not online.

Attending unusual trade shows will become a new leisure activity, as perverse fascinations and hobbies spill out of the world wide web in search of a physical manifestation. Check out the Ultimate Trade Show Directory for some future vacation ideas, like the awkwardly-named FunExpo (funerals), the International Christian Retail Show, the Clinical Symposium on Advances in Skin and Wound Care, Event Expo, Northeast Ohio's premiere exhibition for party planners, and the very self-explanatory The Future of Wipes.

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This Old Toy, neatly packaged parcels of nostalgia / Accuracy and Aesthetics, whose mission 'is building consensus for the construction of semantic space as if it were a series of large scale public building projects.' What does this mean? The site has an interesting, almost sinister, love of diagrams and flowcharts / FormFiftyFive, a ffffound type thing with a more carefully curated approach. Via FFF, Thoughts from E17, the blog of the Build design studio. A blog is as an essential piece of designer kit as a clutch pencil in this modern world / Collected Visuals / I love typography, a weblog.

At Special Presentations at the Library of Congress, John Bull and Uncle Sam, Four Centuries of British American Relations / Peter Nencini, 'Making-looking-thinking of an illustrator-designer-lecturer' / is carefully thought out, beautifully designed, lovingly made, artfully presented and responsibly sold stuff still just _stuff_?

Photography by Ed Panar, via It's Nice That / Everything is Miscellaneous, an ominous-sounding website / The Way Things Go, the classic 1987 film by Fischli and Weiss (YouTube sample) / at first glimpse this is a spectacular mountain viewpoint, but ultimately it's genuinely hard to see what the point is / in the future, we will all have our own personal Biennales.

Cake Wrecks / buy shoes with Modista. Clever / the London Transport Museum photographic collection. Many, many gems, not just for those who get off on photos of vintage traffic (not such a bad thing), e.g. Tower Bridge under construction / How to See with John Ruskin / who would sure have approved of these websites and their avant-garde approach to Ikea's products: Ikea Hacker and Ikea furniture mods.

Rodcorp takes in an art fair: Frieze and Crash / need4speed, a website dedicated to images of speedometer needles reaching the end of their travel / quote from Dieter Zetsche of Mercedes Benz: "There are many studies that say it took 120 years to get to 800 million cars around the globe, and that it will take only another 30 years to double that volume." / Something about Sarah: 'pretty women foil men's ability to assess the future' / Fortress Finland, a nation's unusued bunkers.

We loved Tesugen, but that blog has now evolved into Tesugen Replaced, an experiment whereby past posts are revisited, reprofiled and re-posted, dead links fixed and ideas approached from a different angle. A piece of short-term digital archaeology, akin to flicking through old notebooks, searching for an overall theme to emerge.

Labels: archives, linkage

posted by things at 13:00 / 2 comments