Catching up

A perpetual process / Pitagora Suichi, ‘A collection of Rube Goldberg-like machines’ / the brilliance of the Google Street View Hyperlapse (via Kottke) / short termism: MoMA Will Raze Tod Williams Billie Tsien’s Folk Art Museum. Images by Michael Moran / massive in-game panorama of Totalwar, some sort of Roman-era thing. Very pretty trees / Cassone, a journal dedicatedo art and art books / Interiors Journal ‘presents a discussion about films in terms of architectural space, focusing on the use of space in cinema.’ / Modernist Estates brings word of intriguing apart listings in London and beyond, taking a leaf from The Modern House (if not any commissions from sales) / vaguely related, the stories behind Britain’s most beloved buildings.

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Original art and design on display (and sale) at Studio No.44 / art by Wyatt Niehaus. The ‘Future Solutions‘ series is ‘a bleak pastiche of corporate signifiers: eco-friendly pantones, quixotic windmills, industrial sterility, Plexiglas smoothness’ / photography by Shaun Tompkins. A great eye / Take That, Instagram: The Enduring Allure of Vintage Snapshots. Collectors Weekly on the increasing value of physical ephemera:

This physical nature of vintage photographs is an important part of their appeal, especially in our modern digitized world. Foster tells the story of a friend who purchased an extra hard drive to have more storage space for the thousands of digital photos on his computer, despite the fact that only a handful of the images had ever been printed and enjoyed as physical photographs. “It dawned on me that the 21st century might be the most documented but least saved,” says Foster.

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Eat Lights Become Lights, a fabulous band from South London for lovers of drones, driving, Krautrock, spacey noises, etc / academics vs the supernatural / related, A Podcast to the Curious, devoted to the work of M.R.James / Paolo Soleri has died. The creator of Arcosanti, the archi-centric community in Arizona (it doesn’t look like much on the map, but was always considered a work in progress, with far larger and more impressive constructions in the pipeline).

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Blowing things up

Modern life signs. 3D-printed canal home takes shape in Amsterdam / The Development and Construction of London, a flickr pool / You Are Electric, visual stuff / A Cidade Branca, the art of the axonometric /Tree Houses. Fairy Tale Castles in the Air / Eye Magazine on the old school layout of Private Eye / a collection of Art and design links / FxGuru (Android) and Action Movie FX (iOS) are two apps that bring out the inner Michael Bay in all of us.

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What are some useful and ‘cool’ internet tricks? / sadly no actual hard stats in this piece – just how many hotel owners have seen the beast? – Loch Ness Monster: Is Nessie just a tourist conspiracy? / Bedroom Cassette Masters Volume Two, low-fi electronica / Memories from an Insane Asylum, Scouting NY follows up some urban exploration with some oral histories.

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NMPRV tumbles things from flickr. There’s a sentence that would have made little or no sense a decade ago / Lensblr is a more explicit straight-up photography-focused blog / London then and now (via Coudal) / collages by Sarah Eisenlohr / Autopolis, ‘the cars we loved’ / Life Inside The Kowloon Walled City. We’re allergic to the word ‘infographic’, but this is a wonderfully detailed cross-section drawing / Rick Mather, 1937-2013.

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Secrets

Secret 7″, ‘we do is take seven tracks from seven of the best-known bands and artists around. We press each of those tracks 100 times to vinyl then get creatives from around the world to interpret artwork in their own style for of one of the 7 tracks; resulting in a one-of-a-kind sleeve for every single one’ / sort of related, 45sound, ‘Crowdsourced concert footage With perfect sounding audio’ (via BBC News and possibly countered by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, amongst others) / for those of us who do video games vicariously, Bioshock Infinite – the Special Movie Version, three and half hours of someone else playing a game so you don’t have to / Peckham vs Venice, a taster for the upcoming Palazzo Peckham exhibition at the upcoming Biennale.

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‘The point of industry, of mass production, is to produce affordable goods. When luxury goods ape the language of heavy industry, that’s fetishisation’: OMA’s “Tools for Life” / a new pleasure garden for Vauxhall, Blow the budget / a new Unbound project from Jonathan Meades, Pidgin Snaps / the Omni Magazine Archive.

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Orange crush

‘You might have seen pictures where Bilinda’s playing a Fender Jaguar with an orange scratchplate. And no Jaguar’s ever had an orange scratchplate, so people just assume we put it on. But it isn’t… it’s a tortoiseshell scratchplate. But for three or four nights in the studio I locked everyone out, and they thought I was working, but I wasn’t. I was just really meticulously scratching the top layer off this scratchplate with a razorblade. That took three days. They were my least productive three days. Well actually, they were productive because I had something to show for it, but…’

Kevin Shields on procrastination, via Offset Guitars

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Slight return

Graphic design from the 1920s to the 1970s is a new blog devoted to printed design and ephemera from the golden era of visual culture, a large chunk of which is travel related. A companion site to Travel Brochure Graphics, it’s a lovingly compiled guide to design gone by. This is also a good excuse to mention Herb Lester, a design firm which carries a torch for the graphical style collected by TBG.

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An apology about an apology

Try not to think of us as terrible, dirty liars, but although the winding down process feels very real, we’re clearly never going to stop looking – and finding – stuff. Perhaps the act of taking a step or two back has helped harden our resolve to bypass the more obvious or transient and to keep an eye out for the good things. Thanks to all those who emailed and commented (including Kept Ephemera, Vintage Ad Stock, Willie Robb, Nextness, Andy Martini and more). So onto the links… some day soon.

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An apology

You may have noticed that things has been limping along for the past few months, with infrequent updates and not a whole lot of enthusiasm and energy (with notable exceptions). We apologise to regular readers but suspect the slide down to permanent inactivity has begun. Things will hopefully never actually go away for good but the time will inevitably come when the glacier calves and we drift off into the icy ocean in a state of cryogenic suspension, perfectly preserved (save for a thicket of dead and dying links) for future generations to stumble over.

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Random things

Apologies for the lack of recent posts / Will Wiles on Five Things I Didn’t Know Until I Was Published / widely seen, but still extraordinary: Lego City of Odan / from the WWD Co., Novelty Catalog, at And Everything Else Too / one for the things organised neatly crowd, via haddock, which also points us to the very descriptive Bunker Images / while we’re looking at old websites, try On Falling Over…, Tom Coates’ tale of accidentally rendering himself one-armed / view from the Shard, updated.

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It’s been a big couple of months for bogus military hardware: Is This North Korean Hovercraft-Landing Photo Faked? (via The Guardian) / Did China Try To Pass Off Top Gun As Air Force Footage? / Iran’s Fake Super-Stealth Jet Takes to the Fake Skies, Now with Nice Photoshop.

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You’ve been Glassed

Thirty-five arguments against Google Glass kicks off what is bound to be a hefty backlash against the intelligent goggles. See also this story, ‘Privacy ‘impossible’ with Google Glass warn campaigners and the discussion at Metafilter, which rounds up some other objections. The ’35 arguments’ are compelling enough, but we found one possible plus side. This great short BBC documentary about a teenager with face blindness (Prosopagnosia) offered up one hugely beneficial use for the technology, giving those with the condition an instant means of identifying people around them thanks to facial recognition. From this piece on Chuck Close, who also has Prosopagnosia, ‘it’s been described as being like a human trying to distinguish sheep based on their facial features, something simply incomprehensible in the same way as human faces.’ Nothing a quick database search couldn’t sort out instantaneously.

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Other things. First steel thinning, now corrosive concrete…, a new scandal in Chinese construction / Strictly Cassette / SeaGlass, ‘a new aquatic-themed carousel experience’ designed by WXY for The Battery Conservancy. We’re waiting for the Marine Worlds Carousel instead, created by Les Machines de L’Ile in Nantes / Glad You’re Not There, a tumblr about postcards. See also Tom Phillips’ epic ‘The Postcard Century (at Amazon) / 64 Kilobricks, a Lego Commodore 64 / is it just us, or are GWB’s paintings strangely contemporary looking? / the best-designed car 2012 awards / Anti-Vitruv & Super-Brunelleschi, where architectural theory goes to multiply. A tumblr.

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Vanishing planes and phantom noises

The 727 that vanished: ‘Late in the morning on May 26, when Joseph and Swain were expecting 844AA to land, Joseph took a call from an Air Gemini employee, who demanded to know why another crew had flown the airplane out of Luanda. “He was kind of hard on me,” Joseph says. After the shock wore off, he telephoned the U.S. Embassy in South Africa to report the disappearance, then called his wife back in Florida to tell her to call the FBI. From Washington, D.C., the Department of State, notified by the U.S. Embassy in Angola, sent a message to every American embassy in Africa: Alert aviation officials that an airliner has been stolen, and call every airport with a runway long enough to handle a 727.’

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Simulating the dynamics of the moshpit in javascript / WatchMePivot Magazine, vogueish imagery driven stuff / art, design and photography at Wo and We / CLOG: BRUTALISM is the latest issue from the slow-burning architectural publication (‘Each issue explores, from multiple viewpoints and through a variety of means, a single subject particularly relevant to architecture now. Succinctly, on paper, away from the distractions and imperatives of the screen.’)

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Rorschach Audio – Art & Illusion for Sound is a site dedicated to the cultural impact of audio hallucinations and pareidolia. Set up by artist Joe Banks, it forms a ‘permanent on-line repository for material produced by or relevant to the ongoing “Rorschach Audio” research project, which was initiated in 1999. The “Rorschach Audio” project began as a critique of Electronic Voice Phenomena research (of the making and promotion of alleged ghost voice recordings) in parapsychology and in the arts.’ Via this recent BBC News story on EVP and Radio 4 documentary, ‘Out of the Ordinary‘.

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