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Utopia is a digital typeface

1 minute read Published:

Utopia is a “digital typeface that portrays the mixture between the modernist architecture of Oscar Niemeyer and informal occupation of the urban space that shapes major Brazilian cities.

Running the Numbers

1 minute read Published:

Shipping Containers, 2007. Depicts 38,000 shipping containers, the number of containers processed through American ports every twelve hours. Chris Jordan: Running the Numbers looks at contemporary American culture through the austere lens of statistics. Each image portrays a specific quantity of something: fifteen million sheets of office paper (five minutes of paper use); 106,000 aluminum cans (thirty seconds of can consumption) and so on. My hope is that images representing these quantities might have a different effect than the raw numbers alone, such as we find daily in articles and books.

Rhubarb Rhubarb

1 minute read Published:

The Hungarian composer Antal Borsos (1916-1979) was known for works of a traditional nature until the early 1960s, when he began to dabble with the avant garde. He was particularly interested in incorporating organic noises and envisioned a symphony developed from the ‘music’ produced by plants (creaking trees, snapping buds etc). His Fugue in C major (No.50) used a recording he made of rhubarb growing inside metal bins (forced rhubarb famously grows so quickly that it can be heard expanding).

"It was while I was taking care of the horses that I got in contact with the angels", she says

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Norway's Princess Martha Louise says she has psychic powers and can teach people to communicate with angels. “It was while I was taking care of the horses that I got in contact with the angels,” she says.

Marimekko fabrics on Thinglink

1 minute read Published:

Marimekko fabrics on Thinglink

Building Open Library, we faced a difficult new technical problem

1 minute read Published:

Building Open Library, we faced a difficult new technical problem. We wanted a database that could hold tens of millions of records, that would allow random users to modify its entries and keep a full history of their changes, and that would hold arbitrary semi-structured data as users added it. Each of these problems had been solved on its own, but nobody had yet built a technology that solved all three together.

My Private Sky

1 minute read Published:

When a buyer orders his set of plates he gives his date and place of birth. The buyer’s personal night sky map is then calculated by a custom computer program and printed onto a set of blueprints followed by Nymphenburg’s master porcelain painters. Each set of dinner plates involves the hand-painting of some 500 stars, nebulae, planets and constellations in gold and platinum. Press Release: My Private Sky

Phone a glacier in Iceland

1 minute read Published:

A unique work of art, unveiled today, invites viewers to phone a glacier in Iceland - and listen to its death throes, live, through a microphone submerged deep in the bitterly cold lagoon which relays the splashes, creaks and groans as great masses of melting ice sheer off and crash into the water. The Guardian: Callers take part in art

The Mended Spiderweb series

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Mended Spiderweb #19 (Laundry Line) Nina Katchadourian: The Mended Spiderweb series

Dr. Strangelove Dr. Strangelove

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In Dr. Strangelove Dr. Strangelove, Kristan Horton imitates the satirical movie Dr. Strangelove and creates a new world for the film—silverware become an airplane, plastic and coffee grounds become the sky. Dr. Strangelove Dr. Strangelove

An Interview with Walter Murch

2 minute read Published:

There are little hints of underlying cinematic structures now and then. For instance: to make a convincing action sequence requires, on average, fourteen different camera angles a minute. I don’t mean fourteen cuts – you can have many more than fourteen cuts per minute – but fourteen new views. Let’s say there is a one-minute action scene with thirty cuts, so that the average length of each is two seconds – but, of those thirty cuts, sixteen of them will be repeats of a previous camera angle.