Where has all the good design gone?
April 28, 2008 at 8:06pm | Posted in art, culture, design, history, illustration, photography | Leave a commentIf you, like me, recently attended your last day of college EVER and are now desperately in need of some inspiration to get you through finals and help you finish that children’s book you’re supposed to be writing, feast your eyes on these gorgeous babies (courtesy of the National Magazine Cover Archive).
Whatever is the New Real
December 8, 2007 at 5:35pm | Posted in art, culture, history | Leave a commentTags: obsessive complusive disorder, spacial sequence synaesthesia
Do you have a mental map of the year as a multi-colored prismatic spiral? Do you envision words occupying specific places in three-dimensional space? Or associate numbers with color, smell and tactile experience? If you, like me, suffer from a mild set of obsessive-compulsive behaviors and tendencies toward spatial sequence synaesthesia, you may not want to check out the amazing projects at Fake is the New Real. On the other hand, it might be just the thing that will obsess you and haunt your dreams in that special way. Whoever these people are, they’ve created some totally remarkable new ways of looking at the world around us – from The Symbolic Alphabet, to an ever-changing Contextual Calendar, and one of many potential models for Electoral College Reform – bridging art, design, history, politics, architecture, geography, urban studies/planning, psychology, and a whole heck of a lot else.
It’s tough to figure out anything about the people behind this project; they, like their projects, seem to be multi-faceted and malleable. The content of their homepage includes little biographical information. The cursory google and wiki searches don’t yield much. According to their flickr bio, FITNR is based in Chicago, Oberlin, Brooklyn and Cambridge. I’ll be keeping an eye on them, hoping to know more and continue getting my mind soundly blown. If anybody reading this has any tips at the the identity of FITNR or anything else they might be up to, I’d be happy to hear!
From the Department of Recent Obsessions
December 6, 2007 at 7:45pm | Posted in culture, history, obsession, sociology | Leave a commentTags: unabomber
Dr. Theodore John “Ted” Kaczynski, aka the Unabomber.
Most artists could only dream of creating an impression and image so long-lasting and instantly recognizable to the general public. And usually they don’t have a manifesto with a title like “Industrial Society and Its Future,” either.
Was The 20th Century A Mistake?
October 24, 2007 at 10:31am | Posted in art, culture, film, history, photography | Leave a commentTags: bffs, dickhead in a good way, henry viii's wives, rad senior citizens, the 20th century, werner herzog
This is the most amazing thing I’ve seen in a while: Iconic Moments of the Twentieth Century by Henry VIII’s Wives. Who are these people and how do I make them (the artists and the rad senior citizens who agreed to participate in their project) my BFFs 4 life????!! (Found thanks to the weirdos over at VVORK.)
Also, Werner Herzog will be speaking for free tonite at the University of Pennsylvania‘s Meyerson Hall. The event starts at 5pm; seating is limited. Not really sure what Herzog (who professes to hate the academy, has been quoted as saying, “film is not the art of scholars, but of illiterates,” and is kind of a dickhead in the best way possible) is doing here, but apparently the talk will address the question, Was the 20th Century a Mistake? I don’t know about that, but I’m pretty sure you could make a case for the 21st Century being a mistake, at least thus far.
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