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2011-03-24
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“Among the many things the Japanese people are mourning this week are their libraries”
Macy Halford, “Japan’s Libraries in Pictures”, The New Yorker
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2011-03-10
Hans Haacke, Untitled, 2002, © Hans Haacke/VG Bild-Kunst.
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Total Corruption
If a reactionary is someone who answers the questions of the future with the mistakes of the past, then I gotta report there are a lot of reactionaries in the USA today.
Chicago-based cultural critic Brian Holmes, from ‘Total Corruption: Report from the USA’, e-flux Journal #22, 01/2011
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Via Death House
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2010-12-26
James Blake CMYK EP
2010 R&S RecordsThis is the debut single for the hugely tipped young London based producer on R&S.
James Blake is making some of the most startlingly original music to have emerged from London in 2010 and is a real star in the making. In between studying Popular Music at Goldsmiths and writing a debut album that will take a lot of people by surprise, he has released amazing singles on Hemlock & Hessle, pushing the boundaries of what is expected of ‘dubstep’ music.
Released on yellow, magenta and cyan colored vinyl: RS 1003 (yellow), RS 1003M (magenta) and RS 1003C (cyan).
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2010-12-15
The Guild of Book Workers Library is housed in the Special Collections Department of The University of Iowa’s Main Library and holds over 700 volumes which focus on the arts of the book, particularly on hand bookbinding techniques. The collection also contains volumes on the history of bookbinding and bookbinders, papermaking, paper decoration techniques, calligraphy, printing, and book conservation. By trading newsletters and journals produced by the Guild, the library also receives current periodicals on binding from similar organizations in England, France, Spain, the Netherlands, and Australia.
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The trailer for British film-maker/writer/academic Patrick Keiller’s eagerly-awaited third installment of his cinematic essays on the political, cultural and urban decline of Great Britain, Robinson in Ruins, inadvertently offers a succinct and astute critique of contemporary typography. A classic Keiller motif, the straight shot of a British motorway sign, cuts in an ever-tightening zoom to a lichen-clad detail of Transport, Margaret Calvert and Jock Kinneir’s timeless 1963 motorway signage typeface. This beautiful yet tragic vision of a modernist ruin is juxtaposed with brutal PowerPoint titles set in Verdana. An instinctive graphic designer’s despair at such calamity is countered by a gradual recognition of potential conceptual typographic genius. Post-IKEA web-safe ersatz-Futura titles, paralleled with Robinson’s poetic explorations of British post-industrial ruin, become a romantic gesture commemorating — and perhaps lamenting — the gradual death of modernism in typography.
More at The Guardian (including a literary reading of the lichen shapes that I didn’t originally spot).
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2010-12-07
Jim Allen, Contact part 1 ‘Computor Dance’, 1974.
(Photo by Bryony Dalefield)Govett-Brewster Art Gallery presents Points of Contact: Jim Allen, Len Lye, Hélio Oiticica, an exhibition that traces the historical and conceptual connections between New Zealand artist Jim Allen (b.1922), a significant figure in the development of post-object practices in New Zealand, and two of his greatest influences: expatriate experimental filmmaker and kinetic sculptor Len Lye (1901-1980) and Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica (1937–1980)
Points of Contact: Jim Allen, Len Lye, Hélio Oiticica
11 December 2010 – 27 February 2011Govett-Brewster Art Gallery
New Plymouth, New ZealandVia e-flux
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Google Translate Beatboxing
