Listening to the Atomic Age
From the Canada Science and Technology Museum, sounds of the Algonquin hand-cranked Geiger counter detecting low-level emissions from another Atomic Age artifact, the Algom Uranium Marketing Sample.
Sounds like geckering to me.
Art Institute adds Warhol’s ‘Empire’ to Chicago skyline
From 6 p.m. to 2 a.m. [Friday, December 9], the modern skyscraper [the Aon Center] overlooking Millennium Park will be acting as a movie screen onto which the Art Institute of Chicago will be projecting Andy Warhol’s eight-hour silent, black-and-white epic “Empire,” which consists of one long, unbroken shot of New York’s Empire State Building. Said to be the first outdoor U.S. screening of this landmark — if not exactly action-packed — film, the event marks the very public, logistically challenging kickoff to the Art Institute’s new exhibition Light Years: Conceptual Art and the Photograph, 1964-1977, which opens to members Saturday and to the public Tuesday.
A History of the Sky
A time-lapse study of the sky for a year. By Ken Murphy.
A camera installed on the roof of the Exploratorium museum in San Francisco captured an image of the sky every 10 seconds for a year.
[A History of the Sky] is a mosaic of 360 time-lapse movies, each showing [a] single day. They are arranged chronologically, and are synchronized by time-of-day, beginning before sunrise.
(Thanks to Ju Ju Pongo.)
You’re built like a car (You got a hubcap diamond-star halo)
Europeans have all the fun: lower drinking ages, funner beaches, easier lifestyles and . . . dinosaur skeletons having sex in their museums. This exhibit, which clearly shows two T-Rexes “mating”, is located in the Jurassic Museum of Asturias in Spain.
Via @leatherarchives.
what do I call this one?
(via +Tim Carmody)
from the comments
He sounds like the clodbuster who followed us around at the Conger House Museum in Washington, Iowa, during the funeral home exhibit (tricks of the death trade, 1800s style, or something like that). The rare sound of the southern Appalachian foothills apparently caught his ear. I couldn’t get over the exhibit and was lost in a verbal boomerang. “OMG, look at how tiny that coffin is, lordy! You don’t think that’s a mummy in there do you? This paper says it’s a WOMAN! There’s a net over her face to keep off INSECTS!” The clodbuster probably had seen a Virginia car tag in the lot. Finally, he made his way to the Iowan, farm cap in hand, and announced, “You’re not from around here.” Matter of fact, not aggressive. Just making a statement about a certain person’s museum viewing theatrics.
Back to back on Twitter
So to speak.
Join the LA&M Women’s Leather History Project and Alex Warner on the road at Beyond Vanilla in Dallas TX. (From the Leather Archives and Museum.)
Do I know anyone who works with leather, in a book binding way? Here’s the info. (From clusterfriend Pete Ashton.)
I am a woman of many and varied interests.
I saw Deron in Oslo
At Akershus Castle.
1939 Pontiac Deluxe Six “Ghost Car”
The 1939 Pontiac Deluxe Six “Ghost Car” was built for the New York World’s Fair and was later displayed at the Smithsonian. It sold Saturday for $308,000.
Originally built for $25,000, the car with a Plexiglas body was the first transparent car built in America. Another was built the following year, but its whereabouts are unknown.
spam name
Beatriz Woodson.
We’re off to DC in the morning…
being picked up at the house @ 4:15 am. (ugh.) Danny’s working, I’m vacationing. Anything we (I) need to see while I’m there, you DC folks? (Dave Vogt, I didn’t give enough warning, I know you’re a workin’ boy, could you meet us tomorrow night at La Tomate, Dupont Circle? (We’ll pick up the tab) Or if you have time off one day that fits, meet me for lunch someplace? (We’re there tomorrow afternoon through Thursday afternoon.) We’re staying at L’Enfant Plaza. (sp?) Right off the Mall.
I plan to check the “things to see” once I’m there. It’s a given I’ll go to the East wing of the National Gallery of Art, and to the Hirshhorn. Anything else is up for grabs.
The Life Zone
Three women have been kidnapped from abortion clinics and are being held for seven months–until they all give birth. The film, which appears to cut right down the middle, examining the topic from both sides, offers a powerful, anti-abortion climactic twist.
And no, this isn’t satire.
1. Make List; 2. Do Stuff
This is a flaming brilliant concept for an exhibition. (It’s based on a recently published book.) At the Morgan Library & Museum through October 2, 2011. Drawn from the Smithsonian Institution’s Archives of American Art.
The more you study the Morgan exhibition, the more you realize that lists are everywhere, and that list making is an essential human activity — a way not just of keeping track but also of imposing order on what would otherwise be chaos. Your address book, a restaurant menu, the instructions on the MetroCard machine, prescription-drug ads spelling out possible side effects: they’re all lists. So are those annoying thoughts at the back of your head reminding you that you have books overdue at the library and still haven’t sent a thank-you note to Aunt Gert. Artists are no different, no less preoccupied with keeping track, though most of them have better handwriting than the rest of us, and their lists tend to be a little neater.
Claro y Obscuro: Elsa Muñoz (National Museum of Mexican Art)
National Museum of Mexican Art. May 20 through November 27, 2011.
Chicago area artist Elsa Muñoz paints still settings and meditative moments in time, suggesting something has just transpired, or that a new sequence of events is about to unfold. At times eerie, the work reflects her personal exploration and interpretation of the chiaroscuro technique–an approach where the shadow itself acts as a dominant character in the scene.
“These works are as much about what is plainly revealed in light as they are about what is concealed in darkness . . . the relationship between light and shadow as metaphors.” (Elsa Muñoz).
you cannot experience it all
Seriously, you can’t, it’s impossible, so just stop trying, and surrender to the goodness you do see:
Consider books alone. Let’s say you read two a week, and sometimes you take on a long one that takes you a whole week. That’s quite a brisk pace for the average person. That lets you finish, let’s say, 100 books a year. If we assume you start now, and you’re 15, and you are willing to continue at this pace until you’re 80. That’s 6,500 books, which really sounds like a lot.
Let’s do you another favor: Let’s further assume you limit yourself to books from the last, say, 250 years. Nothing before 1761. This cuts out giant, enormous swaths of literature, of course, but we’ll assume you’re willing to write off thousands of years of writing in an effort to be reasonably well-read.
Of course, by the time you’re 80, there will be 65 more years of new books, so by then, you’re dealing with 315 years of books, which allows you to read about 20 books from each year. You’ll have to break down your 20 books each year between fiction and nonfiction – you have to cover history, philosophy, essays, diaries, science, religion, science fiction, westerns, political theory … I hope you weren’t planning to go out very much.
Headline of the Day
Iceland’s penis museum finally gets human specimen
Tweet of the day, honorable mention
Specifically, he’s been tweeting gorgeous photos from this collection all afternoon.
from the archives: April 29, 2008
It’s the comments that make it.
No, no, no. Dr Pepper.
Q: I have 2 commemorative cans of Dr. Pepper. One is full of soda and one is empty. The archives of Abilene Christian University would like to keep both cans. Can anyone offer advice regarding safe housing and storage of the Dr. Pepper cans?
A: Try the Dr. Pepper Museum people.
(From the Archives & Archivists List)
Five Fonts from the Emigre Library in MoMA
In early January 2011, The Museum of Modern Art in New York made curatorial history when it acquired 23 digital typefaces for their Design and Architecture Collection. Besides such classics as Erik Spiekermann’s FF Meta and Matthew Carter’s Verdana, the acquisition also included five font families from the Emigre Type Library: Keedy Sans by Mr. Keedy; Mason Serif by Jonathan Barnbrook; Template Gothic by Barry Deck; Oakland by Zuzana Licko; and Dead History by P. Scott Makela.
The book commemorating the acquisition is here. For a limited time, you can buy all five fonts and the book for $160.
Ted Serios: Paranormal Photographs
On exhibition through March 27 at the Albin O. Kuhn Library and Gallery at the University of Maryland-Baltimore County: “Psychic Projections/Photographic Impressions: Paranormal Photographs from the Jule Eisenbud Collection on Ted Serios.”
Ted Serios was an alcoholic Chicago bellhop said to have possessed an uncanny gift. Holding a Polaroid camera and focusing on the lens, he produced what he called thoughtographs: images of his thoughts transferred directly to the film.
In connection with the UMBC exhibition, the Chronicle Review features a fascinating article titled Ted Serios and Psychic Projections.
“Bring your monkey back to where it all began.”
An original one-of-a-kind event, the Sock Monkey Madness Festival, will return as a unique celebration of Rockford’s past by highlighting its once thriving knitting industry and boom of the stuffed sock toy made from Rockford Red Heel Socks which continues as a large part of America’s pop culture. The 9th Annual Sock Monkey Madness Festival hours are 11:00 am until 5:00 pm Saturday and Sunday [March 5-6, 2011].
Let’s get cool in the pool
At the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, museum goers can dive into the art — literally. They can actually swim in it. The pool is tucked into a dark, back corner of the museum. It’s 3 feet deep, the size of a mini-lap pool, and it’s ringed with small blue lights. An eerie soundtrack plays as large images — featuring lines of cocaine — are projected on either side of the pool.
I spent two hours in this pool today. It’s an interesting experience. After about an hour of being by myself as people milled around, a large group of young children got into the pool and screamed and splashed. I couldn’t decide whether I was angry because my experience was being shaped by circumstances beyond my control or whether it was nice that a bunch of kids were at a museum swimming in a pool as images of cocaine danced on the walls nearby. One girl kept saying “Mommy, what is that?” and this question was met with silence.
From the Annals of Creationism
The Atlantic Wire has a nice write-up on Answers In Genesis and their plans to include both dragons and unicorns in their new “Ark Encounter” theme park:
The group says “yes,” to both, which implies that their creationist theme park will include dinosaurs and unicorns on the Ark. Here’s Answers In Genesis explaining why dinosaurs were on the Ark, although the group prefers to call them “dragons”:
Being land animals, dinosaurs (or dragons of the land) were created on Day Six (Genesis 1:24–31), went aboard Noah’s
Ark (Genesis 6:20), and then came off the Ark into the post-Flood world (Genesis 8:16–19). It makes sense that many cultures would have seen these creatures from time to time before they died out.
And here’s their position on Biblical unicorns:
The biblical unicorn was a real animal, not an imaginary creature. … The absence of a unicorn in the modern world should not cause us to doubt its past existence. (Think of the dodo bird. It does not exist today, but we do not doubt that it existed in the past.). … To think of the biblical unicorn as a fantasy animal is to demean God’s Word, which is true in every detail.
Frankly, I was a little confused as to their choice of words (i.e., why using the word “dinosaurs” is any less ridiculous than “dragons”), but I’m sure they’ve thought through that semantic argument pretty thoroughly.
Did they just put in their credit card info and voila?
Jason interviewed Jonathan Hoefler about four of his fonts being acquired for MoMA’s Architecture and Design collection.
Hoefler: I should start by stating that you can never actually “buy fonts” online: what one can buy are licenses, and the End-User License that surrounds a typeface does not extend the kinds of rights that are necessary to enshrine a typeface in a museum’s permanent collection. The good news is that H&FJ has become as good at crafting licenses as we have at creating typefaces, an unavoidable reality in a world where fonts can be deployed in unimaginable ways. This was a fun project for our legal department.
From the Glasgow School of Art Archives & Library
Set of costume and stage designs for theatrical productions of Macbeth, Salome and Parsifal, 1933. Pen, pencil and paint with metalic paint touches. Various dimensions around 405×270 mm.
(via @wilfreeborn)
