@justinpickard

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Field Notes, by Maxim Peter Griffin

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Andy Kershaw visits the most cluttered workbench he's ever seen to discover how restoration work is going on a monument to British endeavour in speed on water; Jane Labous samples libraries in two counties to assess exactly what they have to offer; Adrian Goldberg indulges his sweet tooth among the burgeoning dessert shops of Birmingham; Ruth Alexander discovers how the town that's trying to turn itself around—literally—is faring; and Travis Elborough discovers perestroika among sixty thousand tulips on the South Downs.

From Our Home Correspondent (22/04/2018)

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Plus those posters you have everywhere make it seem like an AA meeting, only for people who’ve never been drunk. There was one at reception saying, “Silence = Death.” Right above the spot where you force people to sign a non-disclosure form to enter the building.

Rowland Manthorpe, ‘'Dear Mark, this is why I hate you.' An open letter to Zuckerberg’ (2018)

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‘The City and The City’ (BBC Two)

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Video output from a project on classical music and algorithmic judgement from designer Johanna Pichlbauer.

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(Top illustration from Jonathan Djob Nkondo, for this Bloomberg piece on the blockchain.)

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In the digital metallist mode, blockchain produces the ultimate market mechanism, one that can trade in any form of value and exists beyond the domain of governments and the existing financial system. In the infrastructural mutualist mode, the goal is to produce peer-to-peer information systems that distribute resources and organize a new open networked commons.

Lana Swartz, ‘Blockchain dreams: imagining techno-economic alternatives after Bitcoin’ (2017)

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Combining the politics of China, the flashing lights of modernity, the pressures of tradition and the joys and sorrows of exile, there are countless old demons and new deities in the mandala of Tibetan literature.

Lowell Cook, ‘Off the Plateau’ (2018)

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The arrays of tools, the heaps of sky-blue Styrofoam or wood wool used for stuffing, the sets of glass or plastic eyes, the pots of spray paint, the freezers filled with carcasses wrapped in plastic, the baths in which deer hides soak, an aquarium housing dermestid beetles busy cleaning rodent skulls, a grouse comb (cast from dental acrylic, which allows the light to shine through), and the colorful menagerie in different stages of becoming—all this matter turns taxidermy workshops into sites of intrigue that need no artistic intervention to instill a sense of wonder.

Petra Tjitske Kalshoven, 'Gestures of taxidermy: morphological approximation as interspecies affinity’ (2018)

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When the day comes that cities teem with automated vehicles, space will be at a premium, and modes that use less of it will be favored. It will also become something of a rare pleasure to be able to carve your own path through a city of robots on algorithmically determined journeys. For both requirements, the electric bike fits the bill.

Henry Grabar, ‘The electric glide’ (2018)

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In that way the commercialization of space will also be, we hope, a kind of domestication—not in the sense of taming nature but in the sense of creating a space for dwelling, a venue for human life to unfurl in all its weirdness and complexity.

Ed Finn and Joey Eschrich, ‘The Flag and the Garden’, in Visions, Ventures, Escape Velocities (2017)

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(’Cameraless Photography with Neural Networks')

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Civilisations trailer.

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(Milatoo via Wired UK)

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Scrap is a power and resource in itself in Orkney. There is a local dialect word for it: bruck, which describes both rubbish washed up on a beach, and forgotten things in a cupboard. Bruck is not waste but implies some future purpose may still be found. In the islands, as with many islands, the ethos is: you tie it together with string (or whatever you can find). On Eday, we waded through typewriters and pigeon shit in old churches, we opened a cupboard door and found a bronze ship’s bell, we tore through derelict cars, we discovered submarine parts and other wonders in people’s sheds. Bruck powered our project. If we needed something, we learned to phone around—someone would have it, or near enough.

Laura Watts, ‘Making energy futures at the island edge’ (2018)

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In 1870, the Prussian army laid siege to Paris, a city of Jules Verne modernity. This Paris harboured malfunctioning prototypes of the future—the mitrailleuse machine gun and Le Plongeur submarine—and aborted deranged technologies such as Jules Allix’s long-distance communication system based on the telegraphic escargot fluid of “sympathetic snails,” a fever dream of quantum entanglement. Hemmed in by the Prussian military, Parisians were forced to dine on rats or—if they were lucky—choice cuts from the exotic species in the city zoo.

Matthew De Abaitua, ‘With the Night Mail (Intro)’ (2018)

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The pasilalinic-sympathetic compass, also referred to as the snail telegraph, was a contraption built to test the pseudo-scientific hypothesis that snails create a permanent telepathic link when they mate. The device was developed by French occultist Jacques Toussaint Benoit with the supposed assistance of an American colleague Monsieur Biat-Chretien in the 1850s.

Wikipedia, ‘Pasilalinic-sympathetic compass’