April 16, 2005
Would-be Dada doll
made from recycled materials:
Monte was about to propose. He had read somewhere that a single rose was more romantic than a large bouquet, but standing here, ready to ring the doorbell, he felt ill- equipped...
(link from BoingBoing).
April 11, 2005
Down and out
Lost America (via Life in the Present).
Urban Britain and ispy graffiti gallery (via Rashomon).
March 31, 2005
Abandoned
Second floor lobby, O'Hare. Click for larger image.
Where airplanes go when they die (via Metafilter). Be sure to check out the cool atomic-age postcards of Chicago O'Hare and LAX.
The Canadian Red Cross Memorial Hospital: "a vast abandoned complex in a remote overgrown forest," slated for redevelopment. This may be your only chance to see it (via Plep).
Tales of the underworld: London's 19th-century sewer system (via Mirabilis).
Click for larger image.
March 30, 2005
Urban decay
Fading Ad Gallery" "Ghost signs, ghost ads, phantoms, vintage mural advertisements, whatevery you call them — fading ads are metaphors for survival" (via webzen).
Decrepit Russian embassy in Thailand photo-tour: "The vacant and mysterious Luang Sathorn Mansion and former Russian Embassy. See soundproof and metal-lined rooms, a labyrinth of windowless chambers, and rooms with no apparent way in..." (via BoingBoing).
Urban decay at depressing.org.
Modern Ruins and Urban Exploration.
March 17, 2005
Fun with words
Three ways to recycle those letters (and they do pile up):
Visit the Web of Letters (via Mirabilis),
spell words in letters made of book-covers (Warning! Resource-intensive. Via BoingBoing), or
spell with flickr photos (original source mislaid).
March 02, 2005
SF art
Some things never change.
Two from Boing Boing: sculpture of Geiger's Alien on EBay, made from scrap metal. The same artists have also done Predator and others.
And be sure to check out Tales of Futures Past: gajillion images of imagined retro-futures.
February 27, 2005
Beautiful junk
Chris Jordan, Circuit boards, Atlanta 2004
Artist John Taylor's ships made from found objects.
Chris Jordan's photographs: Intolerable Beauty: Portraits of American Mass Consumption. And Flickr: The Urban Decay Pool (links from wood s lot). From Jordan:
Our consumerism hold an anesthetizing kind of mob mentality; collectively we are committing a vast and unsustainable act of taking, but we each are anonymous and no one is in charge or accountable for the consequences… So perhaps my photographs can serve as portals to a kind of cultural self-reflection. It may not be the most comfortable terrain, but I have heard it said that in risking self-awareness, at least we know we are awake.
Elephant Dung Paper and Paper-Products and Kangaroo Dung Used to Make Paper. Okay, so maybe those two aren't, strictly speaking, "beautiful" ...
Bags Made from Strange Materials. Okay, but felt-tip markers? Skateboards? (from TreeHugger).
February 19, 2005
More detritus
Orphaned photographs: Close to Home: An American Album (via Plep).
Urban Adventure in Rotterdam and Deserted in Prague (via things magazine).
Weblog: Overheard in New York (via Pratie Place):
Trendy: I'd like a swiss burger and, instead of fries, can I substitute soup?
Waiter: No.
Trendy: OK, it was just a suggestion.
Waiter: Great. You can have it that way when you open your own restaurant.
Yes, this is too detritus. And plenty of it.
February 18, 2005
Beautiful books
Livres de Poètes (link from Mark Woods). Writes one of the artists, Lisa Kokin:
I’ve been making books since 1991. My primary source for art supplies is the flea market; I’m intrigued by other people’s detritus. At some point I started using other people’s cast off words. I would take parts of books and cut them up and juxtapose them with parts of other books, such as a sex manual with a hunting guide. Writing in this way, I came up with lots of surprises that I wouldn’t necessarily have come up with on my own.
Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch (1863–1944), The Sleeping Beauty and other Fairy Tales (1910) online, illustrated by Edmund Dulac; The Canterbury Tales online; and The World of Dante: "a hypermedia environment for the study of the Inferno" (links from Plep). Be sure to visit the map of hell.
Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art (via Bibi).
Eerie Publications Cover Gallery (also from Bibi).
The Penguin Collectors' Society (from things magazine).
December 04, 2004
Spooky-lovely-sad
Modern Ruins Photographic Essays (link from Plep). Photographer Shaun O'Boyle writes,
These ruins exist in the fringe landscapes of our cities that were once hardwired to the center of the social and industrial infrastructure, now they have become faded shadows hidden behind cyclone fences, along old canals and abandon rail lines. They map an old system of industrial landscapes now encroached upon all sides by office parks, expanding suburban sprawl and industrial enclaves. Hidden in these ruins are myriad rich stories, tales piled, stacked and horded; they are collapsing heaps with fragments of stories, subtle and personal at times, told in the cryptic language of empty silent rooms, old machinery, unexpected objects and personal details.
Check out State Hospital for the Insane, Mt. Loretto Girls Orphanage, and more.
Update (8:53pm): The new kid on the hallway links to this post with some evocative conjectures about the ways in which different peoples, in different times, may have regarded ruins.
November 29, 2004
An alternative to the Goodwill
Check out A Bibliophile's Bedroom, an exhibition at the Boston Public Library (via The Little Professor, whose house probably already looks like this).
November 14, 2004
You would think
after my recent chagrined post, that I wouldn't link to Boing Boing for a while. But here is a link to a marvelous piece:
An artist created a small animation of a robot walking, then rendered each frame as a stencil. Then s/he went around town and sprayed the stencil on walls, lamp-posts, etc, and photographed each one. When all the photos are played back in sequence, it creates the animation, but with a wildly flickering background of cityscapes that is absolutely wonderful to behold.
How could I not link to it? It has everything: a robot striding through an apocalyptic cityscape to a background of suitably ponderous music. Actually, I don't think it's meant to be a robot; it's too relaxed, too organic. Some kind of Hellboy creature. Though it seems to be based on some sort of padded athlete — a soccer goalie? (The site is in Latvian, Bablefish doesn't do Latvian, and the translator I found wouldn't translate any of the nouns for some reason.) Anyway, I am at clear risk of getting mixed up in questions of intentionality by going down this road. So, a Hellboyish creature it is.
Well there goes any credibility I had.
November 10, 2004
New York, New York
Picking up on some earlier posts about abandoned urban landscapes: Routledge has just published New York Underground: The Anatomy of a City, "a stunning monograph" of Julia Solis's visits to "the subterranean mysteries and ruins of New York City and other locales" (link from Boing Boing). Visit her Dark Passage Web site (previously linked).
Why are these forbidden places so fascinating? To so many people? To me? Because they are at some zeitgeist crossroads of archaeology, zombies, and the apocalypse?
Ummm, zombies.
Crikey! And all these posts were made before the U.S. election.
Perhaps a little more upbeat: Dirty Found, a book of found objects that are, well, dirty. At least, no zombies. Thanks, Maud. Really.
October 25, 2004
Interesting blogs
Just came across these:
Fishbucket: Great links, including sections on abandoned and found stuff, pop culture, and ephemera.
Life In The Present: lots of pop culture links and other cool things.
October 15, 2004
Dust-free archives
Bookninja posts a link that might interest any archivists out there (and you know who you are): the British Library is planning to archive the email "of the nation's top authors and scientists," though there is the ongoing problem of technological obsolescence. The BL is appealing to the general public for access to old computers; maybe I should tell them about those two Performas in the basement.
Bookbindings at the the University of Glasgow (link from Plep) and the British Library.
Women's Travel Writing, 1830–1930 (also from Plep).
Amanda writes, "There really is an archive for everything" as she points towards the Deliberately Concealed Garments Project: Clothing found hidden in buildings: "A research project based at the Textile Conservation Centre, University of Southampton exploring instances of and the practice of concealing garments in the fabric of buildings." This is so cool! Link from Household Opera.
October 12, 2004
Surely there's a screenplay in the offing
"Police play cat and mouse with new French underground": urban explorers on the loose below Paris (link from Mirabilis).
Good thing Martin Amis isn't there (link from Maud).
October 04, 2004
For the one who has everything
Beautiful fish, made of hubcaps. Truly. (from Plep).
September 24, 2004
Finders, keepers
An intriguing entry on jill/txt a couple of days ago about someone who found a stranger's memory card in a cab and started to post the photos online, one a day. The site is apparently now down because the whole thing got slashdotted and presumably the owner of the card was reunited with it. Be sure to read the comments for an interesting discussion of the ethics involved, and of a related, and fascinating, project involving a found address book, "l’homme au carnet" by Sophie Calle, published in Le Monde.
I have seen other, similar things online, like this one here where someone posts some much older photos. Then there are services like istockphoto.com, which I used when putting together the Gender Studies site. When is it okay to use/post/circulate the photographs of strangers? When enough time has passed so that they would no longer be recognizable? When so much time has passed that they are presumed deceased? When do photos pass from the private, into the iconic?
A related question: what about collections of other sorts of found objects, like shopping lists or children's art?
September 14, 2004
Cities
Under Paris: a cinema in the catacombs.
The Face of Tomorrow: "a series of photographs that addresses the issues of globalization and identity" (both via the inestimable Mirabilis).
July 17, 2004
Boy, I've missed you guys!
Lots of funny stuff at Ancarett's Abode:
Legolas Ken and Galadriel Barbie.
Which Loreena McKennitt song are you? ("The Old Ways").
What Kind of Elitist Are You? (Book and language snob. Duh!)
What's my Pirate Name? (Iron Morgan Bonney. Sort of a rum-drinking tin-man with a ribbon.)
Graffitti archeology (from Bookninja).
Injured seagull given a Barbie leg (via Mirabilis). God, I love the internet!
Which generic smut novel character are you? (The Obscenely Wealthy Heiress, of course. Via Nalo Hopkinson).
And from the other end of the alphabet: found zen at web zen. Very cool links.
July 03, 2004
Found stuff
Since I'm going on a trip. From The Tacky Postcard Archive (via Plep; also noted by Mumpsimus).
And check out Photos found in a thrift store camera (via Foreword).
June 30, 2004
Quick link to nowhere
The Cincinnati Subway. And there are tours (links from Boing Boing). Add this to the list.
June 23, 2004
Misc. links
[click for larger view]
"Young Feminists Take on the Family," the newest edition of webjournal The Scholar & Feminist Online published by the Barnard Center for Research on Women, came out today (via Feministing).
The June issue of The Internet Review of Science Fiction is also posted. Highlights: "Feminist SF: Futures for Humankind" by Cynthia Ward, "Science Fiction and the Paradox of Genre" by Matthew Cheney, and an interview about SETI (registration required; free until the end of the month).
SETI@Home has released new client software (via Slashdot). No gui interface for the Mac OS yet, though.
Space Art Through the Ages, including the graphic, above (via Plep). I suspect that some of these artists might be bemused by their company.
American Needlework in the 18th Century and Coffee, Tea, and Chocolate in Colonial America, both at the Met (via Plep).
Kelly Culture: reconstructing Ned Kelly (also via Plep): of particular interest to readers of The True History of the Kelly Gang (mentioned here, here, and here).
Stuff found in used books (via Bookslut; also noted by Household Opera).
June 19, 2004
Paper cuts
The wierd and wonderful web zen has a page of links to paper crafts. Notable are Ida Pearle's collages, the paper games arcade from way of the rodent, box-bots (see above), and what Bradford Hansen-Smith does with paper plates.
And if you are interested in origami, be sure to see Hojyo Takashi's Contemporary Origami; his human figures are rounded and graceful, while some of his animals shade into geometric abstractions. Wonderful stuff.
June 16, 2004
Dark Passage
is Julia Solis' beautiful website. It offers "exercises in forensic archaeology" and "urban post-mortems." And here is an article from The Smithsonian (via Boing Boing).
June 11, 2004
Linked links
Three book links:
Altered Books: the site of the International Society of Altered Book Artists (via moleskinerie).
Pop-up and Movable Books, part of the University of Delaware Library's "world of the child" collection (via Plep).
Fancy limited edition of Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver , list price $ 200.00. But as they say at the Literary Salon, while it's tempting, think of all the not-so-fancy books you could buy with that money!
Segue into SF links:
China Miéville's next novel, Iron Council, due out July 27, takes us, according to the editors, "back to the decadent squalor of New Crobuzon—this time, decades later." (Thanks to The Agony Column). Miéville is also one of the authors represented in the anthology Cities: The Very Best of Fantasy Comes to Town, out this past April.
Segue into dead languages:
"Yoda speaks like Anglo-Saxon" (courtesy of Mirabilis).
Blogging in Latin (via Household Opera).
(Clever how I did that, wasn't it?)
June 04, 2004
Bighappyfunhouse.com
"Accidental art. Found photographs. Via Chicago." Thanks to Household Opera (and, good luck with the move).
June 03, 2004
Poaching
culture, poaching links...
Hand knit superhero costumes that look like grandpa's longjohns, embroidery samplers featuring comic book vignettes, beaded trading cards: it's all here (via Boing Boing).
The Heinz Nixdorf Museum: "From cuneiform to computers." Think stone tablets and computers that fill whole rooms (via Boing Boing. Who have the resources). On a related note, Liz Lawley contemplates adding to the landfill.
Elizabeth Gaskell's home open to tourists (from MoorishGirl). I've been to Chawton and Dylan Thomas's boathouse, have walked through Bloomsbury, and will be going to Haworth in July as part of a conference. Now to get up to Manchester ...
More on gendering robots, from the new, refurbished ms.musings.
Also from msmusings: WisCon, and seven women sf writers talk about rewriting a masculine tradition. This from Patricia Wrede: "Size does matter."
Perhaps I have misjudged Eliot all these years (from Rake's Progress).
The Shatnerian keeps up with his home town.
Vintage tobacco ads (and related products such as "Slug-a-Bug insect killer for use around children, food, pets!") and before and after trade card ephemera (from Beautiful Stuff [and here]).
"Corpi, Murakami, and Contemporary Hardboiled Fiction" by Cathy Stebly, about using hard-boiled fiction to examine the past (from wood s lot).
"Studies in Narrative: Science Fiction and Fantasy": twenty lectures that overview both genres, available as MP3 downloads from The University of Minnesota (from Beautiful Stuff).
Index to the biographies and writings of members of the Frankfurt School and The Charles Booth Online Archive (both from Plep).
May 25, 2004
Urban decay as art
Attaboy.ca has an interesting post, which begins
For my money, urban decay is difficult to beat as a subject for photography. Japanese photographer Saiga Yuji proves it with a rousing series on Gunkanjima, a mostly artificial island that briefly held a coal-mining community off the coast of Japan.
Other links:
Modern Ruins photographic essays
abandoned-places.com
Exploring the Twin Cities
Forgotten Detroit
Forgotten NY
Industrial Archaeology in California
Infiltration: the zine about going places you're not supposed to go. Check out the story about the abandoned Stelco site. Makes me feel nostalgic for my years in Hamilton.
Lost America: the abandoned roadside west.
Modern Ruins by Phillip Buehler.
The Places I shouldn't Be Page
Sonic Atrophy
Urban Speleology: list 'o links
Urban Speleology: also links
Ruins and Urban Exploration: more links
More links
The Urban Exploration Ring: there's an army out there!
May 13, 2004
Book news
The Diamond Sutra, "the earliest printed book to bear a date," is on display at the British Library. Go to the exhibition site and explore the scroll via Shockwave (via That Rabbit Girl).
Library of Alexandria discovered: "the world's first major seat of learning" (via Household Opera).
Sow's ear from a silk purse department: clutch purses made from recycled books (via Maud).
The Strand independent bookstore in Manhattan goes from "8 miles of books" to "16 miles of books" (also from Maud).
May 11, 2004
Collectzione
From the beautifully named to drown a rose: a found type gallery and a vintage homemade tapecover gallery.
May 10, 2004
UnderNY.com
Under New York. What it says. From Plep.
May 05, 2004
Ephemera
Some great links from Cyborg Mommy a couple of days ago:
An American Time Capsule: Three Centuries of Broadsides and Other Printed Ephemera (should prove useful for my summer projects; there was a lot of cross-over between British and American broadsides in the 18thc)
EphemeraNow.com — for whiter teeth! for fresher breath!
<< Deconstruct this!
May 03, 2004
Some links
A collection of found grocery lists (via Watermark).
True Type fonts from found objects (via Boing Boing).
Ahnold is a sensitive guy (via Chuck).
Japanese children's cartoons are down with bodily functions1 (according to John and Belle. Scroll down past adorable kids. If you can.).
This just in: writers are "vain, self-dramatising, self-pitying, arrogant, callous, foolish, censorious and just plain selfish" (via MoorishGirl).
Sam's Mailbox Picture Collection (via Plep).
And finally, the special, limited editon Hello Kitty vibrator (thank you, bloggin it!).
April 30, 2004
derelictlondon.com
Derelict London: "an unusual photographic portrait (of over 600 pics)." Link from greenfairydotcom.
Found Magazine
we collect FOUND stuff: love letters, birthday cards, kids' homework, to-do lists, ticket stubs, poetry on napkins, telephone bills, doodles — anything that gives a glimpse into someone else's life. anything goes...
Some of this stuff is funny. Some is sad.
(Link from Frogs and Ravens).
April 28, 2004
Recycled art
Elise blogs about her new piece by Jean Shin. Shin is an artist who makes sculptures from throwaway items like rolodex cards, discarded shoes, and used lottery tickets. Here is more info.
More (10:50): Was thinking about why I like this image, apart from a general interest in recycled art, and I think it is because the strips of shoe leather are so clean; they look fresh and even damp, like seaweed. They have left behind all associations with dusty, cracked, dry leather fit for the dustbin, and become something else completely.
Compare with Glenn Priestley's charcoal drawing, "Black Shoes" (detail):
April 19, 2004
Reversing vandalism
For a year, an unknown person mutilated copies of books on GLBTQ topics1 in the San Francisco Public Library and left them with little typewritten advertisements for a Bible radio station inside. He was finally caught, but what to do with the books? Click here to see "Reversing Vandalism," an amazing collection by various artists, professional and amateur, made from the damaged books.
"For Duf" by Dacey Hunter, courtesy of the San Francisco Public Library.
[The glass highlights the words, "What were you afraid we would learn?"]
1 Okay, I'm being snotty, quoting this. So be it: "Though the vandal had clearly relied on the library catalog to seek out books on gay issues, he evidently did not understand the search results: Among the books destroyed were works by author Gay Talese and those concerning the Enola Gay, the famous World War II warplane..."
April 12, 2004
I'm more interested in what's inside
Via Crooked Timber: The Chocolate Wrappers Museum. Seeking wrappers from Namibia, Samoa, and Turkmenistan, among others.
April 11, 2004
Ghost stations
Photo by David Sagarin. City Hall Station, NYC.
Underground History, a site devoted to abandoned stations on London's Underground. Via Boing Boing.
London's Abandoned Tube Stations. Via Plep.
Closed stations in Paris' subway.
Cincinnati's Abandoned Subway (also posted by Plep).
More from Cincinnati.
Remnants of Abandoned Stations, Tunnels, and Station Entrances found on the MBTA.
Abandoned Stations at nycsubway.org.
Abandoned Stations (NYC) by Joseph Brennan, "the city's foremost expert when it comes to these abandoned stations," according to NewYorkish.
Abandoned subway tunnel (Newark), at Satan's Laundromat.
Friends of the High Line, "a non-profit organization dedicated to the preservation and reuse of the High Line, an elevated rail structure on the West Side of Manhattan" (check out the photo gallery).
OldNYC.com, "a web page that explores some of the many facets of New York City's transportation infrastructure" (link from Making Light, in an excellent post about NYC which also links to Forgotten NY. Other links here, here, and here.)
Photo by Bruce Davidson. NYC Subway, 1980
The photo, above, is how I remember the subway when I first went to NYC with Joe in 1984. I kinda miss the graffiti.
April 07, 2004
Decayed Machinery
Here is a weblog devoted to, well, decayed machinery. Via Beyond the Beyond.
April 02, 2004
web zen
Strange and wonderful links blog. The museum zen entry links to xerox art, the "gallery of forgotten girlie magazines," and on-line museums: "collections and exhibits covering a vast array of interests and obsessions."
[Link from Boing Boing]
March 26, 2004
Haven't had a Barbie post in awhile
so here is a cool site, The Distorted Barbie. Paintings, thoughtful commentary, and links. Mattel tried to shut them down in 1997, but the site is still up.
The Distorted Barbie is on detritus.net, "dedicated to recycled culture."
March 21, 2004
Passages
Two links from an interesting blog I stumbled across called consumptive.org: "art, photography, and the uncanny":
18/3/04: photographs of recycled paper. Much more exciting than it sounds. (Scroll down to bottom of page.)
27/2/04: Time lapse photography: a woman aging 69 years, smiling throughout.
Detritus
A new category.
And here are three new links:
Photos of those hokey church signs that make you wince — such as "God is at the end of your rope" — via Long story; short pier;
and two photographers' sites: Modern Ruins by Philip Buehler, and Robert Wogan's documentation of the industrial past, both via Plep.
March 18, 2004
Drains
A short while ago I posted on blogs which focus on found or industrial objects. Further to the topic, flaschenpost comments on a recent international upsurge in the theft of manhole covers and drains. Can you imagine stealing this,
this,
or this,
only to melt them down?
[In a comment to my short list of sites, Watermark suggests Heavy Little Objects as a fascinating addition.]
March 15, 2004
Collections
I have been marking various sites for some time now, that showcase collections of found or prosaic objects. The visual equivalent of found poetry; a testament to the compulsion to collect; a determination to find beauty in the everyday; a documentation of the post-industrial landscape. The list is now just long enough to indicate some type of zeitgeist, though I'm sure I'll add to it. Sorry that I have not noted who led me to most of these:
Rob Banham: Lettering on wheelie bins
Drainspotting [check the links page for a long list of fellow travellers]
Megan Hicks: The Newton Ground Level Gallery
Itchy Robot: Found Typography
mapsproject (via long story; short pier)
Pictures of Fire Hydrants