Medical-related artworks by Laura Splan (via two-zero). From here we get to the work of Gail Wight. Many intriguing projects here, such as the Cabinet of Curiosities ('meditations on evolution') and Spike, a brief history of the experiments and explorers who decoded the cells, nerves and electrical impulses that make up our brain. It's full of endlessly fascinating trivia: 'In Germany, Dr. A. Bayer synthesizes barbituric acid, naming it after a friend called "Barbara." Its derivatives, used in medicine as sedatives and hypnotics, will include the first sleeping drug, "barbital."' (and, presumably, Barbiturates)

I once saw grim footage of this particular 'experiment' - the public electrocution of an aggressive elephant at Coney Island's Luna Park (last link needs Quicktime). I'd forgotten it was a publicity stunt designed to promote Edison’s preferred (and ultimately doomed) electrical current system (the original plan was to hang the elephant). There was even a recent competition to design a memorial for Topsy, the tragic pachyderm in question.

We found out more about Topsy's plight at Roadside America's Elephant's Graveyard, eleven tales of 'America's dead, misunderstood titans'. There are some seriously tragic ends: Jumbo was hit by a freight train; Thirsty Mary was shot to death; Norma was struck by lightning. Perhaps most terrible of all is the tale of Big Mary, hung from a crane (how do you hang an elephant? Oh. Ugh). These tales would make a great, but gruesome, children’s book.

'Living here is like an itch,' an author's thoughts on St Petersburg. Ingrid Bengis, author of Metro Stop Dostoevsky describes her adopted city as a place without destiny or purpose, a city of catastroika ('catastroika - a sign of a complete catastrophe', from this article on the failure of perestroika and, gulp, the need for evangelical missions in post-Soviet Russia). Meanwhile, the caryatids and atlantes just watch, waiting.

Related. Russia's prison tattoos, a fascinating article by David Johnson about Prisoner's Tattoos, a book by former guard Danzig Baldayev. Originally published by Limbus Press in St Petersburg, the book is shortly to be re-issued by, I think, Scalo in Germany. (Limbus also has a couple of St Petersburg/Leningrad galleries: the city during World War II and in the Seventies). Baldayev's obsessive work was carried out against a background of a huge prison population and high levels of crime (indeed, his publisher is even quoted as saying: 'After 50 years, what we're hearing and seeing now will be forgotten. In general, the level of criminalization of society will fall, and this book will be a monument to a culture that has passed.') Baldayev's work is truly a 'dictionary' - these marks are all part of an elaborate language of power. 'A prisoner who has a tattoo of a cat smoking a pipe is a successful thief, Baldayev says. A snarling tiger or wolf means the thief is particularly powerful. A murderer might have a tattoo of a warrior in armor standing on severed heads or a tattoo of a sword piercing a skull.'

Elsewhere. The Foolscap Press produces large, lavish-looking illustrated books. We would like to actually hold one. They also have a useful collection of Artist's Book dealers worldwide / Courageous Ace is one of the world's largest car supercarriers, capable of hauling 6,400 cars across the globe at a time. Launched by the Mitsui O.S.K Lines, it leads us into the world of bulk carriers, where you get whole ships devoted to wood chips, of all things. Bulk-carrying cars has a big advantage - the cargo is self-propelling, so it can haul itself on and off the boat. Related: two images (I, II) of the Tricolor, which took a load of Volvo XC90s to a very watery grave back in December. The salvage operation even has its own website, TricolorSalvage.com.

The tale of the first computer virus, at waxy / chunky, wacky watches from Japan at Tokyoflash / an elegy for the Beetle (one of presumably thousands), via scrubbles (one more Beetle link at the BBC) / Nasty, 'academia at its brattiest', with articles like Jennifer Garrison's Kissing Dementors: Fear and Social Discipline in the Harry Potter Novels'.
posted by things magazine at 08:32

We have been contacted by someone eager to sell us 'Silent Domolition Agent' (sic), also known as 'soundless creaking agent'. It sounds rather amazing. From the instructions: 'Please stir a kind of cement powder matter with water, pour it a hole in rock or concrete. After a moment, rock and concrete will rend themselves.' Makes a change from endless viagra spam.

We are honoured to be making our first contribution to the Mirror Project - a wing mirror shot / yet more pin-ups / online wedding lists are now commonplace, as are picture galleries of past ceremonies, but this just strikes us as extremely over the top / found in the depths of our links file, with no accompanying documentation: e-com.con.com - it's looks like a pseudo-hacked corporate site. Was this for a movie tie-in? We're baffled. Why did we even clip it in the first place?

The earth as art via raccoon / extraordinary web design at Frosch-Studio. If one was a potential client, wouldn't a hugely detailed and lavish flash promotional site make you nervous? Doesn't it imply that the studio doesn't have much to do except play with their website? / end laundry basket confusion (and save a bunch on handmade Danish quality socks - is there any other kind?) with 10 socks, via diminished responsibility.

The Bat Guano galleries of nuclear weapons testing / vaguely related, a review of 24 at Sight and Sound. We're backed up with video tapes here, a month or so behind the UK, let alone the US, so we can't read it just yet / overmorgen, a highly worthwhile weblog / Colombia-based Jorge Retrepo's excellent wonksite is worth visiting for its black and white photos of cars and trains / Pastense, commercial quality 1950s retro furnishings. We'd prefer the real thing, though, as this stuff smacks too much of sticky-floored fast food joints and inappropriately dressed waitresses / Pierre di Scullio's Qui Resiste catalogues the author's various hand-printed publications, as well as fonts and links / more fonts at the beautiful fountain.

The world of Raymond Scott, (unwitting) composer of madcap cartoon melodies and pioneer of electronic music (with his own invention, the Electronium). The site contains sounds too. He also worked with a young Robert Moog (more on Moog: I, II, III). Contemporary musical instruments rarely have personalities - in fact, they spend most of their time imitating old musical instruments (like this Flextone amplifier, or this huge collection of digital drum machine resources). One could argue that people who take the time to build their own instruments (like the awesome New Brutalism) have an edge on those who don't, those for whom a guitar, keyboard or drum machine is just another tool, and not a thing with character.

Historic sites on the web. An old online gallery of the work of Julius Shulman / old collection of flash experiments at surface.yugop - not a lot has happened here for a while / also old: jjg.net's collection of weblog links - the state of the online world in October 2000 / missing in action: List Magazine.
posted by things magazine at 09:59

'The Magic Circles' is Paul Morley’s elegy for the vanishing 7” vinyl single. Will music soon cease to be associated with physical objects? Morley calls the iPod 'at once a nail in the coffin and some kind of saviour, … an object that seems beautiful enough to honour the history of the popular song as a vast and varied art form, and to be the futuristic replacement to the vinyl single.' It might be beautiful, but as a result 'the physical presence of the popular song is gone.' He concludes (with shades of the KLF ):


More scattered links. We like the Glasses Project at Miss Ashley: 'an experiment in repetition and the effects of americana on strangers in the supermarket' (the object gallery is also beautiful) / more photos at absenter / Japanese apartment buildings are seriously austere / very clever '3D' gif gallery.

The official site for Roobarb and Custard - keep re-loading to hear the intoxicating theme tune again and again / after the American Gallery of Psychiatric Art, we now have the Japanese gallery of Psychiatric Art (via geisha asobi) / modern living, neat, strangely futile flash animations / handy: how to catch a magic bullet / Wandsworth Borough council has equipped its registery office with two wedding cams / Steam Powered will do clever things like give you free games (Half Life included, apparently) if you install it.

In stark contrast to yesterday’s shiny stainless steel Jacob Jensen-designed B&O; pieces, here are some vintage phonographs at Old Crank (via Fiendish is the word) / apropos of absolutely nothing. What makes the new MINI supremely great is all down to its Germanic design and engineering – qualities the country has long since excelled at. Sadly, what makes it supremely irritating its wholly British image and advertising campaign, highlighting how Britain excels at vapid creativity, rather than manufacturing.

Archive of imagery and recollections about recorded migration into the UK (via BBC) / Purse Lip Square Jaw, a weblog / all sorts of contemporary debris at monochrom, e.g errors / the pin-up art of Gil Elvgren / Josep Lluis Sert's Fundació Miró, Barcelona (related: more Barcelona and Miro) / Mastication is normal has kindly offered to judge books by their covers - i.e. how to approach the same subject from different angles, and the subversion of the designer's trade ('this cover is nothing short of perfect'). We'd also recommend occasional things contributor Alan Powers’ book Front Cover, and his forthcoming Children's Book Covers for dust-jacket junkies.

The story of rabbits in Western Australia, a companion piece, one might say, to Danielle Olsen’s Dividing Australia.
posted by things magazine at 09:02

Lots of little links today. What does the future hold? Scoot on over to Illustrated Speculative Timeline of Future Technology and Social Change (a bit of a mouthful - perhaps the future spells the end of snappy marketing acronyms?). There is a huge amount of information here, courtesy of futurologist J.R. Mooneyham (but, ironically, not a whole lot in the way of illustrations). We especially appreciate the auto section, because we're a bit sad like that. Strangely, though, all of the concepts illustrated are from the 1990s - in comparison, today's concept cars seem to be driven by marketing, rather than futurism.

J.R. predicts, depressingly, that come the middle of this century most of us will have plunged into the escapism of virtual reality to get away from the environmental disasters and religious warfare that will apparently be all too common. Great. Related: what's hot or not? The Future Concept Lab, a nebulous futures organisation, charts the most recent cultural 'hits and hot', presumably helping the desk-bound high-flyer to keep their finger on the pulse.

Elsewhere. Share your shed at Readerssheds / abstract imagery culled from around the globe at trashfish.net / more global galleries at buffoonery.org / a collection of sprawling notes on insects, pests, plagues and politics, full of informational nuggets ('Stinging insects account for 40 - 100 deaths annually in the United States')/ hangart bills itself as 'emerging artists for emerging collectors', a fine idea.

Lots and lots of design links at capsyl.com / we'll be trying to get hold of the first long player by EE (a name guaranteed to frustrate search engines - surely one of the first things aspiring bands do these days is make sure their name is as unique as possible via google?) on Asian Man Records. EE counts in its line-up one Sooyoung Park, formerly of Seam and Bitch Magnet, two of the finest bands in the history of creation.

Neural.it, an Italian site 'on new media art, electronic music and hacktivism'. There's also a print quarterly. Subscription exchange, perhaps? / this interactive map of Australian nuclear sites comes with a hefty collection of photos (aside: did you know that at one point the French government was seriously considering using parts of Corsica as a nuclear test site?) / self-explanatory URL: cooljapanesetoys.com / Mondo Fragile, 'modern illustrators from Japan'. Pretty good, as you'd expect, but with a seriously retro, dare-we-say-it, wallpaper*-esque feel.

Music video review. The video for Mogwai’s 'Hunted by a freak' is terribly, terribly sad. The video for Benny Benassi's 'Satisfaction' is quite amusing (if highly post-ironic) / Beoworld, devoted to the retro yet stylish joys of vintage Bang & Olufsen equipment. From here, we learn about B&O;’s Beoplayer mp3 software - does anyone have any experience of this?

The Motorway Simulator, linked by this recent me-fi post on roads and road-centric sites (it also tallies well with John Weich's new things review, Mobility). Now you can travel the length of the M1 from the comfort of your desktop! Quite an existential experience and something which would combine well with the early work of Julian Opie (we'd quite forgotten how sassy Opie's website is, epitomised by this page. Not a big archive, though). The Opie piece we were thinking of, Imagine You Are Driving turns up on something called the Microsoft Art Collection, which presumably catalogues the company's artistic holdings). Sort of related: Multi Theft Auto is a multi-player 'mod' for Grand Theft Auto (with a version promised for Vice City).

Many, many links at innovation watch / art for housewives, ironic name for an art-oriented weblog / daft flash: make a drum solo (disclaimer: we haven't actually played with this with the speakers on - we're just imagining what it sound like) / speaking of sound, tmn linked to a phenomenon new to us (but probably well known to the world at large): soundboards. These are very infantile, but can be used to make entertaining prank calls. Our advice: calls 'made' by aggressive Italian-Americans are usually the most amusing (especially when they are answered by other Italian-Americans).

We have vague memories of mentioning Laura Holder's epic splash archive before. Whatever. Regardless, this is a beautiful desk / classic pool shot at Slower. This image is pretty stunning as well. Is there an award this guy can win? He deserves one / 'The key to a successful freelance career is…' / window shopping in the (evil?) empire / 'playing dress up' at the game girl advance zine, all about Otaku / pin-up galleries.

Plasticando.com is an Italian model trains site - the track plans have a certain grace / well-linked, but still fun, the museum of coathangers (via sugar-n-spicy, via tom mcmahon) / the Star Wars alphabet project (via me-fi, obv.) at the hitherto unknown Lego Star Wars Experience.
posted by things magazine at 08:56

Collision Detection contains interesting musings on the nature of video games in society, what we expect from them, what we don't expect, what non-gamers think, etc., etc. ('Indeed, this basic concept -- that games get better the more they resemble movies -- is the dominant way that mainstream cultural critics think about games.') For example, this post focused on in-game cinematics, concluding that attempts to imitate filmic conventions in cut-scenes were usually laughable. On the other hand, when gamers use the lack of real world constraints in their games, the results are often far more exciting - offering a visual spectacle impossible in cinema (although the CGI-heavy blockbusters are swiftly catching up, creating gravity and physics-defying action sequences. Indeed, Felix Salmon mentioned in his review of Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle, that the film's pre-credit sequence is of 'such physical impossibility that the eponymous girls are essentially treated as superheroes.' (Also by Felix Salmon, 'Girlie Mags and serious journalism,' which is interesting also for the information that there is someone called Seth Mnookin)

The Collision Detection piece links to this SSX Tricky movie, but there's also the celebrated Warthog Jump, subtitled 'a Halo physics experiment', which uses the X-Box game as a kind of playground for impossible events. Indeed, there's a whole genre of 'film-making' that uses 3D games engines as a kind of virtual studio: Machinima (more info at 3Dfilmmaker.com). A lot of these short movies resemble music videos (see the SSX Tricky one linked above), in their synchronisation of action and sound. But more ambitious projects are in the offing, for example, Anachronox, which weighs in at an impressive 1.1gb download. There was also a well-publicised attempt/project/performance of the sitcom Friends using the Quake engine: Quake/Friends. There's a video here.

Elsewhere. More on reality vs unreality/virtuality here in this musing on the physics of space games. We can well remember the Newtonian physics of the seminal Elite series, especially Frontier, whereby one would happily plough into large planets on a regular basis. (the Frontier: First Encounters manual online, in pdf).

Grant Scott's photo series 'Crash Happy: a night at the bangers' captures the oil, sweat, fear and exhileration of banger racing, that strange motoring sub-culture. 'Overalls, £100. Crash helmet, £300. Racing license, £60. Diesel for truck, £35. Petrol for race, £10. Car £20.' / it doesn't have the natty illustrations that accompanied the polar bears, but you still might want to read the seven myths about Swiss bank accounts / vast model Boeing 747.

Local opinion is, as one might expect, sharply divided over the merits of Frank Gehry's scheme for Hove Harbour. This is Gehry's first major UK project (his first building, the Maggie's Centre in Dundee, is far more restrained). Although the project will no doubt 'launch a 1000 metaphors'', we can't help but feel that this is statement architecture par excellence - buildings that will act as magnets, regardless of their ultimate usage (luxury flats) / Speaking of taste, we liked the me-fi thread on this audacious piece of urban kitsch: the Spirit of the Seas. Although more than a bit Franklin Mint in its artistic aspirations, what's most grotesque about this fishy wonder is its sheer scale: some 200 feet long.

Critical Mess, or if movie posters told the truth. Actually, movie reviews seem almost entirely irrelevant these days. No-one, in UK broad sheets at least, writes terribly convincingly about film at the moment. Criticism is reduced to a torrent of clever-clever comparisons, and the public just goes ahead and sees the film anyway (guilty as charged). Related: the myth of the big opening weekend, or how the more screens you open on, the better.

28mm is quite exceptional these days, as is 99000, with its photo-centric weblog (which gives us the digital photography FAQ, which we'd do well to read) / City of Tomorrow, via Sachs Report.

Finally. The site continues to behave in strange and mysterious ways. Advice (on css positioning especially, and the issues it might have outside of the safe, predictable world of IE/PC - i.e. Mac users) is always welcome.
posted by things magazine at 10:42

The American Gallery of Psychiatric Art is getting a fair amount of linkage at the moment (we spotted it via Ashley B, who found it via dublog). Back to the drugs. I'm presuming these ads are taken from psychiatry journals - you get the feeling that the target audiences aren't exactly able to speak for themselves. Examples: Dexamyl (like so many early anti-depressants, an amphetamine), some early advocacy of Ritalin (‘brightens mood and improves performance’), and Thorazine ('quickly puts an end to his violent outburst').

Elsewhere. 'A polar bear heaves a block of ice at a walrus. It is an ancient belief in the north that bears occasionally kill walruses in this manner. Most scientists doubt it.' From the obscure but informative Polar Bear Myth Gallery (via the gospel according to Mark). There are only five entries (and strictly speaking only one of these is actually a myth), but we like its precision / Ramage is a good new cultureblog / Foodgoat talks about food, from junk to haute cuisine / dublog also pointed us to Ron Wise's epic Geographical Dictionary of World Paper Money. An epic labour of love, it's worth browsing just for the concision of the maps alone. But if you've ever wanted to know what fifty Swazi emalangeni looked like in 1990, or what two Hutt River Province dollars were like in 1970 (rather natty, actually), this is the place to come.

Giornale Nuovo on Cabinets of Curiosities. Which got us thinking: what are our modern cabinets of curiosities? Perhaps it's the video games console, through which whole worlds are stored and accessed (related: a game that likes real sunlight, via kottke). Practically every home has such a device today (related: twenty years of the Nintendo Famicom. Also, if only these were links to go with this timeline of Rare's impeccable video-games heritage - screenshots, anything), functioning as a gateway to somewhere else. We'll have more on virtual worlds - and virtual things - soon.

Find sounds at findsounds ('scream' is always a good way to start) / a striking urban exploration image at Jinx Magazine (via me-fi, especially nicwolff's comment, which had us digging around for more information on the crash of Pan Am's helicopter shuttle in May 1977. A stray rotor from the disaster killed a young woman waiting for a bus on 43rd (related: celebrity deaths in air crashes)) / Indelible is modest, elegant and unassuming, yet it's just one of an octet of weblogs maintained by Alison Bloom. The others include a page devoted to a wedding, personal experience of Judaism, health, house-keeping, poetry and, finally, arts administration. Phew. Truly a life lived through the medium of the internet.

A neat, slightly retro, links page at yomgaille.com (via kesskisspass) / a fotolog all about books / the photography of Olivia Gay / links and things at two-zero (which is where we find the Erotic Museum, a destination to which we will inevitably return) / a random lists of links at guitarstart / I’m going to miss the Guardian’s 'wrap' email service, which becomes a subscription-only service from tomorrow. It will interesting to see how it fares in its new commercial incarnation.

The conceptual Corporate Fallout Detector - swipe a barcode, and this Geiger-counter like device will squirrel through the myriad levels of company ownership to give you the low-down on the parent company's environmental and ethical record. Now if you can imagine a similar thing on a mobile phone-like device. Or even a mobile phone itself, where the benefits of a built-in barcode scanner are numerous. Instead of taking a calculator to the supermarket, you could just point and scan your own basket and keep a running total, as well as a long-term, instantly accessed record of your purchases. After all, it's not as if the stores aren't doing it for you already... (read 'The card up their sleeve', a recent Guardian piece on the information gathering revolution).

Finally, apologies for the continuing retina-searing problems that Mac users have recently (always?) experienced. We're working on a fix and thanks, especially, to Tom and Michael for help and advice. The upshot of all this ferreting around has been interesting. Call us naive, but we were shocked to see screen captures of this page on Safari and see the fonts all smoothed and neat (something to do with Quartz, we presume). Then we discovered font smoothing in Windows XP, hidden away on the desktop. Now everything is similarly buttery.

But as a result, we can no longer see pixels. It is confusing. (related: the history of the pixel - 'tomorrow, members of the 'mezzo-rez' generation will likely pine nostalgically for artifacts of their 640 x 480, 16-bit color screens.'). In the same way that one acquires a 'regular font’, the shape of which seems to influence the way one reads, types, and most importantly writes, becoming all smoothed out is unnerving. It’s like seeing your words in print far ahead of the event (assuming that one’s words were destined for print in the first place). It takes away one more barrier between random musing and published work. Is that helpful?
posted by things magazine at 10:09

Golly. You leave the country for a few all-too-short days of sun, sea and sand, sans any of the accoutrements of your everyday technological life, and the first thing you do on returning is race around the internet, frantically checking this and that to see what’s new, what’s changed, who’s where. The garden, on the other hand, gets only a perfunctory once-over – as soon as it’s been established that nothing (especially important) has died it can take care of itself for a few hours more. Instead, this whistle stop tour of one’s daily stomping grounds is like servicing a beloved car after a winter lay-up, poking around, making sure the levels are satisfactory, that nothing untoward has sprouted, nothing weak has perished or tarnished.

On to the links. The prints of Alex Katz / 360-degree cityscapes in Germany / music reviews and more at Earlash (last three all via tmn, an early port of call) / the new literary lottery: 'Good news for aspiring novelists: Advances for first-time authors have blown sky-high. The catch? If the book doesn’t sell, the fallout can kill your career.' / Armed Service Editions, wartime books via me-fi / hit the road, and the high seas, with the Terrawind, the ultimate all-in-one device.

Glasgow 1938 is a visual resource of the city's Empire Exhibition, a modernist/deco delight that teetered on the brink of a new era and consequently vanished without undue influence. The images could be bigger, but take a tour around the streamlined pavilions (I, II, III) and you get a feel for the age, a bright, airy optimism that was too tainted and distant for the post-war generation to return to and whole-heartedly embrace. The centre-piece was Thomas Tait's steel tower, a 330 foot tall homage to Dudok-esque modernism. It lasted barely a year before demolition. More information, as well as exhibition reminiscences. The exhibition programme. You can see a (small) film-clip here, courtesy of BBCi's Scotland on Film archive.

Staying with cities. Rotterdam, from the banks of the Maas / a photo gallery of Mont St Michel / great photography at Octaplex, including industrial ruins / more Deutsche photographie at photocase.

You dip one toe into the dynamic world of online flash, design and typographic artists and you escape several hours later, your head reeling: excellent time-wasting resources and neat design at Lefthandside.com / m-o-n-a-m-o-u-r.com / links and things at wonksite / tronic studio (including a beautiful little quicktime movie about motorway flyovers) / prmthn.net.
posted by things magazine at 11:01

And we're back.... many thanks to all those who wrote to point out the horrors this site suddenly started presenting when viewed on a Mac. We're working on a fix - let us know of any more outstanding issues. More tomorrow...
posted by things magazine at 16:53

Design for Homes compiles the annual results of the Housing Design Awards into an archival site. The HDA produces a neat little booklet of the very residential design in the UK, and so this site is a welcome resource (ironically, this British-centric site was brought to our attention by Coudal, which also gives us deserted farms in Iceland, a highly evocative title).

Closely related: Ideal Homes: Suburbia in Focus. This site, a 'history of the South East suburbs of London in words and pictures' is highly recommended. The huge amount of archival material relating to local history - London, Britain, wherever - is gradually finding its way onto the web, enhacing everyone's understanding and respect for the neighbourhood they live in. Ideal Homes presents a wealth of visual material (with fairly decent sized images as well), as well as histories of London's southerly boroughs (including one that's pertinent to us). There are extended essays on certain areas too: Blackheath, Plumstead and Thamesmead, London's last major attempt at creating a modernist suburb. All the site needs are links to contemporary maps so you can identify the location of the old photos.

However, when it comes to file sizes, nothing can really match the American Memory server at the Library of Congress website. Will a five megabyte archival tiff do? Yes please. We think Miss World should change its name to the First Internation[al] Pageant of Pulchritude & Seventh Annual Bathing Girl Review (in Galveston, Texas, of all places).

Elsewhere. Spray-on stockings (via Sachs Report) / the brilliant city of sound writes about the V&A;'s Art Deco exhibition (and links to this microsite illustrating prominent art deco buildings in London) / not quite deco: Big Al Capone's Bedroom Suite (via gapers block) / Helmintholog, a weblog / 'mystery spots' (also see mysteryspot.com), where strange angles fool the brain into making wild claims for the abandonment of the laws of physics / nightmarish medical conditions: foetus in foetu (text link only, don't panic).

Get a dose of the Florida Lifestyle at Corey Weiner’s Red Square Photos. All those cruise liners and private jets… / a timeline of the folding chair / the Museum of Communication, Berne. Nice website, but not enough information / Jean Snow is an excellent Japan-based weblog / Athens is a Japanese art and design bookshop, which tantalises with its wares but presents an insurmountable language barrier to their acquisition.

The Barrington Atlas of the Greek and Roman World / Yutaka Sone's Jungle Island is an impressive installation: a carved marble motorway intersection. Read more about roads in John Weich's review of Mobility: A Room with a View.

things is taking a week off, so the site will look a little more static than usual. In the meantime, read pieces from the upcoming issue 17 (see the sidebar on the right), check our three photologs (I, II, III), flick through our first few side projects and send us lots and lots of email to read on our return. And don't forget to watch this huge vacation movie at superlounge.
posted by things magazine at 10:30

Our current favourite thing? Our copy of Collecting Mania arrived two days ago, and we’ve only just had a chance to check it out. Peter Reichard of typosition.de and Christopher Lindlohr of loxodrome.de, who work together on the excellent Spatium Newsletter, set out to discover what creatives collect. 'What are you collecting and what does it mean for your creative work?,' they asked, and 80 people responded, designers, photographers, typographers and illustrators from 32 countries around the world.

The A4-sized book that has resulted is a beauty, a two-colour print job that is comprehensively illustrated by tantalising glimpses of the various collections. It’s also refreshing to find a print publication so saturated with exciting-looking URLs that it makes you hungry to type them in – rather than just be led by the nose through a series of hyperlinks (like I'm going to do now): extra-oomph, Richard May, santotipo.com (with lettering images from around the world), and many more.

There’s also a sense of a profession (designers in general) working extensively in an increasingly transient medium. Cataloguing work – collecting the ‘things’ that make up these designers’ working output – is hard. So pop culture artefacts and disposable products become totems: Francois Chalet and his collection of 'inflatable figures from all around the world', or Peter Himpel: 'I collect post-its (all memos I’ve ever written are lying in my drawers). God knows why I do this.' Most, if not all, of the featured collectors acknowledge their obsession. Daniel Knorn says of his incredible DDR Modell Autos site: 'of course, it’s a little insane to spend 250-300 Euro on some cars….' Happily for us, though, he did, as this is one of the most gorgeous toy-related websites I've ever seen.


Elsewhere. Vigovisiones, 'one of the best kept little secrets in the world of photography,' is a bi-annual exhibition in the Spanish port city of Vigo / daily photography from Copenhagen / no sooner had we finished swooning over Keith Lovegrove’s new book Graphicswallah than we read this sad news story: Bollywood technology kills poster art / even more Nessie: fossilised plesiousaur bones found (note that the BBC sees fit to accompany the link with a picture of the discredited 'Surgeon’s photograph'. Back story here and here).

Hit the open road (we especially liked this picture) / Wood s lot on Walter Benjamin / finally, a photo of the geek Holy Grail.
posted by things magazine at 10:22