Fig. 99. Bird fitted with a device to measure wing motion. La machine animale : locomotion terrestre et aerienne. 1878.
The Mercator projection vs the true size of each country.
I am a professional internet enthusiast. I made Everybody at Once with Slavin and Molly. I also made Know Your Meme with Jamie, Ellie, and Drew. Before that I did a bunch of things in online video and art and activism and internet culture.
Fig. 99. Bird fitted with a device to measure wing motion. La machine animale : locomotion terrestre et aerienne. 1878.
Nature has its own ways of organizing information: organisms grow and register information from the environment. This is particularly notable in trees, which, through their rings, tell the story of their growth. Drawing on this phenomenon as a visual metaphor, the United States can be envisioned as a tree, with shapes and growing patterns influenced by immigration. The nation, the tree, is hundreds of years old, and its cells are made out of immigrants. As time passes, the cells are deposited in decennial rings that capture waves of immigration.
[…]
This is an ongoing project by Pedro Cruz, John Wihbey, Avni Ghael, and Felipe Shibuya. This project was kindly supported by the College of Arts, Media, and Design at Northeastern University (as part of the Dean’s Research Fellows 2017-2018, which included Sarah J. Jackson and Brooke Foucault Welles, and Population Flows and Identity in the U.S., and Waves of Immigrants research grants projects). Exhibition of the tree rings kindly supported by the Northeastern Center for the Arts.
CLASSIC OLD-SCHOOL PHOTOGRAPHY IN GHANA
Philip Kwame Apagya was born in Sekondi in Western Ghana in 1958, after a period of apprenticeship in his father’s photo studio (a former crime-scene photographer), he worked as a travelling photographer for a while in Ivory Coast following the colour revolution in the late 1980s. After his photojournalism studies at the Ghana institute of journalism, he opened his own studio in Shama in the Western region of Ghana in 1982.
Philip Kwame Apagya is known worldwide, because of his participation in many personal and collective exhibitions. among others:
‘Snap Me One!’ studio photographers in africa ,special emphasis was put on the studio decorations. the items shown include 150 photographs,
10 original backdrops from ghana as well as other materials.
visitors had the opportunity to be ‘snapped’ in front of a backdrop
of their choice. the photos were taken by Philip Kwame Apagya.
A DesignBoom review of Philip’s works states
“
In africa, a photo studio is the place where dreams come true. for a few pence, ordinary mortals can strike a pose and achieve immortality, have things they haven’t got and may never have, be people they are not and may never be, have access to the inaccessible. People start asking for personal portraits that go beyond the image usually present on identity papers, often the only 'popular portrait’ available. this open new roads to the art of photographic portrait, with possibility for the artist to catch
special moments in people’s existence: people ask for a picture for several reasons, but with the common desire to have a 'funny picture’. In this process, new forms of self-representation become part of a new social identity: this is the framework in which we might consider the work of Philip Kwame Apagya.
Philip Kwame Apagya’s formal portraits in front of commissioned painted backgrounds seem to be suspended between realism and a sort of naïvité,
They are both unreal and hyperealistic: the dreams of african people are put on stage - against scenery which praises consumer society.
The subject stands in front of a painted backdrop that portrays everything people dream of having: fake new england country houses
showing off some porcelain, VCRs and TVs in bar closets,
modern kitchens with well-stocked refrigerators with coke and cheetos…
portraits with with a quarter / half / full smile, because nobody in africa is really deceived by make-believe… but for one glorious moment they can have it all.
These portraits are highly amusing for us, 'western people’,
but are also unintentionally disturbing because of the insight they
offer into a growing cultural vacuum. This is the dream, and it is empty and materialistic”
Philip’s works has toured the world and exhibited in some of the best galleries.
1998
stadtmuseum, munich;
city museum abteiberg, mönchengladbach;
iwalewa-house, university of bayreuth;
1999
smithsonianiInstitute, washington
2000
royal tropical institute, amsterdam
a catalogue with the same title is available.
'snap me one!’
studio photographers in africa
prestel-verlag, 1998
'africa by africa’ / ’ l'afrique par elle-même’ / 'portrait afrika’
a photographic view
1999
maison européenne de la photographie, paris;
barbican art gallery, london;
south african national gallery, cape town;
2000,
third rencontres de la photographie africaine, bamako, mali;
haus der kulturen der welt, berlin;
'africa inside’
2000
noorderlicht 2000 photography festival, fries museum, groningen;
'collezione etro uomo spring/summer 2000’, galleria luisa delle piane, milan
Coal miners’ houses with no windows to the street, East Durham 1937
Photography by Bill Brandt
David Graeber on Gilets Jaunes:
“Let me begin by offering two suggestions as to the source of some of the confusion:
1. in a financialised economy, only those closest to the means of money-creation (essentially, investors and the professional-managerial classes) are in a position to employ the language of universalism. As a result, any political claims based in particular needs and interests, tend to be treated as a manifestation of identity politics, and in the case of the social base of the GJ, therefore, cannot be imagined as anything but proto-fascist.
2. since 2011, there has been a worldwide transformation of common sense assumptions about what participating in a mass democratic movement should mean—at least among those most likely to do so. Older “vertical” or vanguardist models of organization have rapidly given way to an ethos of horizontality, one where (democratic, egalitarian) practice and ideology are ultimately two aspects of the same thing. Inability to understand this gives the false impression movements like GJ are anti-ideological, even nihilistic.”
To understand the appeal of the movement—that is, of the sudden emergence and wildfire spread of real democratic, even insurrectionary politics—I think there are two largely unnoticed factors to be taken into consideration.
The first is that financialized capitalism involves a new alignment of class forces, above all ranging the techno-managerials (more and more them employed in pure make-work “bullshit jobs,” as part of the neoliberal redistribution system) against a working class that is now better seen as the “caring classes”—as those who nurture, tend, maintain, sustain, more than old-fashioned “producers.” One paradoxical effect of digitization is that while it has made industrial production infinitely more efficient, it has rendered health, education, and other caring sector work less so, this combined with diversion of resources to the administrative classes under neoliberalism (and attendant cuts to the welfare state) has meant that, practically everywhere, it has been teachers, nurses, nursing-home workers, paramedics, and other members of the caring classes that have been at the forefront of labor militancy. Clashes between ambulance workers and police in Paris last week might be taken as a vivid symbol of the new array of forces. Again, public discourse has not caught up with the new realities, but over time, we will start having to ask ourselves entirely new questions: not what forms of work can be automated, for instance, but which we would actually want to be, and which we would not; how long we are willing to maintain a system where the more one’s work immediately helps or benefits other human beings, the less you are likely to be paid for it.
Second, the events of 2011, starting with the Arab Spring and passing through the Squares movements to Occupy, appear to have marked a fundamental break in political common sense. One way you know that a moment of global revolution has indeed taken place is that ideas considered madness a very short time before have suddenly become the ground assumptions of political life. The leaderless, horizontal, directly democratic structure of Occupy, for instance, was almost universally caricatured as idiotic, starry-eyed and impractical, and as soon as the movement was suppressed, pronounced the reason for its “failure.” Certainly it seemed exotic, drawing heavily not only on the anarchist tradition, but on radical feminism, and even, certain forms of indigenous spirituality. But it has now become clear that it has become the default mode for democratic organizing everywhere, from Bosnia to Chile to Hong Kong to Kurdistan. If a mass democratic movement does emerge, this is the form it can now be expected to take. In France, Nuit Debout might have been the first to embrace such horizontalist politics on a mass scale, but the fact that a movement originally of rural and small-town workers and the self-employed has spontaneously adopted a variation on this model shows just how much we are dealing with a new common sense about the very nature of democracy.
As artists, we want to speak from the scar, not the wound, from self-possession as opposed to raw pain. The audience can feel the difference … When an artist creates or performs from pain and inexperience, you feel their pain and inexperience and nothing else. In contrast — and this is the power and magical potential of great art — when you read or watch an artist perform from a place of self-anchored strength, as the audience, you feel invigorated with newfound clarity, wisdom, and inspiration.
“Blessed are the cheesemakers”, runs the famous line from the Monty Python film Life of Brian. But a recent court case gives the lie to the notion that manufacturers of cheese have fortune on their side, after the court that interprets EU law ruled that cheese cannot be protected by copyright. In November 2018, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) handed down its judgment in the case of Levola Hengelo v Smilde Foods – in which one cheesemaker sued another because they said their rival’s product tasted the same as theirs. The ruling, that copyright law does not protect the taste of cheese, is important because it affects more than cheese. The judgment implies that other similar products such as perfumes cannot be copyrighted either. While it might be bad news for the makers of cheese or scents, it’s an important judgment for British and Irish artists as the court’s argument implies that their creations do not have to fall into one of the eight rigid categories of the UK Copyright Act – such as “literary, dramatic and musical works” or “artistic works” – and therefore more works are protectable.
How to perceive the population of cities.
Here is New York City, a region of 18 million people. Each dot represents 1,000,000 square meters. Deeper shades of red represent more people. But there’s another way to look at NYC’s population. Let’s grow each dot into a 3D block. The taller the block, the more people. NYC’s population now resembles a mountainous terrain.
If we zoom out to view the entire world, it looks different than you might expect.
From my perspective (albeit a US-centric one), it was eye-opening to see how the world’s population is so unevenly distributed.
What stands out is each city’s form, a unique mountain that might be like the steep peaks of lower Manhattan or the sprawling hills of suburban Atlanta. When I first saw a city in 3D, I had a feel for its population size that I had never experienced before.
Three years ago, my constantly worsening sleep deprivation and stress resulted in a burnout. I’m 30 years old now, at the time of posting this comic, and I still haven’t recovered fully. I still have the heart symptoms - even the smallest amount of stress brings the symptoms back. It’s likely I will never recover enough to work a fulltime job again and I can’t go back to high-stress environments like customer service. But that’s alright. I am more than just my work. I’m slowly learning to be merciful towards myself and to show myself the same kindness I show others, and I think that’s very important.
This is my story and I won’t be ashamed any more.
Blackwater rivers, like the Suwannee River in Florida, carry waters so laden with organic material that they’re dyed a deep, dark brown. For the Suwannee, most of this material comes from the rich peat deposits of the Okefenokee Swamp that lies upstream. As vegetation in the swamp decays, tannins from the plants dissolve into the water, giving it its distinctive color, which the river maintains along its full 400-kilometer journey to the Gulf of Mexico. The dark waters of the river act as a tracer, revealing how the fresh river water mixes with the ocean in the enhanced-color satellite image above. It’s amazing to see how far the river’s influence spreads before delicate wisps of color pierce the darkness. (Image credit: U.S. Geological Survey; via NASA Earth Observatory)