notes.husk.org. scribblings by Paul Mison.

Cyanotypes, by Christian Marclay (Flash):

The photograms in this exhibition are made with music cassette tapes he has physically disassembeled. In some, the plastic cases form austere grids.

The cyanotype process dates to the dawn of photography and was developed by the English  scientist  Sir John Herschel in 1842. Using a light-sensitive chemical mixture, these cyanotypes were created by placing objects directly onto the surface of paper coatd with the mixture. The resulting blue photograms reveal a silhouetted image that varies in darkness due to the opacity of the objects.

Reconstruction of square US standard road sign lettering (1927) by Eric Fischer on Flickr:

Overlaying the 1952 Standard Alphabets for Highway Signs with as many characters from the earlier square-letter standard as I could find in sample signs from pre-1942 editions of the MUTCD, mostly from the 1927 Rural Sign Manual. The real standards for these characters, never published in book form, probably still exist in a dusty file cabinet in some public works department office.

I was not able to find any square letters from Series A, only a few digits. The 1935 MUTCD specifies “Soft Shoulders” to be in Series A, but the image of the sign appears to be in Series B. I didn’t find Q or 9 in any series.

In general the metrics of the square characters closely match those of their rounded successors, much as Clearview has tried to do. The exception is W, which was approximately a series narrower in the square letters.

The Series B period (from 7 A.M.) seems to be round and the Series C period (from St. Louis) square, for no obvious reason.

A Google image search for all sizes of the image I just reposted. (Previously.)

Teledyne Ryan UAV Drone RPV Firebee on Flickr:

Catalog #: 04_04094
Title : Teledyne Ryan UAV Drone RPV Firebee
Date: 1950-1989
Corporation Name : Ryan Aeronautical, Teledyne Ryan
Location: Ryan Envelopes
Additional Information: Q-2C, BQM-34A/S
Tags: Teledyne, Ryan, UAV, Drone, RPV, Firebee, Q-2C, BQM-34A/S, 1950-1989
Repository: San Diego Air and Space Museum Archive

via straup.

HST approach by smallritual on Flickr.

What more to say?

16 Aerial Views of Houses from the “Night Sun” Series by David Deutsch:

All the photographs in his extensive Night Sun series are aerial images shot at night from a helicopter hovering some four hundred feet above the ground. A Los Angeles native, Deutsch surveyed the city’s vast suburban sprawl, illuminating the ubiquitous flat-roofed bungalows and faux-Spanish villas with a bright police searchlight.

From the Night Vision: Photography After Dark exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

The work of art in the age of Googled reproduction:

I don’t want to call these digital objects “image economies,” I want to call them something like Google Clusters. Or maybe Pergoogles: These are iconic images — per Google.

Even that is a bit of a cheat, because obviously Google is responding to the specific words I choose. (The title of each image here corresponds with the search term I used; I didn’t use quote marks in my searches.) It’s easy to capture “Mona Lisa,” harder to see what Google makes of Warhol’s iconic soup can, or Michelangelo’s David (see below).

Nevertheless, I’m rather pleased with the results, all in all.

I’d love to see all these printed crisply, and very large, and displayed in a high-ceilinged and white-walled gallery. Or museum. After all, I think a case could be made for these as “digital readymades,” a term whose origins I don’t know, but that I’ve read applied to the“Photoshop Gradient” pieces by Cory Arcangel. Those are supposedly one-click affairs, and the ones I’ve seen I quite like. (Though I’ve only seen them online.)

(via krislane)

Clouds by josh-n on Flickr.

mappeal:

Lego-inspired Spaceman print set by Ame72
Retro To Go

[This is good.] Perhaps the grey one should have been blue, since they made that one? A minor niggle, though.

The Airline Bag Lounge (via)