While the exhibition is physically immersive, its conceptual focus is time (or rather, how time is experienced in prison). As Caputo explains, “Time in prison is never neutral; it is structured, regimented, and often experienced as an oppressive force.” The exhibition’s title, Prison Times, nods to this fragmented, fictional timescale, where the outside world runs on one clock and the incarcerated on another.
A jacket with built-in electric fans designed by Japanese fashion brand Anrealage keeps staff cool at the Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation pavilion at the Osaka Expo.
The pavilion aims to depict the future of communication, and Morinaga applied the same idea when designing the uniforms.
“These clothes transcend division and disparity, connect the dots and expand human potential by sharing senses,” the designer explained.
morning computer: some useful things first thing in the day.
Xiao Jiang. I don’t know if there is actually any rain outside that window, but the whole image reminds me of melancholy, disappointed rainy days from childhood.
Imagine a Slushee composed of ammonia and water encased in a hard shell of water ice. Now picture these ice-encrusted slushballs, dubbed “mushballs,” raining down like hailstones during a thunderstorm, illuminated by intense flashes of lightning.
Planetary scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, now say that hailstorms of mushballs accompanied by fierce lightning actually exist on Jupiter. In fact, mushball hailstorms may occur on all gaseous planets in the galaxy, including our solar system’s other giant planets, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.
morning computer: some useful things first thing in the day.
More than 100 years after the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun in the Valley of the Kings, new interpretations of the burial are still emerging. A recent article published in the Journal of Egyptian Archaeology proposes that a set of seemingly plain, functional objects are in fact a key part of the complex rituals which would ensure the transformation and regeneration of the young king in the afterlife.
I’ve been invited to a private dining experience in Kennington where I’ll be served several dishes made exclusively from roadkill. Petr Davydtchenko, a Russian performance artist, and Michelin star chef Masayoshi Haraguch are hosting the dinner. I arrive an hour before the other guests to chat with Petr. Me and Petr speak about the reasoning behind his practice. Starting in 2016, he decided to move to the south of France, detach from society, and learn how to be completely self-sufficient. He mentions evading capitalism and embracing brutality. Every morning he would wake with the sun and cycle for thirty kilometers looking for roadkill. Donkeys. Badgers. Deer. Pheasants. Rats. Then there’s the animals we’re all a bit more fond of. Cats and dogs. Sad to think about, but still a natural part of life.
Probably not useful, actually:
The best way to prepare a fox is to leave its body in a running stream for 24 hours, this will tenderize the meat, making it softer and easier to eat. For some reason, this feels like incredibly useful information and something I’ll probably tell my kids.
morning computer: some useful things first thing in the day.
The “music” of starquakes—enormous vibrations caused by bursting bubbles of gas that ripple throughout the bodies of many stars—can reveal far more information about the stars’ histories and inner workings than scientists thought.
While it was getting ready to power down its Gaia spacecraft, the European Space Agency encountered some unusual resistance.
The spacecraft, which has been creating a highly detailed three-dimensional map of more than a billion stars throughout the Milky Way and beyond, proved surprisingly difficult to kill.
“Switching off a spacecraft at the end of its mission sounds like a simple enough job,” said Gaia spacecraft operator Tiago Nogueira in an ESA statement. “But spacecraft really don’t want to be switched off.”
morning computer: some useful things first thing in the day.
During the pandemic, Keobounpheng was helping her son during a distance-learning 4th-grade geometry class, and a particular phrase caught her attention. “Geo means earth, so geometry is just measuring the earth,” the teacher said.
“These words… changed my worldview and reminded me that underneath rigid linear laws, an entire foundation of forgotten circular consciousness exists,” the artist says. “Aside from the powerful conceptual connections I was able to draw from geometry as a visual language to understand and express a circular, expansive worldview, the physical motions of spinning the compass awakened something deep within me.”
Master of Architecture students are pioneering paludiculture, using reed fibres, eggshells and textile waste to develop sustainable building materials and redefine architecture’s role in tackling climate change.
The report opens with a stark observation: we’re living in the “Age of Big Content”—a time of infinite scrolls, algorithmic recommendations, and what Stocksy calls “vibe-less mood boards”. The result is a creative landscape experiencing both “Peak Complexity” and the “Meh-ocene,” where global aesthetics are collapsing into sameness.
As the report notes, “Cafes look the same in Tokyo and Mexico City,” while creative industries struggle with originality—evidenced by the fact that not a single original film (as opposed to a sequel, reboot or remake) cracked 2024’s top 15 highest-grossing movies.
The Curation Paradox at Creative Boom. I’m amused by the Meh-ocene, the natural stagnation of atemporality, which was on our minds fifteen years ago.
(Which really just summons Albert Speer and “ruin value” to my mind, oops)
A team of Egyptian-American archaeologists has uncovered the tomb of an unknown king who reigned over the region of Abydos in southern Egypt 3,600 years ago.
I used to ride the train past the Olympic stadium in Stratford quite often, and would frequently imagine it repurposed as a post-apocalyptic ritual space, a giant radio dish for praying to the space gods and a complicated gallows for mass executions.
morning computer: some useful things first thing in the day.
…visiting ancient sacred sites would have been a rich olfactory experience. Sculptures in ancient Greece were covered with perfume just as bodies were. The practice was known as kosmesis, a “super-adornment” that also involved applying textiles and jewelry. Among the nearly 3,000 stone inscriptions found on Delos are those that record the ingredients necessary for kosmesis for the statues of Hera and Artemis. The list included sponges, oil, soda carbonate, linen, wax, and rose perfume.
This idea that there can be at any one given time multiple intersecting, beautiful in some cases, conflicting worlds in which design occupies, operates, and works is a really powerful concept that is driving where design is heading.
This links to a podcast episode that I haven’t listened to yet, but I like the term pluriverse. There’s a transcript lower down the page, which is great for me as I read faster than people talk.
Pluriversal design, the concept of a world of many worlds as design practice, is not a new idea but one that has drastically increased in influence. First, here’s Renata Marques Leitão explaining how the pluriversal design paradigm can restart discussions of change:
I think that we have to start to identify what I name theories of change, how change happens. What are our assumptions about how change happens and what’s the final result? What do we want to produce? What is the pathway towards change? And then our partners, they also have their theories of change. They also have their pathways. And you can’t really imagine that your pathway, just because you are a very educated person, is better than their pathway. So it’s a lot about recognizing our assumptions, especially assumptions about how change happens.
The idea that we all live in intersecting worlds is worth picking apart a bit: it’s either blindingly obvious or it’s a useful filter to look at life through, and I’m not sure which yet.
Sometimes it’s very difficult to separate what is real help and what is simply oppression.
morning computer: some useful things first thing in the day.
