(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.
One hundred percent recycled and recyclable, The Polygood Growth panels are made from post-consumer and post-industrial waste, with elements from discarded refrigerators, washing machine enclosures and consumer electronics creating accents in the mix.
Found while slowly removing plastics from my daily use. Plastic spoon in the brain has been haunting me for weeks now.
The hand-held grinding tools used to process cereals that the first European Neolithic societies buried in deposits had a high symbolic value for the women who used them, related to time and the cycles of human life, nature and settlements.
morning computer: some useful things first thing in the day.
A new scientific study is challenging long-held beliefs about Jackson Pollock and his iconic “drip paintings,” suggesting that the Abstract Expressionist may have embedded hidden images, or what researchers call “polloglyphs,” into his compositions. While some experts argue this is merely a case of pareidolia—seeing patterns in randomness—the findings reignite debate over the psychological depth and hidden symbolism in Pollock’s revolutionary art.
The researchers refer to these “recognizable” images as “polloglyphs,” and believe that they may have been camouflaged by Pollock’s “drip technique.” They claim, for example, that the 1945 work Troubled Queencan be rotated to reveal various images, including a “charging soldier holding a hatchet and a pistol with a bullet in the barrel; a Picasso-esque rooster; a monkey with goggles and wine; and one of the clearest images, the angel of mercy and her sword.”
I am enjoying “polloglyphs.”
By integrating data from four key fields—stone tool production, hunting strategies, symbolic behavior, and social complexity—the study argues that different human groups, including Neanderthals, pre-Neanderthals, and Homo sapiens, engaged in meaningful interactions.
“Symbology” should go next to “polloglyphs.” The protagonist of Dan Brown’s books is a “symbologist,” but Brown made up symbology. It’s a mix of iconography, semiotics and symbolic anthropology.
morning computer: some useful things first thing in the day.
“After six decades of effort, the origin of the mysterious highest-energy particles in the universe may finally have been identified,” says Farrar, a Collegiate Professor of Physics and Julius Silver, Rosalind S. Silver, and Enid Silver Winslow Professor at NYU. “This insight gives a new tool for understanding the most cataclysmic events of the universe: two neutron stars merging to form a black hole, which is the process responsible for the creation of many precious or exotic elements, including gold, platinum, uranium, iodine, and xenon.”
‘Mirror Ascend’ brings the record full circle. This time, however, the ominous drones have been replaced with a simple guitar melody and distant peals of saxophone. It’s a moment of unabashed beauty that feels like clouds parting after a storm. By the end of this evocatively autumnal album, Mirrored Daughters have wandered deep into the forest, but are finally out of the woods.
For his large-scale works, Roussel begins by carving wooden panels, but rather than using the blocks to make prints, he applies acrylic paint to the surfaces to create bold, textured paintings.
morning computer: some useful things first thing in the day.
