[Image: 020 by Gerco de Ruijter, 28" x 28", from Baumschule (2008-2010), courtesy of the artist].Dutch photographer Gerco de Ruijter recently got in touch with an extraordinary series of aerial photographs called Baumschule—some of which, he explains, were taken using a camera mounted on a fishing rod....
Choke Points and Kill Switches
[Image: Courtesy of Terremark, via the Atlantic]. Andrew Blum has a short piece up at the Atlantic today about the geography of "internet choke points," and the threat of a "kill switch" that would allow countries (like Egypt) to turn off the internet on a national scale. After all, Blum writes, "it's...
Landscape Futures Super-Media
[Image: For a project at the Bartlett School of Architecture's Unit 11, presented and discussed at the Landscape Futures Super-Workshop, Rina Kukaj explored a series of aerial landscapes—a "purification blanket"—that would act as a distributed atmospheric filter for the city].Two write-ups of the Landscape...
Nest Factory
[Image: A swiftlet nesting house in Thailand; photo by Alexander S. Heitkamp, courtesy of Wikipedia]."This drab, windowless concrete facade does not conceal an electricity substation, data servers, or a high security detention center," Nicola Twilley writes over at GOOD. It is, instead, a living birds'...
Machine Vitrine
[Image: The spidery and self-supporting Cavity Mechanism #4 w/ Glass Dome by Dan Grayber, courtesy of Johansson Projects].Artist Dan Grayber has a new show on display in Oakland, at Johansson Projects. It features an ingenious collection of spring-loaded devices that play on ideas of architecture, tension,...
Spaces of Food #5: Madeira Odorless Fish Market and the Tempelhof Ministry of Food
With just a few more hours left in GOOD's weeklong festival of food-writing, I thought I'd throw one more post out there: two projects by Lik San Chan. [Image: From the Madeira Odorless Fish Market by Lik San Chan].The first is the Madeira Odorless Fish Market, from 2006. Camara de Lobos, Madeira, Chan...
Hadean Transport
Greenpeace has released these images of a train carrying nuclear waste through Valognes, France. Shot with infrared film, the photos show a demonic red glow coming from inside the bellies of the railcars. [Images: Via National Geographic]."The train is hauling a so-called CASTOR convoy," National Geographic...
Spaces of Food #4: Betel Nut Beauties
[Image: From Betel Nut Beauties by Magda Biernat, courtesy of Clic Gallery].This rounds out today's short series of posts written for GOOD's online festival of food-related writing.I first heard of the Taiwanese spatial subculture of betel nut shacks last autumn when a former student of mine at USC,...
Spaces of Food #3: The Mushroom Tunnel of Mittagong
It seems appropriate, in the context of GOOD's ongoing week of interdisciplinary food writing, to revisit an old favorite post of mine, written by Nicola Twilley, about the extraordinary mushroom tunnel of Mittagong, where disused industrial infrastructure and an emerging food-production system fortuitously...
