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Three Spirits by Xenis Emputae Travelling Band. Looks like I was premature in 2008 when I was eagerly contemplating the demise of the cassette tape as a music format. Earlier this year I bought a music cassette for the first time since the early 1980s, albeit inadvertently since this was the compilation that came with The [...]

El Banquete Magnético (2011) by Cristina Francov. • Did Vertigo Introduce Computer Graphics to Cinema? asks Tom McCormack. He means Saul Bass’s title sequence which mostly uses still harmonographs but also features some animated moments by John Whitney. •  Temple of the Vanities by Thomas Jorion. “Pictured here are political monuments and munitions depots, hulking [...]

Elektrik Karousel, a new release on the Ghost Box label by The Focus Group. “For a clue to its moods, think Czech animation, Italian Giallo, early Radiophonics, HP Lovecraft stories, 1960s underground cinema, Lewis Carroll and baroque psych.” Julian House’s package design is “heavily inspired by 1960s underground press and conceived as a kind of [...]

Collage by Chloé Poizat. • Xenis Emputae Travelling Band plays the Music of John Dee, and free at Bandcamp: Victorian Machine Music by Plinth, the “creaking, winding, piping, chiming and wood-knocking of Victorian parlour music machines”. • Jeremy Willard on Mikhail Kuzmin, “the Oscar Wilde of Russia”. Related: Conner Habib on the Disinfo podcast discussing [...]

I never used a graphics tablet for drawing, in the past if I needed to draw something I’d use pencil and paper then scan the results. In recent years, however, I’ve grown dissatisfied with this process, especially after I rearranged my work area and packed away the space-hogging Ikea table I used to use as [...]

I’m generally indifferent to panoramic views of cities, especially London where the sprawl lacks the distinct contours of Manhattan or the Napoléonic severity of Hausmann’s Paris. This view is different, however, being a 320 gigapixel panorama of the capital seen from the top of the BT Tower. This view is currently the world’s largest panoramic [...]

From the Beautiful Faces series (2012) by Tran Nguyen. • “What possessed a generation of young European artists, and a few Americans, to suddenly suppress recognizable imagery in pictures and sculptures? Unthinkable at one moment, the strategy became practically compulsory in the next.” Peter Schjeldahl on the birth of abstraction. • “A profanely mystical work [...]

Yes, it’s all happening this month… Unlike other work that’s surfaced recently the cover art for issue 41 of How It Works magazine was completed less than a month ago. Headlines obscure much of the artwork but the picture is also run full-page inside, something I wasn’t expecting. How It Works has major newsstand distribution [...]

Two Grove Press covers by Roy Kuhlman. From Arden Kuhlman Riordan’s Pinterest page collecting her father’s cover designs. • “When people asked me what boylesque was, I’d say I’m doing burlesque and I have a penis,” said Mr. Ferguson. • Sequence5: 42 tracks of new, atmospheric/ambient music. A free download in a variety of formats. [...]

Technological mandala 02 (The beginning) (2012) by Leonardo Ulian. • The Yellow Magic Orchestra really were the Japanese equivalent of Kraftwerk in 1978. I’d not seen this video for Firecracker before. Same goes for the Technopolis and Rydeen videos. Related: YMO’s synth programmer, Hideki Matsutake, showing off his modular Moog on a Japanese TV show. [...]

Autochrome by Léon Gimpel. The Grand Palais exhibition hall in Paris is one of the few sites remaining from the Exposition Universelle of 1900 (see yesterday’s post), and is still in use today as a venue for art exhibits, fashion shows and the like. The huge and graceful canopy ceiling makes it a far better venue [...]

Grand entrance. Every time I think I’ve said enough on this subject something else turns up. I’ve linked before to the Brooklyn Museum’s tinted photographs of the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1900 but these photochom prints at the Library of Congress are so sharp, detailed and subtly hued they make all other views seem crude [...]

“There are always more golems,” I wrote back in August, and here’s another. The artificial entity this time is a military computer that’s the subject of Golem XIV (1973), a science fiction story by Stanislaw Lem that was later expanded into a novel: The book is written from the perspective of a military AI computer [...]

Lovecrafton. I’ve had online art exhibitions in the past but this month some of my work can be seen inside a virtual space. Lovecrafton is a Lovecraft-themed town in Second Life created by illustrator John Aardema. As is evident from the screenshots, the atmosphere is suitably autumnal with the requisite Colonial architecture. I was slightly [...]

Transmitter Crowbar Discharge Unit, Bates Linear Accelerator. Photo by Daniel Jackson from his Dark Machines series. The language we use for writing about art is oddly pornographic: We know it when we see it. No one would deny its distinctiveness. Yet efforts to define it inevitably produce squeamishness, as if describing the object too precisely [...]

“A recurrent rumour says that Chris Marker and the cat Guillaume-en-Egypt sank with the Titanic.” Photo credited to Wim Wenders. In our moments of megalomaniacal reverie, we tend to see our memory as a kind of history book: we have won and lost battles, discovered empires and abandoned them. At the very least we are [...]

More illustrations from Albert Robida, and a riposte to anyone thinking that the idea of the end of books is a recent thing. This article by bibliophile Octave Uzanne appeared in Volume 16 of Scribner’s Magazine (July–December 1894). The piece opens with a description of various scientists and artists at a Royal Society evening making [...]

More 19th-century futurism from French illustrator and author Albert Robida. Le Vingtième Siècle was published in 1883, and is a far more comical look at life in the 20th century than La Vie Électrique, showing a future where most of the airships are shaped like enormous fish. This is a copiously illustrated volume of over [...]

Albert Robida (1848–1926), a French illustrator and writer, might be less well-known today had he not authored several books which attempt to predict what life might be like in the 20th century. He was sufficiently well-regarded in his lifetime to be given the task of imagining “Old Paris” for one of the attractions at that [...]

The Garden of Urban Delights (2010) by Marcin Owczarek. His protagonists are misfits: alienated, implicitly gay, longing for love, frequently hard to be around, always fixated on small pleasures that compensate for an essential feeling of not belonging. [...] His patroness Edith Sitwell termed him “that rare being, a born writer.” William Burroughs dedicated The [...]