{ feuilleton }

Just the thing for when you need to build your own… From a page of plans at Forgotten Futures. The photo of the Vickers Parseval craft is from this early aviation archive.

Meanwhile, my good friend Ed alerted me to a documentary film which will be released in March this year. Farewell is directed by Ditteke [...]

More dirigibles. Posters from the Library of Congress Performing Arts Poster Collection for The Air Ship (1898), a musical comedy by JM Gaites.
I’ve had some longer posts planned but I’m chasing a deadline this week, hence the resort to brief picture posts.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Dirigibles
• La route d’Armilia by Schuiten & Peeters
• The [...]

This week’s picture research involves airships for some Steampunk-related illustration work. Lots of great Zeppelin photos abound, of course, and I’ve always liked seeing the more notable peacetime moments such as this flight of the US Los Angeles over Manhattan in 1930. Wikimedia Commons has another very striking picture of the same craft moored to [...]

Kieran at Sci-Fi-O-Rama was in touch recently asking me to contribute a paragraph about a favourite Roger Dean picture for this feature about the artist. The following splurge of polemic was the result, something I’d been intending on writing for a while. Since so many words would have overwhelmed the other contributions it’s being presented [...]

top left: Power by Edward McKnight Kauffer; top right: Speed Underground by Alan Rogers
bottom left: Which? by Maurice Beck; bottom right: St Paul’s Cathedral by Robert Sargent Austin
A small sample of the many great posters commissioned by London Transport during the last century, part of the collection at the London Transport Museum. These are all [...]

One of my Cthulhu portraits as it appears in Image Swirl, a new Google feature-in-search-of-a-purpose. Yes, I own a portion of the Googleverse, or the Googleverse owns a portion of me; the latter seems more likely. As well as being the cover of my Lovecraft volume, that picture appeared earlier this year on a reprint [...]

Durham Cathedral as it appeared this weekend as a part of the four-day Lumiere art event which illuminated the cathedral’s already spectacular location with projections and light installations. Flickr has a wide selection of photos documenting the various stages of the event.
The fluorescent bulbs on the banks of the Wear would have dazzled even Dan [...]

Continuing a rather psychedelic week, Eyecandy is another of those groovy web toys, this time putting you inside a kaleidoscopic sphere of coloured circles whose parameters you can change with sliding controls. Fun to mess with when the right music is playing.
And while we’re on the subject, my new calendar has been selling very well [...]

In which Ernst Haeckel’s Art Forms in Nature are given the Mandelbrot treatment. The example above is one of a number of variations created using the splendid Gorgon-headed Starfish, a creature I’ve messed with myself a couple of times.
These fractal images have been created by the Subblue people using their Fractal Explorer plug-in for Adobe’s [...]

One nation under a Moog | Synth Britannia.

A recent book purchase was A Century of Punch (1956), a weighty collection of drawings from the humour magazine edited by RE Williams. While much of the comedy is now very dated, many of the illustrations and cartoons yield other pleasures, not least by being a fascinating snapshot of the times and their attitudes. Some [...]

In which the Buddha Machine returns as a bespoke instrument/greatest hits package from Industrial music outfit Throbbing Gristle. Having been a TG aficionado for many years, and being the proud owner of a Buddha Machine, this item looks like an essential purchase.
Thirteen original TG loops: a mix of experimental noise, industrial drone, and classic melodies [...]

Paris au XXieme Siecle by Jules Verne (1994).
Following a comment I made last week in the post about the Temples of Future Religions by François Garas, I’ve decided it’s time to give some proper attention to one of my favourite comic artists, François Schuiten, a Belgian whose obsession with imaginary architecture resembles the earlier endeavours [...]

Sometimes petitions work. A few weeks ago one such was launched by computer scientist John Graham-Cumming on the UK government website requesting a public apology for the terrible treatment accorded mathematician and wartime codebreaker Alan Turing in 1952. Turing was prosecuted after admitting a gay affair to police investigating another matter and given the choice [...]

Moldover’s CD case: a working theremin.
In May this year, Brian Eno was writing in Prospect magazine about the current state of the music business as it continues to be assailed by digital technology. Among the things Eno discussed was the packaging of music:
The duplicability of recordings has had another unexpected effect. The pressure is on [...]

A cosmic pendant lamp by New York lighting manufacturer, Caldwell & Co, created for the Rockefeller Center in 1932. The company’s Art Deco-styled designs for that building feature a number of other flying saucer pendants although none as striking as this one. The photo is one of many made available by the Smithsonian Institute on [...]

Following the post last week about the Gamelatron, Masha left a comment referring me to the similar, if less harmonious, Automates Ki systems of Canadian composer Maxime De La Rochefoucauld who describes his constructions as “musical robots activated by inaudible frequencies”. He also says:
Ki is a japanese concept : roughly, it is the invisible vital [...]

The Gamelatron at Galapagos Art Space March 2009. Photo by Gisella Sorrentino.
A laptop-controlled gamelan orchestra by Zemi17 aka A. Taylor Kuffner. See it in operation here. (Is it Gamelatron or GamelaTron? Their spellings differ…)
The GamelaTron is the fruit of a collaboration between The League of Electronic Musical Urban Robots (LEMUR) and the composer Zemi17: A. [...]

How Amazon’s remote deletion of e-books from the Kindle paves the way for book-banning’s digital future

Two Apollo 11 pictures from NASA’s endlessly fascinating collection of high-res photos. Both these are of Buzz Aldrin taken with Neil Armstrong’s suit-mounted Hasselblad. The one above is the most famous of the lot, of course, reproduced endlessly (I even copied it once as part of a drawing), but you hardly ever see it in [...]