Weekend links 768

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The Mona Lisa as it looks run through the Random Pixelate setting in Glitch Lab.

• “We don’t have enough Dada in this world of too much data. Something is needed to break-through the over-curated simulacrum that is the online world in order to let in a bit of non-artificial light. One way to make a break is through the deliberate cultivation of the glitch.” Justin Patrick Moore on circuit-bending, glitch music and Surrealist composition.

• The seventh installment of Smoky Man’s exploration of The Bumper Book of Magic has been posted (in Italian) at (quasi). There’s an extract in English at Alan Moore World.

• New music: Remember The Clouds by Philippe Deschamp, and Requiem For The Ontario Science Centre by Tony Price.

• Michael Brooke offers suggestions for where to begin with Polish film director Wojciech Has

• At Printmag: A new book shares the artistic odyssey of Iranian designer Farshid Mesghali.

The Letraset Graphic Materials Handbook for the year 1987.

• Steven Heller’s font of the month is Cubo.

• Yet more Polish film posters.

A cat’s eye view of Japan.

• RIP Roy Ayers.

Glitch (1993) by Moody Boyz | Glitch (1994) by Autechre | Glitch (2011) by Brian Eno And The Words Of Rick Holland

Documents d’atelier: Art décoratif moderne

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These collections would have been useful when I was mining my Art Nouveau reference books while working on the Bumper Book of Magic. Documents d’atelier is a two-volume overview of the Nouveau idiom as it manifested throughout the worlds of art and design, from architecture and housing interiors, to jewellery, ceramics and so on. The books were compiled in 1899 by Victor Champier, and no doubt draw on the resources of Revue des arts décoratifs, the magazine that Champier edited from 1880 to 1902. The Nouveau era didn’t last very long but it generated many guides of this kind, not all of which are useful if you’re looking for something to work from. Documents d’atelier is better than most in presenting actual works rather than speculative designs, and with more variety than you find in other guides. The colouring is also an attractive feature: black-and-white photos have been tinted in pastel shades to match the colour reproductions. The creators of each design are credited on the pages so you don’t have to go hunting through an index.

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Both these volumes are hosted at Gallica where the web interface remains as inefficent as ever. If you want to see more pages I recommend downloading the PDFs rather than trying to leaf through the things online.

Volume 1 | Volume 2

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Gwenaël Rattke record covers

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Muscle Up (2015) by Patrick Cowley.

This post is partly a reminder to myself that I’m still missing the last two Patrick Cowley album releases on the Dark Entries label. Dark Entries have distinguished themselves over the past few years by compiling selections from Cowley’s previously unreleased tape archive. Many of the recordings were made in the years before Cowley established himself as a producer of Hi-NRG disco hits, long pieces of instrumental electronic music which are closer to the typical electronica of the 1970s than the club music he became known for. This didn’t prevent his early recordings from being used as soundtracks for gay porn films, however, a connection that Dark Entries acknowledge in the packaging for their first three Cowley releases: School Daze (2013), Muscle Up (2015) and Afternooners (2017). The fourth album in the series, Mechanical Fantasy Box (2019), was released in tandem with a book of the same name, a journal of Cowley’s sexual encounters during the late 70s. The book and the albums from Muscle Up on have all featured art and graphics by Gwenaël Rattke, a German artist who uses traditional collage methods to repurpose imagery and graphics copied from gay magazines and porn publications of the 1970s and 1980s. The last time I looked at Rattke’s work I wasn’t aware that he’d created more album art so this post gathers a few additional examples along with his designs for Dark Entries.

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Lesbians On Ecstasy (2004) by Lesbians On Ecstasy.

I always like to see an accurate pastiche, and Rattke’s pastiches are close enough to their targets to be mistaken for products of the period they resemble, especially when assisted by fonts like Quicksilver, Stop, Sinaloa, and Motter Textura, all of which are redolent of the disco decade. Creating collages with scissors, paper and what looks in places like Risograph reproduction also helps with the period authenticity. You could create work like this with wholly digital means but if you did you’d have to do spend time disguising the absolute precision of those techniques.

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We Know You Know (2007) by Lesbians On Ecstasy.

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Liquidation (2015) by Liquid G.

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Patrick Cowley – Afternooners (2017) by Patrick Cowley.

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Suggestions in Design by John Leighton

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Among the new book arrivals at the Internet Archive is this study of global design and ornamentation, with art by John Leighton and text (or “descriptive and historical letterpress”) by James K. Colling. Suggestions in Design was published in 1880, with the pictorial matter having been available for many years as part of Dover Publications’ Pictorial Archive series. I don’t have a copy of the reprint, however, so this was a useful find. Leighton’s illustrations are black-and-white throughout, and all separated from each other, which is what you want if you’re looking for a design you may use yourself. The illustrations are also carefully done, something you can’t always say about the smaller books of this type.

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The Victorian era is where design history begins. Suggestions in Design follows the structure of Owen Jones’ landmark study, The Grammar of Ornament, ranging across the world and through the ages to demonstrate the evolution of decoration and sculptural form. Leighton ends the book with several pages of his own designs. Browse it here or download it here.

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A Day of Expo 70

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Poster design by Yusaku Kamekura.

More expositiana. Expo 2025 opens in Osaka in April, 55 years after the last expo staged in the city. Looking at the Expo 2025 website I can’t see the event generating much interest 50 years from now the way that Expo 70 does today. Expo 70 is the only 20th-century exhibition with any substantial cult value, something I’d guess to be a combination of several factors. On the design and architecture fronts the exposition was especially notable, with a great logo, great posters, and pavilions that look like a future that never arrived. In the 21st century the Japanese dimension of Expo 70 adds to its attraction; among other things the event is the only exposition whose site gets trashed by battling kaiju monsters, as happens at the end of Gamera vs. Jiger.

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The Tower of the Sun from the Expo 70 Official Guide.

Then there’s the centrepiece of the event site, Taro Okamoto’s Tower of the Sun, which joins the Eiffel Tower, the Brussels Atomium and Seattle’s Space Needle in being an exposition remnant that future generations have decided to preserve. Okamoto’s Tower is the strangest of all the surviving exposition structures, the creation of a multi-talented artist, designer and jazz drummer (!) who exhibited with the Surrealists in Paris in the 1930s. Now that the Tower is now left standing alone in open parkland it seems more like the world’s largest Surrealist sculpture. In 2018 Kôsai Sekine released a feature-length documentary, Tower of the Sun, about the artist and the construction of his tower.

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A Day of Expo 70.

A Day of Expo 70 is a much shorter documentary made to promote New Zealand’s involvement with the exposition. This is one of the longer English-language films made while the expo was still in progress, and one of many films about the event at this dedicated YouTube channel. Most of the clips are in Japanese, like this three-hour TV special, but still worth seeing for the documentary detail. For French speakers there’s an hour-long documentary at the Radio Canada archives. And while I usually dislike the pointless upscaling of old film and video material this clip shows overhead views of the expo site from the monorail and the cable cars.

Previously on { feuilleton }
Impressions of Expo 67
Expositiana
The exposition moiré
Angkor in Paris, 1931
The world of the future
Space Needle USA
A Trip to the Moon, 1901
Le Panorama Exposition Universelle
Exposition cornucopia
The Evanescent City