☛ The Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art: “A Hedgehog” by Hans Hoffmann, watercolor and gouache on parchment, 7 7/8″ x 11 3/4″, before 1584. Purchase, Annette de la Renta Gift, 2005 (2005.347).

From The Metropolitan Museum of Art website:

Some forty years after the death of Albrecht Dürer in 1528, a renewed interest in his art led to the “Dürer Renaissance,” which originated in Nuremberg, the city where he worked for most of his life, and flourished in Prague at the court of Rudolph II. It is a testimony to the formidable scope of Dürer’s oeuvre that the best-known artist of that Renaissance, Hans Hoffmann, based his reputation on just one aspect of the master’s work. Although Hoffmann was a painter and a draftsman of portraits and religious subjects (examples of which have been acquired by the Museum in recent years), he is remembered mainly for his studies of plants and animals. This breathtakingly lifelike depiction of a hedgehog must have been based on sketches made from life. More than Dürer, who tended to stress the objectivity of his observation, Hoffmann animated his depictions of animals, suggesting in a most touching way a human alertness absent from the greater artist’s nature studies.

This drawing is currently on display in Gallery 692 as part of the exhibition Dürer and Beyond: Central European Drawings in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1400–1700 (from April 3 to September 3, 2012). The exhibition website offer a high-resolution image of the drawing (3,775 x 2,584). Bellow is a detail from the head retrieved from this higher resolution file.

“A Hedgehog” (detail) by Hans Hoffmann, watercolor and gouache on parchment, 7 7/8" x 11 3/4", before 1584

• Datavisualization.ch Selected Tools:
  

  Datavisualization.ch Selected Tools is a collection of tools that we, the people behind Datavisualization.ch, work with on a daily basis and recommend warmly. This is not a list of everything out there, but instead a thoughtfully curated selection of our favourite tools that will make your life easier creating meaningful and beautiful data visualizations.

  

• The Atlantic: “Forget About It: Making the Internet More Like Our Brains” by Megan Garber, May 8, 2012. Excerpt:
  

  Snapchat is an iPhone app that, fascinatingly and maybe even usefully, lets you apply a time limit to the photos you share with friends. You can decide whether your recipient (or a group of recipients) sees a photo for 2 seconds, or 5, or 10 … before what they see disappears entirely. Think Path, with a focus on photos. Think Instagram, with an expiration date.

• Digital Journal: “Op-Ed: Three current trials for mass murder worlds apart” by Alexander Baron, May 8, 2012. Excerpt:
  

  The third criminal trial for mass murder is one that has received very little coverage in the mass media. It is, unusual, to say the least. For example, it is selling merchandise – fancy a badge or a T-shirt? Click here and follow the instructions.

  The Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Tribunal was founded by Mahathir bin Mohamad, who served as Prime Minister of Malaysia from 1981-2003. Dr Mahathir is admittedly a somewhat off-beat character for so senior a politician, but no one who leads a country for 22 years is to be treated with contempt. The purpose of the tribunal is to criminalise war, which involves “holding perpetrators of war crimes to account for their actions especially when relevant international judicial organs fail to do so”.

  The main argument is far fetched, to say the least, but it remains an interesting (and very quick) introduction to the legal problems surrounding the trial of mass murderers.

• Forbes: “Neutrinos to Give High-Frequency Traders the Millisecond Edge” by Bruce Dorminey, April 30, 2012. Excerpt:
  

  Eighty some years after Wolfgang Pauli first postulated its existence, the lowly neutrino is now on the cusp of being harnessed to facilitate automated high-frequency trading through earth itself. That is, if this weakly-interacting, electrically-neutral subatomic particle can be successfully time-encoded and pointed from one financial center to another.

  The idea is that by sending neutrino-based buy-and-sell messages via a 10,000 km shortcut through earth; high-velocity traders could handily beat their competitors.

  

• BBC: “Magnetic bacteria may help build future bio-computers” May 7, 2012. Excerpt:
  

  A team from the UK’s University of Leeds and Japan’s Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology have used microbes that eat iron.

  As they ingest the iron, the microbes create tiny magnets inside themselves, similar to those in PC hard drives.

  The research may lead to the creation of much faster hard drives, the team of scientists say.

  See the original press release by Univeristy of Leeds: “Bacterial builders on site for computer construction” May 4, 2012.

  

• Technology Review: “Are Smart Phones Spreading Faster than Any Technology in Human History?” by Michael Degusta, May 9, 2012. Excerpt:
  

  These figures show that smart phones, after a relatively fast start, have also outpaced nearly any comparable technology in the leap to mainstream use. It took landline telephones about 45 years to get from 5 percent to 50 percent penetration among U.S. households, and mobile phones took around seven years to reach a similar proportion of consumers. Smart phones have gone from 5 percent to 40 percent in about four years, despite a recession. In the comparison shown, the only technology that moved as quickly to the U.S. mainstream was television between 1950 and 1953.

  It would be interesting to re-write this analysis using Everett Rogers’s well known theory of diffusion.

  

• MoMA: “Contemporary Art Forum: Critical Play—The Game as an Art Form” Friday, May 18, 2012, 10:00 a.m.–5:00 p.m.

  Pippin Barr whom I wrote about recently (Zorba: The Video Game) will be present at the MoMA to discuss with fellow artist Scott Snibble (designer of Björk’s Biophilia apps) and Paola Antonelli, Senior Curator at the MoMA for the Department of Architecture and Design. This MoMA’s “Contemporary Art Forum” is the second time in just a few weeks that video games are given a serious treatment by or inside a notable national museum (see the Smithsonian American Art Museum).

  

☛ The Daily Dishes: A catalog of 365 Petri dishes painted by Klari Reis (all completed in 2010). Depicted above is “Untitled” from the Hypocondria series (read below for a detailed explanation). Click for hi-res (it’s worth it). © Klari Reis.

Klari Reis is an American artist born in 1977. She got her Master of Fine Arts (MFA) from the City and Guilds of London Art School in 2004 (CV: PDF). She has been working in San Francisco for the past six years.

Around the same time she got her degree from the London Art School, Klari Reis was diagnosed with Crohn’s Disease. She had to undergo a battery of tests. She eventually developed a strong interested in those results, especially in the ways her blood would react to different pharmaceuticals in Petri dishes. In fact, she liked it so much she decided to learn more about the whole process and found a way to study it at Kings College and at St. Thomas’ Hospital (both in London). She’s also actively working with biotech firms based in North Carolina for inspiration and is the owner her very own microscope (so she can do “small experiments” at home)¹. At first, her art strongly reminded me of Erno-Erik Raitanen’s“Bacteriograms” (2008-2010). However, the techniques used in both cases are obviously quite different.

Klari Reis started painting colorful representations of pluricellular-like structures using epoxy polymer and mixed media on aluminum boards. She would name those pieces after pharmaceutical drugs (“Cefuroxime”, “Cloxacillin”, “Clindamaycin” for example). Here’s a description of those early pieces in a 2009 issue of Artweek magazine:

The basic motifs are circular blobs, often internally marked with smaller circles, a unit that evokes eyes when the interior is highly differentiated with various striations and flows. In other places, monochrome internal dots suggest breasts, and wavering outlines hint at amoebae. These motifs are spread across the surface, with different pieces gaining their individuality through the color schemes, and the relative density and ordering of the blobs. (Artweek: “Klari Reis and Carol Paxton Juliano at Cain Schulte Contemporary Art” by John Raptko, PDF; another description of Reis’s early work can be found at ArtRabbit)

“Cefuroxim” by Klari Reis, 2009, mix media on floating aluminum panel, 48" x 48"

The author of this description goes on noticing something that seems important in retrospective, almost prescient of what was about to come. It has to do with the aluminum board Reis was often using at that time:

(…) the frequently square supports gives the works a rhetoric suggestive of a sample or a specimen, a bit of something arbitrarily cut from an indeterminate large batch.

As it happened this work slowly evolved and, in 2009, Klari Reis started a new project where she would literally paint flat Petri dishes. This first series of Petri dishes was titled Hypocondriac². The idea was not to produce figurative images, but rather to visually explore the endless variation of forms, colors and textures she had observed in the labs. She wasn’t always trying to make photorealistic reproductions of them:

“I occasionally try to make a Petri dish painting look exactly like an image I have been inspired by. However, I usually like to work just from memory and do my best to recall the natural formations seen and the way the shapes and reactions made me feel.” ¹

She paints using an epoxy polymer which is basically a compound created from the reaction between a resin (or epoxide) and a hardener (or polyamine). She colors the polymer using various method and media (powders, oils, acrylics and industrial dyes for example). Since epoxy is highly toxic (see this fact sheet about “Epoxy Resin Systems” by the California Department of Public Health), she works in a controlled environment:

While conventional artists use a color palette and canvas to create art, Reis must clothe herself in a biohazard suit and oxygen mask. This is mandatory to protect her from the toxic fumes that result while combining various resins, epoxies and industrial dyes to create each one-of-a-kind piece. ³

Working on Hyponcondriac, Reis further developed and fine tuned her technique for painting Petri dishes. Eventually, her art evolved into a new project which she called Hypocondria (the ending “c” was dropped from the previous name). She now paints in real Petri dishes by filling them up with dyed epoxy polymer. Because this medium can also be used in a transparent or clear state, the result are paintings offering a striking sense of depth and volume: multiple level of colors are intertwined in a three dimensional volume⁴.

Detail image of Petri dish painting, from the Hyponcondria series. © Klari Reis

Detail image of Petri dish painting, from the Hyponcondria series. © Klari Reis

The mode of presentation evolved alongside Reis’s art. While the aluminum boards were hanged on the wall, the Petri dishes make use of a different hanging mechanism: they are “pinned” with steel rods at various distances from the wall, a little bit like butterflies on a white board. This method allows for the light to penetrate the Plexiglas from behind thus illuminating the translucent and glossy epoxy hardened in the dishes. Since hardened epoxy can sometime look like glass, the final result with the light coming through multiple Petri dishes of various colors arranged together could be compared to stained glass.

Detail image of Petri dish installation in Shanghai Peninsula Hotel. © Klari Reis

Detail image of Petri dish installation in Shanghai Peninsula Hotel (side view). © Klari Reis

Each Petri dishes come in various size. The ones displayed on her blog The Daily Dish measure either 6, 4.5 or approximately 3 inches in diameter. None bear a specific title as they are all part of the myriad of dishes composing the ongoing Hypocondria series. For installations, Reis arrange multiple Petri dishes either in circular formations (for example she will arrange 30 pieces in a 28 inches wide circle) or amorphous shape. Given the nature of the Hypocondria series, installations can easily be adapted to various needs. For example, 1500 of her Petri dishes paintings ornate the walls of a hallway onboard the cruise ship Oasis of the Seas¹.

Hypocondria: 150 pieces Petri dishes installation, 60" in diameter, mixed media on Petri dish. © Klari Reis

Image of artist Klari Reis working in her studio, 2010. © Klari Reis

Along with her ongoing Petri dishes series, Klari Reis keeps working on boards, creating new kaleidoskopic imagery. Her series Street Anatomy bring her interest for biological representation to a larger scale while she paints bird views of maps as if they were microbial universe.

“San Fransisco North” by Klari Reis, 2011, mixed media on floating aluminum panel, dyptich, 60" x 120" ©Klari Reis

“Manhatten Blue” mixed media on floating aluminium panel, 48 x 72 in, 2011. © Klari Reis

To learn more about Klari Reis, here are some relevant links:

• Aside from The Daily Dish blog, Klari Reis has an official website (Flash is required). The site provide an overview of her art, form the flat aluminium boards to the Petri dishes. It also includes picture of other series such as Street Anatonomy and the Apothecary Bottle Project. Aside from pictures of her paintings, the website provide an artist statement, a short bio and a collection of relevant press releases. Reis also have a Facebook Page dedicated to her artistic activities.
• Klari Reis is currently represented by Cynthia Corbett Gallery. The gallery’s website offers the usual: a gallery of works, short biography, CV, current and past exhibition, press releases. A short PDF catalogue is also available for download (PDF).
• Anyone interested in this very peculiar kind of aesthetic should take a few minutes to visit the Microbial Art website.
• MycoRant: “The Petri Dish Art of Klari Reis” by January 10, 2011. That’s by far the most informative article about Klari Reis’s art I’ve been able to find online.
• Finally, below is a video of Klari Reis setting up a Petri dishes exhibition in Shangai, back in 2010. It’s an interesting document as it shows the process of fixing or pinning the Petri dishes on a dry wall.

• • •

^1. MycoRant: “The Petri Dish Art of Klari Reis” April 15, 2010. ↩

^2. On YouTube, one can see a video of an exposition of the series Hypocondriac at Art Hamptons during the summer of 2009: “Interview with Gallery Director Cynthia Corbett and artist Klari Reis at Art Hamptons 2009”.↩

^3. The Denver Post: “An Oasis of art inspired by the “Natural World” by Bob Kelley, January 23, 2011. PDF.↩

^4. Similar results are found in the art of Japanese artist Riusuke Fukahori. Fukahori also uses expoxy polymer to paint three dimensional gold fishes which appear to be frozen in a pond of transparent resine.↩

☛ The New Yorker: “Those are the headlines, and we’ll be back in a moment to blow them out of proportion” by Dana Fradon, September 23, 1991, p. 93

Dana Fradon is a legend at The New Yorker. He published his first cartoon for the magazine in 1948 and became a regular cartoon contributor in 1950. As of today, The New Yorker has published more than 1,400 of his cartoons.

A native of Chicago, Fradon studied at the Art Institute of Chicago before beginning three years’ service in the U.S. Army Air Forces during World War II. He resumed his artistic studies at the Art Students League of New York, and broke into the ranks of professional cartooning when he signed on to join the extraordinary group of cartoonists assembled by New Yorker founding editor Harold Ross. He currently resides in Newtown, Conn. (read more form a recent press release by the Western Connecticut State University)

Below is a portrait of Dana Fradon which appeared in an unidentified American newspaper on September 5, 1978 (retrieved from the blog Designanator: “From the cartoon archives: Dana Fradon of The New Yorker” December 3, 2009).

Portrait of cartoonist Dana Fradon published in an unidentified newspaper on September 5, 1978 (Retrieved from Designanator)

☛ Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak, Harper Trophy edition [1963]1984, 25th Anniversary Edition, copyright page. © Maurice Sendak.

From The New York Times:

Maurice Sendak, widely considered the most important children’s book artist of the 20th century, who wrenched the picture book out of the safe, sanitized world of the nursery and plunged it into the dark, terrifying and hauntingly beautiful recesses of the human psyche, died on Tuesday in Danbury, Conn. He was 83 and lived in Ridgefield, Conn.[…]

Roundly praised, intermittently censored and occasionally eaten, Mr. Sendak’s books were essential ingredients of childhood for the generation born after 1960 or thereabouts, and in turn for their children. He was known in particular for more than a dozen picture books he wrote and illustrated himself, most famously “Where the Wild Things Are,” which was simultaneously genre-breaking and career-making when it was published by Harper & Row in 1963. (“Maurice Sendak, Author of Splendid Nightmares, Dies at 83” by Margalit Fox, May 8, 2012)

“Maurice Sendak at his Ridgefield, Conn., home with his German Shepherd, Herman, in 2006.” (photo Joyce Dopkeen/The New York Times)

Here’s how The New York Times concludes its article on Sendak:

Though he understood children deeply, Mr. Sendak by no means valorized them unconditionally. “Dear Mr. Sun Deck …” he could drone with affected boredom, imitating the semiliterate forced-march school letter-writing projects of which he was the frequent, if dubious, beneficiary.

But he cherished the letters that individual children sent him unbidden, which burst with the sparks that his work had ignited.

“Dear Mr. Sendak,” read one, from an 8-year-old boy. “How much does it cost to get to where the wild things are? If it is not expensive, my sister and I would like to spend the summer there.”

“Where the Wild Things Are” (pp. 31-32) by Maurice Sendak, Harper Trophy edition (1963)1984, 25th Anniversary Edition. © Maurice Sendak.

For more about Maurice Sendak see:

• The Kenneth Tyler printmaking collection holds 20 illustrations in various state of completion along with a detailed biography.
• The Rosenbach Museum & Library holds more than 20 items related to or produced by Maurice Sendak (photos, illustrations, written notes).
• In 2005 The Jewish Museum in New York held an exhibition about Maurice Sendak. Six illustrations are still display online.

☛ Allison Sommers: “Afterbirth”, gouache on illustration board, 12″ x12″, 2010. © Allison Sommers.

Allison Sommers currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She primarily uses gouache and pencil to create most of her art pieces (specifically “Winsor-Newton and Holbein gouache on Strathmore 20-ply illustration board” according to her FAQ page).

What strikes me the most while browsing her work on Flickr is the diversity of images I found: colorful paintings alongside black-and-white drawings, luminous settings alternates with dark composition and while certain subjects seem inoffensive enough (even charming) other are brutally disturbing. Most of them though deal with deformed bodies, humanoid monsters, imaginary insects or more often impossible animals. Things are turned inside out (sexuality and eviscerated guts are involved), opened up and fragmented into a chromatic crowd of small biological details (vegetable, plants, food, smaller organisms, etc.). Some paintings strongly reminded me of Alice in Wonderland, while others felt as a variation on the work of Hieronymus Bosch (most likely because of the details and the constantly renewed parade of hallucinatory monsters although some of Allison illustrations have a more cartoonish signature).

I was first drawn to Sommers’s work when I discovered the recently completed illustration “Cain and Abel” which I intend to use in an upcoming post.

I added a few more paintings by Allison Sommers below (as well as additional online resources about her). But the best way to experience her art (aside from having the chance to see it in an exhibition) is to visit her official website and browse through her Flickr account. She’s also present on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and Google+.

The following images were all retrieved either from Sommers’s Flickr account or from her exhibition “Schlarafenland” over at Thinkspace Gallery.

“The Starving Time” by Allison Sommers, gouache on illustration board, 6" x 10", 2007. © Allison Sommers

“Nothing to Eat” by Allison Sommers, gouache on illustration board, 4.5" x 6.5", 2008. © Allison Sommers

“Beneath” by Allison Sommers, gouache on illustration board, 12" x 12", 2010. © Allison Sommers

“Dowry” by Allison Sommers, gouache on illustration board, 7.5" x 7", 2010. © Allison Sommers

“I’m Charlie” by Allison Sommers, gouache on illustration board, 6" x 7", 2010. © Allison Sommers

More resources online about Allison Sommers:

• At her official website: a collection of relevant links (some of them are listed below).
• Arrested Motion: “Interviews: Allison Sommers” November 18, 2008. Excerpt:
  

  AM: You seem to have a fascination with entrails, intestines, organs, and anatomy. Do you have a medical backgound?

  AS: Not in any formal way, although my mother studied medicine for a while and thus from an early age I had at my disposal those sorts of books– Grey’s Anatomy and the like. I’ve always been compelled by viscera, not so much for the -yuk- factor but the arresting beauty –and color!– of the flesh we carry around with us every day. There’s something very unifying about it– and always a little strange– because you do feel something basic about it on a gut level. Hah.

• Tangled Fingers: “Allison Sommers Interview” by Jes Fortner, November 3, 2011. Excerpt:
  

  Q1. Tell us a bit about your work.

  I’ve been drawing and painting since I was tiny, and it’s been something by which I define myself since then. My work is pretty escapist– I’ve been running away to those la-la lands ever since I started drawing them…

• Hi-Fructose: “A Studio Visit with Allison Sommers” by JL Schnabel, January 2, 2012. Excerpt:
  

  Featuring her signature style of miniature scale paintings composed of gouache on paper, the clusters of creatures, either employed as soldiers, beasts or nurses amongst others are engaged in action in darkened, war torn landscape. Illuminating the scale and inventiveness of Sommers who will also be showing one of the largest pieces she’s created to date, several of the smallest works are housed with antique matchboxes. Hi-Fructose recently had the opportunity to visit Sommers’ studio, take a look at her curious collections and a preview of the new work after below.

• Juxtapoz: “Back Talk: A Conversation With Allison Sommers” December 30, 2012. An interview made of short questions and short answers:
  

  8. Something that concerns you: That strange area where art and market mingle…

  9. Artists you admire: Joseph Beuys, Dieter Roth, Otto Dix.

• Informationweek: “DARPA Aims To Reuse Space Junk” by Therese Reger, April 26, 2012. Excerpt:
  

  The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) wants to turn disabled satellites and their components, including antennas and solar arrays, into functioning systems. The agency will host a conference on June 26 to explore ways to create refurbished satellite systems at a fraction of what it would cost to build them from scratch.

• The New York Times: “What’s in a Name?” by Errol Morris, Part 1 (April 29, 2012), Part 2, (May 1st, 2012) and Part 3 (May 3rd, 2012). Excerpt from Part 1:
  

  Just what names might be and how they relate to things in the world has been a long-standing subject for philosophical discussion and argument. In “A System of Logic: Ratiocinative and Inductive” (1843), John Stuart Mill quotes Thomas Hobbes (from “De Corpore,” 1655).

  “A Name,” says Hobbes, “is a word taken at pleasure to serve for a mark, which may raise in our mind a thought like to some thought we had before, and which being pronounced to others, may be to them a sign of what thought the speaker had before in his mind.”

  

• Forbes: “Here’s Why Google and Facebook Might Completely Disappear in the Next 5 Years” by Eric Jackson, April 30, 2012. Excerpt:
  

  Social companies born since 2010 have a very different view of the world. These companies – and Instagram is the most topical example at the moment – view the mobile smartphone as the primary (and oftentimes exclusive) platform for their application. They don’t even think of launching via a web site. They assume, over time, people will use their mobile applications almost entirely instead of websites.

  We will never have Web 3.0, because the Web’s dead.

  Web 1.0 and 2.0 companies still seem unsure how to adapt to this new paradigm. Facebook is the triumphant winner of social companies. It will go public in a few weeks and probably hit $140 billion in market capitalization. Yet, it loses money in mobile and has rather simple iPhone and iPad versions of its desktop experience. It is just trying to figure out how to make money on the web – as it only had $3.7 billion in revenues in 2011 and its revenues actually decelerated in Q1 of this year relative to Q4 of last year. It has no idea how it will make money in mobile.

• La république des livres: “À qui les archives Michel Foucault?” by Pierre Assouline, April 29, 2012. Excerpt:
  

  Ce scénario-catastrophe relève d’autant moins de la science-fiction que le classement des Archives Foucault s’est bien fait de manière préventive afin, dans un premier temps, de les empêcher de quitter le territoire en douce. Le sociologue Daniel Defert, qui partagea la vie du philosophe et hérita de leur propriété, a en effet décidé, à 75 ans et au lendemain d’une opération du cœur, de s’en séparer ; il a donc déposé une demande d’autorisation à l’exportation qui a mis le feu aux poudres : « La famille de Michel Foucault et moi-même souhaitons que ces archives restent en France, d’autant que l’édition de ses cours n’est pas achevée. Mais si ce n’est pas possible, je n’ai pas de réticence a priori contre l’Amérique, qui a tant fait pour lui » confie-t-il. Mais qu’est-ce qui ferait capoter l’affaire ? Deux choses qui pourraient n’en faire qu’une : l’argent pour s’aligner sur le prix du marché (nul ne veut se risquer à lâcher un montant, mais pour être plus précis, disons que c’est beaucoup, c’est à dire nettement plus que pour l’acquisition du manuscrit des Mémoires de Casanova ou des archives de Guy Debord) et une ancienne rivalité entre deux institutions culturelles qui ont chacune leurs arguments et… un même ministère de tutelle (ce n’est pas celui des sports et arts martiaux).

  

• The New York Review of Book: “In the Zone of Alienation: Tarkovsky as Video Game” by Gabriel Winslow-Yost, May 1st, 2012. Excerpt:
  

  But one aspect of Stalker’s enduring fascination has been the way it seems to prefigure the Chernobyl disaster that occurred seven years after its release: the nuclear meltdown created an abandoned, radioactive “zone of alienation”—over a thousand square miles considered too radioactive to enter, though tourists began to be allowed in last year — that to many was eerily similar to the Zone of the film. It is this parallel that inspired a Ukrainian video game developer named GSC Game World to create a series of first-person shooter game adaptations of the film called, respectively, S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl, S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky, and S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat (Pripyat is the name of the abandoned city built to house Chernobyl workers). The different “levels” or settings in the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games are detailed (though thoroughly fictionalized) recreations of Pripyat, the cordon itself, and so on. Released between 2007 and 2010, the games have been absurdly successful; Shadow of Chernobyl alone sold several million copies around the world (and, bringing the cycle of adaptation full circle, a series of novelizations based on the game were released in Russia).

  

• AlJazeera: “Munch’s The Scream fetches record $120m”, May 3rd, 2012. Excerpt:
  

  The only privately owned version of Edvard Munch’s The Scream – one of the most recognisable images in history – set a world record when it sold for $119.9m at Sotheby’s in New York, far exceeding pre-sales estimates of about $80m.

  The 1895 pastel of a man holding his head and screaming under a streaked, blood-red sky has become a modern symbol for human anxiety, popularised in movies and plastered on everything from mugs to Halloween masks. It is second in worldly fame to only the Mona Lisa.

  

• The Guardian: “From the archive, 1 May 1992: Stephen Hawking reviews film of his best selling book” by Stephen Hawking, May 1st, 1992. Excerpt:
  

  I have been fortunate in the director of the film, Errol Morris. He is a man of integrity, with a feeling for the issues. It would have been all too easy to have someone who would have concentrated on the more sensational aspects of my private life, and my medical condition, and who would have treated the science in a superficial way. A friend of mine, who has had several television programmes based on his work, was envious of how the scientific ideas came through on the film.

  

• The New York Times / Media Decoder: “Nielsen Reports a Decline in Television Viewing” by Brian Stelter, May 3, 2012. Excerpt:
  

  To the astonishment of some in the industry, total TV viewing has been on the rise in the U.S. for years, despite a plethora of other entertainment options. But new Nielsen data, also released on Thursday, showed an unusual dip in TV viewing in the last three months of 2011. At the same time, some people are spending more time playing video games and watching Web video — though TV still retains the lion’s share of people’s free time.

  In the last three months of 2011, the average American with a TV set at home spent 153 hours and 19 minutes watching “traditional TV” — TV viewed on a set rather than a computer or a tablet. That total is about 46 minutes less than was watched in the last three months of 2010, or a decline of 0.5 percent.

• TorrentFreak: “Pirate Bay Enjoys 12 Million Traffic Boost, Shares Unblocking Tips” May 2, 2012. Excerpt:
  

  Last week the UK High Court ruled that several of the country’s leading ISPs must block subscriber access to The Pirate Bay. The decision is designed to limit traffic to the world’s leading BitTorrent site but in the short-term it had the opposite effect. Yesterday, The Pirate Bay had 12 million more visitors than it has ever had, providing a golden opportunity to educate users on how to circumvent blocks. “We should write a thank you letter to the BPI,” a site insider told TorrentFreak.

  

• Kickstarter: “The Canyons” A Narrative Film project in Los Angeles, CA by Braxton Pope”. From the project’s page:
  

  The Canyons is a contemporary thriller written by Bret Easton Ellis (Less Than Zero, American Psycho, etc.) to be directed by Paul Schrader (Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Affliction, Auto-Focus, etc.) The Canyons documents five twenty-something’s quest for power, love, sex and success in 2012 Hollywood. […] The Canyons team has realized the Kickstarter is indeed a part of this new independent change, and is seeking to connect with our fan base even further with this campaign. Raising money will assist us in the production of our film in addition to increasing awareness of it. There is a distinct value in having an intimate relationship to those who care most about our work, and we are thankful to Kickstarter for helping foster these relationships.

• Bookshelf Porn: “Porn for book lovers. A photo blog collection of all the best bookshelf photos from around the world for people who *heart* bookshelves.”

  

• The Atlantic: “The Government Would Like You to Write a ‘Social Media Will’” by Rebecca J. Rosen, May 3, 2012. Excerpt:
  

  By some estimates, nearly a half a million people with Facebook accounts passed away last year, leaving family and friends to navigate what to do with those pages. Leave the account open? Shut it down entirely? Convert it to an official Facebook memorial page? What would you want for your own Facebook profile? And forget Facebook, what do you want to become of your email account?

  If you want any say in such matters, you might want to consider creating a social-media will, as the US government is now recommending as part of its advice on estate planning.

• main is usually a function: “Quasicrystals as sums of waves in the plane” by Keegan, October 24, 2011. Excerpt:
  

  This quasicrystal is full of emergent patterns, but it can be described in a simple way. Imagine that every point in the plane is shaded according to the cosine of its y coordinate. […] To render this animation I wrote a Haskell program, using the Repa array library.

  First spotted via Science Tumbled. The result can be seen below (animated GIF).

  

☛ Turner Classic Movies / Archives for Citizen Kane: “Full publicity shot of Orson Welles as Charles Foster”. Publicity stills were specially-posed photos, usually taken off the set, for purposes of publicity or reference for promotional artwork:

Orson Welles was born on May 6, 1915. One can browse a gallery of high resolution scans of images depicting Orson Welles over at Dr. Macro’s High Quality Movie Scans (most images are presented without context: mostly they are publicity stills and movie stills).

Dr. Macro’s website is a must see for anyone interested in popular movie stars for the earlier days (mostly from the 1940’s and earlier). Example below.

Undated photo of Orson Welles, retrieved from Dr. Macro’s website

• • •

Previously: May 6, 1915: Orson Welles Was Born.

☛ Merrell: Type Matters! by Jim Williams, New York: Merrell, 2012, 160 pp. Amazon (with preview), Google Books (no preview).

From the publisher website:

Once upon a time, only typesetters needed to know about kerning, leading, ligatures and hanging punctuation. Today, however, most of us work on computers, with access to hundreds of fonts, and we’d all like our letters, reports and other documents to look as good – and be as readable – as possible. But what does all the confusing terminology about ink traps, letter spacing and visual centring mean, and what are the rules for good typography? Type Matters! is a book of tips for everyday use, for all users of typography, from students and professionals to anyone who does any layout design on a computer.

The author Jim Williams has been teaching graphic design as a senior lecturer at Staffordshire University for the past 18 years (see his academic page). He began his career in London as a typographer in advertising, notably working for the famous agency Collet Dickenson Pearce (nowCDP-Travissully London). He’s a member of the New York Type Directors Club. Apart from teaching, he also works with the U.K. based letterpress printing company Blush Publishing (gorgeous products).

The book actually started as a series of talks about day-to-day typography (he was asked to do those talks by a design company who wished to provide tips and advice to its designers). Williams later found the funds necessary to transform this presentation into a booklet which he handed out to his students. The booklet was featured on Creative Review on March 2010 (see “Nice publications: Bumper Edition!” by Gavin Lucas) and managed to attract some attention. Ultimatly, Williams was approach by an editor who proposed to transform de booklet into a full 160 pages book which was just release (May 2012).

This story is told by Williams in the preface he wrote for his book. The whole preface is available online at typetoken®: see “Type Matters! | Jim Williams” by David Watson (May 2, 2012). At the same link, one can find nice photos of the book’s page layout (some of which are reproduced below).

“Type Matters!” (pp. 92-93) by Jim Williams (New York: Merrell, 2012) Retrieved from typetoken®

“Type Matters!” (pp. 104-105) by Jim Williams (New York: Merrell, 2012) Retrieved from typetoken®

“Type Matters!” (pp. 106-107) by Jim Williams (New York: Merrell, 2012) Retrieved from typetoken®

Some aditional reviews are available online as well:

• I Love Typography: “Type Matters” a review by James Puckett, May 2, 2012.
  

  Type Matters is a solid addition to the field of introductory texts on the subject of typography. It is not perfect, but the innovative presentation and short text makes it a great option for design students. And it may be the best gift around for friends and coworkers in need of a quick education in typography.

• Creative Review: “Type Matters!” by Gavin Lucas, February 27, 2012.
• Cool Hunting: “Type Matters!” by James Thorne, March 28, 2012.
  

  The book’s soft leather cover opens to a series of well-designed pages, the knowledge of type embedded in lines of examples. Introductory concepts like weight and letter spacing are paired with lesser-known bits to demonstrate what ultimately constitutes an elegantly executed page, as well as what gets in the way. The world of type also offers a delightfully strange lexicon, so you’ll be armed with intimate knowledge of jittles, picas, nuts, ligatures, ink traps, muttons and kerning.