{ via Colleen Nika }

{ Mural at Sax, a new high-end restaurant in Washington D.C. }

{ Creating the Invisible Mannequin Look | Chris Brock }

{ It looks as if Ruby was a button collector and seamstress, and poor Mr. Kittner was her display model. | Thanks Tim! }

{ via Clayton Cubitt }

{ Juliana Santacruz Herrera, Knitted street interventions }

{ The Evolution of Lids| full story }

{ Thanks James }

{ Lots being sold in an online auction of the personal effects of Ted Kaczynski, aka the Unabomber. }

{ 1 | 2 }

{ Christopher Wool, Untitled, 1992 }

{ The Final Edition | Thanks Glenn }

{ Kevin Cyr }

{ In 1993, a convicted murderer was executed. His body was given to science, segmented, and photographed for medical research. In 2011, we used photography to put it back together. | 12:31 | more | Thanks Tim }

Recently, scientists have begun to focus on how architecture and design can influence our moods, thoughts and health. They’ve discovered that everything—from the quality of a view to the height of a ceiling, from the wall color to the furniture—shapes how we think. (…)

In 2009, psychologists at the University of British Columbia studied how the color of a background—say, the shade of an interior wall—affects performance on a variety of mental tasks. They tested 600 subjects when surrounded by red, blue or neutral colors—in both real and virtual environments.

The differences were striking. Test-takers in the red environments, were much better at skills that required accuracy and attention to detail, such as catching spelling mistakes or keeping random numbers in short-term memory.

Though people in the blue group performed worse on short-term memory tasks, they did far better on tasks requiring some imagination, such as coming up with creative uses for a brick or designing a children’s toy. In fact, subjects in the blue environment generated twice as many “creative outputs” as subjects in the red one.

{ WSJ | Continue reading }

{ Alan Wolfson, Canal St. Cross Section, 2009-2010 }

related:

{ George Segal, Walk, Don’t Walk, 1976 }

What is protected in the fashion world via the law and legislation, and what is not? Blakely: The main protection fashion designers have is over their trademark: their logo, their name. Source is protected; that’s why you hear about raids on pirates, who have made copies of Louis Vuitton bags, Canal St. in New York (NYC), Santee Alley in Los Angeles (LA). Have control of their name; have copyright protection of all the two-dimensional designs that go into the production of a garment. Textile design with a certain pattern–automatically qualify for copyright protection of that design. What they don’t own are any of the three-dimensional designs they end up creating. The stuff you see prancing out on a runway are actually up for grabs. Anybody can copy any aspects of any of those designs and get into no trouble with the law. Those designs are not particularly utilitarian–a word that comes up a lot in this industry–utilitarian stuff tends not to be protected legally. Something has to be considered a work of art in order to be considered for copyright protection. The courts decided long ago that they did not want any fashion designers owning such utilitarian designs as shirts, blouses, pants, belts, lapels. Don’t want somebody owning a monopoly–basically what a copyright gives you. (…)

Standard view would be: If I think my design is going to be copied, and copied quickly–which is what has happened to some extent because the copying ability better and the speed faster–then you’d think people would have less incentive to create new and better designs. That does not seem to be the case in the fashion industry. Why? Several reasons. One, from the beginning, copyright has both given artists an advantage and also taken something away. What it takes away from creators is access to other creative designs. Copyright holders may own what they have, but they cannot sample freely from others around them. Huge problem in the film and music industry. The fashion industry doesn’t suffer from this problem because every design that has ever been made is within a type of public domain. It is the raw material they can sample from to make their new work. Rich archive. The history of fashion, every hem length, every curved seam, every style is available to sample from. Not just stealing–sort of a curatorial responsibility. They are curating. Different gestures, different design elements from the past. Inevitably creating something new.

{ Johanna Blakley on Fashion and Intellectual Property | EconTalk | Continue reading }

photo { Bianca Jagger by Andy Warhol }

Social convention of 1884, when FDR was photographed at age 2 1/2, dictated that boys wore dresses until age 6 or 7, also the time of their first haircut. Franklin’s outfit was considered gender-neutral.

But nowadays people just have to know the sex of a baby or young child at first glance, says Jo B. Paoletti, a historian at the University of Maryland and author of Pink and Blue: Telling the Girls From the Boys in America. (…)

For centuries, children wore dainty white dresses up to age 6. (…) The march toward gender-specific clothes was neither linear nor rapid. Pink and blue arrived, along with other pastels, as colors for babies in the mid-19th century, yet the two colors were not promoted as gender signifiers until just before World War I—and even then, it took time for popular culture to sort things out.

{ Smithsonian Magazine | Continue reading }

It has become harder to escape feeling like a tourist. Part of this is because cities are becoming more indistinguishable. In his essay “The City in the Age of Touristic Reproduction” philosopher Boris Groys notes how the local distinctions that once made foreign destinations exotic — the architectural or culinary peculiarities, the unique monuments, the cultural idiosyncrasies — have all become exportable signifiers, rapidly transmissible around the globe. This dissemination of local ideas, Groys argues, establishes a worldwide uniform city in places that were once distinct.

{ The New Inquiry | Continue reading }

image { Olivier Laric, Versions, 2010 }

bonus (1:04 mark):