What if the Victorians (with their steam engine industrial aesthetic) had had access to digital technologies? What if a Victorian design sensibility had not been eclipsed by modernism and its minimalist aesthetic? What if technologies such as dirigibles, analog computers, or digital mechanical computers (such as Charles Babbage’s Analytical engine) were still with us? Steam-powered…
media archaeology
Holmes 2009 – documenting the past?
It can’t really be called “period detail”. What impressed us about the new Sherlock Holmes movie [Link] was the way it handled the nineteenth century. It was the color space (very mannered, desaturated, toned) and the abraded, worn, littered look of the urban spaces. It just kind of felt like Victorian London. Of course, Victorian…
ghost in the mirror 2
Daguerreotype c 1850. Oblique view. See the project Ghosts in the machine.
ghosts in the mirror 1
Spent a family Thanksgiving up in Boonville, Anderson Valley with Sam and Angela Schillace. As ever, the locality is, for me, one of few fragile traces of somewhat indeterminate and agricultural pasts, juxtaposed with major investment in business futures. An old (cultivated) apple tree in the nearby field, railway carriages in the town converted to…
Big Sur CA
One of those staged viewpoints. We are little different from the days of the Claude Glass – a tinted convex mirror through which the tourist or artist of the picturesque and sublime could see a composed and painterly image. Now we have the wide angle lens, saturated color (after Fuji Velvia), and the LCD of…
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