the making of, by greg allen
I love this boro jacket at Sri as much for the color as the patching:
This jacket is well-used, as is quite obvious. To describe its color is difficult: it is a kind of medium-range grey blue; the hemp cloth itself is woven of exceedingly narrow stripes which gives a misty appearance to the neutral color.
This is actually the inside of the jacket. The 10 other photos Sri posted doesn’t include a shot of the outside.
boro hemp noragi, taisho era [srithreads]
BELLMAC-32A Layout in the Ball Labs, Murray Hill Lobby, image: ieeeghn.org
Look closely, at least until I can track down a larger version of this snapshot.
Because it may be the world’s largest plotter pen drawing.
It’s a 20×20-foot layout of the BELLMAC-32, the world’s first 32-bit microprocessor, developed by AT&T just before they divested themselves of Bell Labs and the RBOCs beginning in the late 1970s.
BELLMAC-32A microphotograph, via ieeeghn.org
According to a first-hand history of IEEE fellow Dr. Sung Mo (Steve) Kang, developing the BELLMAC-32 constantly uncovered the limitations of the design, testing, manufacture, and QA process for microprocessors:
Chip layout verification was another huge challenge. At that time, no CAD tools were available for the entire chip layout verification. As a result, we had to generate many CALCOMP plots and Scotch-taped them together to form a 20-foot-by-20 foot plot that was placed on the floor in a huge room. To make sure interconnects were formed properly, all terminals were labeled and wires were traced by using color pencils to make sure the lines ran continually. Although primitive, this method uncovered many errors and, in the end, produced error-free layouts and fabricated chips. We used a huge empty room in Building 3 of AT&T Bell Labs at Murray Hill or the main lobby area to complete the checking.
I love that creating the most advanced computer chip of the day still involved PhDs crawling across the floor with colored pencils.
Still from Microprocessor for the Information Age, a 1982 industrial film on the making of the BELLMAC-32, via AT&T’s Archive
And of course, there’s the giant drawing itself, spit out by a printer in tiles and taped together. Was Wade Guyton even born when this all went down? Yes, but still. So awesome.
Now to track down a working CALCOMP plotter and recreate it. Because it’s probably too much to hope that AT&T or one of their computer engineer diaspora rolled all those sheets up and stuck them in their moisture-free basement. Right?
Microprocessor for the Information Age (1982) [techchannel.att.com thanks greg.org reader robin edgerton]
First-Hand: The AT&T BELLMAC-32 Microprocessor Development [ieeeghn.org]
previously: Shatner, plotter art, and the drawing machine as seen at the beginning of the digital age
Here’s video of James Bridle giving a live, keynote speech version of his awesome tumblr, The New Aesthetic, at a web conference in Australia. Lots of good stuff, though not much that will be new to TNA followers.
There are a few greg.org favorites in there, too, including lots of camo, Dutch Google camo, Blurmany, that crazy Google Books book, Google Google Google camo camo camo.
Waving At Machines, at Web Directions South, Sydney AU [booktwo.org]
Here’s another recipe from John Cage, this one maybe from a stay in Ithaca? Before he went vegan, obviously. From Empty words: writings ’73-’78, p. 91:
Holiday Inn: Room 135.
Four cups of ground walnuts;
4 cups of flour;
12 tablespoons of sugar;
2 2/3 cups of butter;
4 teaspoons of vanilla.
Form into circa 125 small balls.
Bake at 350 degrees in motel oven.
Now back to Room 135.
Roll in 1 pound of powdered sugar.
Nut balls.
Makes enough for one dance company, I guess.
Wild. The previous post about erased and archived and someday-to-be-resuscitated Nixon reminded longtime greg.org reader Jonathan of another obscured national conspiracy: the Dictabelt recordings of the Kennedy assassination.
Apparently, a motorcycle policeman along the presidential motorcade route through Dallas had his mic stuck open, and he inadvertently laid down several minutes of audio on a police radio channel, which was being recorded by something called a Dictabelt.
Generations of investigators who examined the recording drew controversial and sometimes conflicting conclusions from it about the participation of a second gunman. But basic questions about which policeman’s radio was being recorded, and where he was at the time, have never been answered definitively.
In any case, the celluloid acetate medium on which the recording was made is microscopically degraded further with every pass of the stylus. So the more it is disputed and heard and analyzed, the more it is physically erased.
Dictabelt evidence relating to the assassination of John F. Kennedy [wikipedia, thanks jf]
Sebastian Errazuriz came up with the idea for his coke slab when he saw friends scratching out lines on a coffee table. The indentations make it so easy, a child could do it!
It’s so functional and brilliant, I’m surprised someone hasn’t invented it already. It’s also gorgeous to look at, though it also appears that the actual production version available for sale on Grey Area’s website is matte finish, not mirror-finish stainless steel. Too bad.
Maybe better to wait for Rirkrit‘s version.
[Other things I just thoguht of: Painting Bitten By A Man, 1961, Jasper Johns; Table, also 1961, Yves Klein.]
COKE SLAB
Sebastian Errazuriz, 16 x 9 x 0.75 inches, $2,100 [shopgreyarea.com via museumnerd]
In what is probably the most ideologically analytical essay ever written about paperweights, curator Barbara Casavecchia notes that many of the 60 paperweights she selected from Enzo Mari’s collection “are the product of a manual labor–serving as fragmented evidence of the persistence of non-alienating forms of work, specifically within the craftsman-like dimension inherent to production that Mari has investigated for years.”
One incarnation of Mari’s investigation was an exhibition and discussion forum he organized in 1981 titled, “Dov’e l’artigiano”/”Where is the crafstman”. It was presented first at Fortezza da Basso in Florence, and then at the Triennale in Milan. There was a catalogue published–which I can’t find anywhere–and at least one review–which I can only find a few quotes from, but otherwise, the Italians have not yet processed or digitized their contemporary design history yet.
In his latest book, Venticinque modi per piantare un chiodo/25 ways to drive a nail, Mari says the objective was to “illustrate the unresolved ambiguity of the relationship between industrial design and ‘handmade.'”
Excerpts from an Ottagono review of “Dov’e l’artigiano” place the show and Mari’s critical view of the alienating labor conditions of mass production at the center of the debate over Italian design, culture, business, even a national identity of sorts. On the one hand, some Italian producers, still modernizing, hid the fact that their consumer products were partially made by hand because they “did not want to lose the noble title” of industrial design. And others hid the fact that they’d begun using industrial manufacturing processes because they didn’t want “to lose the prestigious title of an object ‘made by hand.'”
As he had done in 1973 with his autoprogettazione plans, exhibition, and product line, Mari eschewed theoretical arguments in favor of a “didactic exhibition” of objects and the close analysis of their creation. For the show he uncovered hundreds of examples of artisanal and craftsman-like processes being used to make mass-produced industrial design. Here are the objects and categories I’ve been able to find so far:
Oh yeah, and the whole show took place inside a geodesic dome.
I’ll add more objects and pictures if/as I find them. It’s hard to process a 30-year-old exhibit you’ve only just found out about. But it makes me think of things like, well, obviously, pen plotters and that insane William Shatner integrated circuit drawing movie. And NASA workers using giant clothespins to glue the mylar strips toghether for Project Echo satelloons. And Richard Serra sculptures made in defunct shipyards and Richard Prince car hoods. And hand-embroidered Gap kids’ dresses that turn out to have been made by children in India. And etsy and custom Nikes and pre-stressed jeans. And Ikea furniture that offloads all the non-alienating labor processes onto the customer.
Which is all by way of saying I have no grand theories on the current state of the relationship between craft and industrial production; but I think they’ve turned out to be not quite as incompatible as they seemed in 1981.
LINKS/RELATED
This all started with the catalogue essay for Enzo Mari: Sixty Paperweights, An Intellectual Work, which just closed in Berlin. [kaleidoscope-press.com, tanyaleighton.com]
Maddamura’s discovery of the Ottagono review is one of the few online sources of info on the “Dove’e l’Artigiano” show [image, too: maddamura.eu]
Mari’s new book, 25 Ways to Drive A Nail, is not available in English yet. [google books tho]
Apparently, as a state-of-the-art battleship in the US Navy during the 1920s, the USS Maryland was “in great demand for special occasions.”
Which might give a hint about why she was tricked out at some point in these dazzling but highly non-camo lights.
USS Maryland [thekingof via reference library]
i love that the headline on this story, “Hubble Directly Observes The Disk Around A Black Hole,” has to be followed immediately by, “but it’s not that disk.”
The spectacular patterns and rays in the photo above of the double quasar known as HE 1104-1805 are apparently imaging artifacts from the Hubble Space Telescope, They’re caused by the circular aperture and the structural elements of the telescope itself.
Meanwhile, the accretion disk is only visible at all because HE 1104-1805 is subject to gravitational lensing, distortions in the light caused by the gravitational pull of an intervening galaxy.
I can’t quite articulate it yet, but there’s something here about the appeal and limits of opticality; the utility and limitations of the narrow, visible part of the spectrum; and the documentation and characterization of distortion that I find very interesting. And then there’s the inextricable relationship between the instrument and its object; which then collapses as the universe itself–the galaxy-as-lens–becomes the instrument for viewing itself.
Hubble Directly Observes the Disc Around a Black Hole [spacetelescope.org, via]
What’s That Strange Disk Around That Black Hole? [discovery.com]
Not sure what’s cooler about JWZ’s post about visiting the repurposed Christian Science church that is now The Internet Archive’s San Franscisco Mothership:
their slick and simple book digitizing station setup, or the “terracotta army of avatars of their long-term employees” which are gradually filling the pews.
The Internet Archive [jwz.org]
Well that’s kind of fantastic, like Victorian- era Rauschenberg.
Apparently, to commemorate Her Majesty the Queen’s to the Isle of Jersey, The Jersey Herald printed copies of the September 11, 1846 edition of the newspaper on silk panels, which were then stitched together with beaded pearls. Here’s a detail shot:
Did they only make the one copy? Is this the only printed silk newspaper facsimile out there? Can I find these in any boot sale of dead queen paraphernalia, or only Malcolm Forbes’s?
UPDATE AFTER TEN MINUTES OF GOOGLING So printing newspapers on silk is/was a commemorative thing. The first copy of the first issue of the Grand Rapids Times was printed on silk in 1837 and presented to its largest subscriber/investor, while additional souvenir copies were printed on cloth. A silk copy of an 1852 edition of the San Francisco Daily Whig came across book conservator Nicole Wolfersberger’s desk [and into her flickr stream] a couple of years ago. The Upper Hunter Courier made a silk presentation copy of their paper for Lord Belmore after he came to open a section of railway in Scone in 1871. It was not nearly as nice as Queen Victoria’s.
And in 2007, the Jiefang Daily Press Group gave the V&A a copy of the 2005 silk front page which was carried into orbit on China’s second manned space flight.
The Forbes Collection at Old Battersea House – Sale 338 – Lot 415
TWO PRINTED COMMEMORATIVE SILK FACSIMILE NEWSPAPER SHEETS
Est. £500-800 [lyonandturnbull.com]
Previously: Rauschenberg Currents Event
I’m not sure what’s cooler:
That during World War I, John Purroy Mitchel, “The Boy Mayor of New York,” built a giant plywood battleship called the USS Recruit in the center of Union Square to drum up volunteers for the Navy,
That it was repainted overnight by the Women’s Reserve Camouflage Corps in brightly colored dazzle camouflage to get more business,
Or that there’s a site–and a book!–called Camoupedia.
Camoupedia: A Compendium of Research on Art, Architecture and Camouflage, by Roy R. Behrens (Bobolink Books, 2009) [camoupedia]
ce ci n’est pas un Razzle Dazzle? Ellsworth Kelly, Study for Meschers, 1951, moma
When tiny scans of Gwyneth Paltrow’s Interview interview with Ellsworth Kelly first appeared on tumblr, the only thing you could read was his pullquote about his tour of duty in World War II:
I was in what they called the camouflage secret army. The people at Fort Meade got the idea to make rubber dummies of tanks, which we inflated on the spot and waited for Germans to see.
Which, nuts, right? I guess I’d heard of Kelly’s camouflage involvement before, and I remembered somewhere that Bill Blass had also been in a camouflage division, but I’d never put it all together that these guys were in the Ghost Army, whose operations remained largely classified and unknown until the mid-1990s.
Here is Kelly’s fuller quote, and his photo of himself standing next to a burlap jeep:
PALTROW: Did you design camouflage while in the army?
KELLY: I did posters. I was in what they called the camouflage secret army. This was in 1943. The people at Fort Meade got the idea to make rubber dummies of tanks, which we inflated on the spot and waited for Germans to see through their night photography or spies. We were in Normandy, for example, pretending to be a big, strong armored division which, in fact, was still in England. That way, even though the tanks were only inflated, the Germans would think there were a lot of them there, a lot of guns, a whole big infantry. We just blew them up and put them in a field. Then all of the German forces would move toward us, and we’d get the call to get out quick. So we had to whsssh [sound of deflating] package them up and get out of there in 20 minutes. Then our real forces, which were waiting, would attack from the rear.
PALTROW: So in a way, it was just like an art installation! That’s amazing.
KELLY: One time, we didn’t get the call and our troops went right by us and met the Germans head on. Then they retreated, and they saw our blow-up tanks and thought they were real and said, “Why didn’t you join us?” So, you see, we really did make-believe.
PALTROW: It’s the perfect job for an artist in combat.
KELLY: We even had the tank sounds magnified because tanks would go all night long.
It sounds like Kelly was actually in the 603rd Engineer Camouflage Battalion, one of four units in the 23rd HQ Special Troops, which entered France just after D-Day and ended up seeing quite a bit of action, all with balloons and loudspeakers instead of actual weapons.
As Edwards Park explains in a fairly detailed history, the 23rd’s main objective was to impersonate various active divisions in order to cover or obscure troop movements. The inflatable weaponry was designed to fool aerial reconnaissance, but the 23rd also acted out the operations of the units they were impersonating/replacing, visiting fake garbage dumps, and laying fake tank tracks at night under the cover of pre-recorded troop sounds and fake radio broadcasts. And they created fake badges and mingled with local civilian populations, passing along disinformation. As Park puts it, “It wasn’t long, in fact, before the 23rd had a voluminous file on visual identifications and the men suffered many a bloody finger sewing bogus shoulder patches on their uniforms before going into action.”
It’s one of many not-too-thinly veiled references to the 23rd’s apparently fruity reputation. I’m sure there’s at least one queer studies dissertation out there on masculinity, war, and the confluence of camouflage, artsiness, and passing for “real” soldiers.
As NPR reported in 2007, most camo/deception soldiers were apparently ordered never to discuss their wartime efforts. But Jack Masey was never told to keep quiet–waitaminnit, Jack Masey? The USIA design director and serial Expo geodesic dome commissioner? Holy smokes! It all makes filmmaker Rick Beyer’s documentary Ghost Army feel like a race against time. I hope he got some good stuff.
Meanwhile, I guess I’m on the hunt for some 23rd material myself. In 2004, Sasha Archibald wrote in Cabinet about the Ghost Army’s unauthorized insignia for itself, which featured the three-legged triskelion and the motto, DECEIVE TO DEFEAT. [Christoph Cox’s excellent history of sonic deception in the military leads me to believe that everything I knew about the 23rd I learned in Cabinet Magazine.]
And I guess it’s too optimistic to imagine any rubber tanks or vintage camo have survived all these years; I can’t imagine if the top secret thing preserved such artifacts or doomed them. But at the least I could start tracking down some of those Ellsworth Kelly posters.
OK, Meyers’ site points to this 1992 video by/about the WWII paintings of Harold Laynor, who describes himself as part of the “famous Ghost Army,” and says its activities were “unknown to the general public until well after 1980.” Hmm. Laynor also says there was an initial plan in 1942-3 for the 603rd to focus on domestic camouflage. But that the British successes with battlefield camo in North Africa inspired the US to deploy the deception unit in combat.
Related: British WWII bullshit camo stories
The Civilian Camouflage Council, included a lot of folks at Kelly’s school, Pratt
Sounds so-so, but full of facts/details: military historian Jonathan Gawne’s 2002 book, GHOSTS OF THE ETO: American Tactical Deception Units in the European Theater, 1944 – 1945
While doing some family history research, I discovered that one of my grandmother’s cousins, Charles Burr, a farmer in Burrville, Utah, had been killed by W.A. “Boss” Lipsey, a neighbor, in March 1943.
The Burr family version of the story says that Lipsey had run-ins with many other farmers in the valley, and that, after a water rights argument, he lay in wait in the bushes until Burr ventured out to feed his animals, and then he shot him in the back with a 12-gauge shotgun.
A version of the story online mentions a years-long feud between the two, and specifically referred to a fight a couple of years earlier between Burr, Lipsey, and Lipsey’s sons.
I just received the court records for Lipsey’s murder trial, including some information the defense drafted for the judge to pass along to the jury during their deliberations. Here is one, with the judge’s handwritten notations in italics:
DEFENDANT’S REQUEST #2.
The Court instructs the jury that the evidence in the case shows, without dispute, that on August 7, 1941, Charles Burr, with his fingers and hands, dug out the left eye of the defendant.
Refused
July 1, 1943
John L. Sevy, Jr
Judge
The Burr account I have ends:
The family could not believe the verdict of second degree murder with a fifteen-year prison sentence with eligibility for parole after five years. Needless to say, the Burr family did not believe justice had been served.
The account does not mention what I found from newspaper accounts: that Boss Lipsey was denied parole once and appears to have died in the Utah State Prison. As of 1995, when this Burr family history was privately published, it doesn’t sound like there’s been much attempt to reconcile the Lipseys and the Burrs’ versions of their intertwined history. I don’t know if I’m up for trying, or if I’m too close or too far to do it.
05/12 UPDATE Thank you, Google. I have heard from one of Boss Lipsey’ great grandchildren that Boss was, in fact, released from prison shortly before he died. As one might imagine, their family stories emphasize details that the Burr versions omit, like that Lipsey was in his mid-70s when he and 40-yo Charley first fought over their turns for the Koosharem Reservoir’s irrigation water. I may end up putting the Burr family version of the incident online sometime; it was written by Charley’s son Ned, who was around 13 at the time his father was killed.
Mondo Patrick tipped me off to this a little while back, and for a while there, it was kind of turning my table world upside-down.
It’s an autoprogettazione table by Enzo Mari, of course, model 1123 xE, one of the most picnic tabliest of them all, made from the original 1970s precut wood kids produced by Simon Gavina.
It was really tempting, but ultimately the condition issues–there were some split and badly repaired wood pieces on one side which would probably mean losing some of the original wood–and really, the shipping from somewhere outside Torino to, wherever really, where am I going to put a second table project on no notice? And maybe if I could wait for the euro to collapse it’d make financial sense, but–anyway, I passed on it.
That hammered, golden patina still shines in my dreams, though. Let’s watch the European auctions for a while and see if this bad boy reappears. Meanwhile, I still have this image of Rirkrit’s chrome ghost of 1123 xE to keep me company.
