Regular readers will know how much I enjoy a good piece of meta-ness or self-reference. My latest ‘project’ is based around this idea.
I was experimenting with the features available on CafePress, and needed a unique design to upload. The result is Meta Mug – A receptacle for your hot beverage, incorporating a QR code design which links to… the page where you can buy more mugs.
This sort of thing is very much of the New Aesthetic tradition and I know that plenty of merchandise has QR codes on it. However, I wonder if anyone has created a self-referential mug in precisely this manner.
Where Are You Going?
Where Are You Going? is a poetic hoarding at Farringdon Station, commissioned by All Change Arts. It was created by artists Sarah Butler and Yemisi Blake.
Yours truly is acknowledged on the artwork as one of the ‘local people’ who inspired the project, after I sent them a copy of my story, Northern Line Lovers.
Pink is for Girls?
We all buy in to the Blue-is-for-Boys, Pink-is-for-Girls myth, even though we know its bullshit. Here I bookmark some notes on The Wearing Of Pink.
First: When Did Girls Start Wearing Pink? After the war, according to J.B. Paoletti, a historian:
In 1927, Time magazine printed a chart showing sex-appropriate colors for girls and boys according to leading U.S. stores. In Boston, Filene’s told parents to dress boys in pink. So did Best & Co. in New York City, Halle’s in Cleveland and Marshall Field in Chicago.
Today’s color dictate wasn’t established until the 1940s, as a result of Americans’ preferences as interpreted by manufacturers and retailers. “It could have gone the other way,” Paoletti says.
Eight Screens at Farringdon
Earlier this week I uploaded this short clip of a train pulling in to Farringdon Station, as filmed by the eight platform cameras and piped to the array of monitors near the top of the platform.
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Remixing Disney Princesses
It is hard to overstate the influence of Disney cartoons on our folklore. The stories of Snow White, Sleeping Beauty et al have been around for centuries, but the versions presented by Walt Disney and his studios have become the definitive, almost canonical representations of the characters. Many people have a huge problem with this, because the studio’s versions tend to overlay its particular moral prism over the stories, which can be partriarchial – or just very saccarine – and much of the ambiguity and darkness is lost in the retelling. For example, Disney’s relentlessly upbeat The Little Mermaid has a very different fate to Hans Christian Andersen’s Den Lille Havfrue. The former gives up her entire heritage and identity for the love of a man; the latter tries and fails to stab him, and then finds herself consigned to a purgatory in the spirit world.
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