Justine Cooper was the first artist-in-residence at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. During her residency, she explored the back passageways, storage rooms, and specimen cases where the majority of the museum's collection is stored. Cooper documented what she saw using a wood 4x5 view camera from 1910. Her huge photographs are a stunning testament to the wonder and oddity of nature as we collect it. Cooper's show, Saved By Science, at the Kashya Hildebrand gallery in New York closed today, but much of the work can be viewed online. (Seen here: Trophies | 30" x 39") From the press release and artist statement:

Sheer optical exuberance surfaces from a set of Graphium sarpedon butterflies. In the Victorian attic a group of donated ex-Barnum & Bailey, Ringling Brothers Circus seals, swathed in plastic wrap, await their departure to climate-controlled storage. The 21st century liquid nitrogen cooled frozen tissue collection holds a million specimens in a room the size of a studio apartment. Immense corridors of locked steel storage cabinets most powerfully express the veil of structure dropped over the complexity of nature...

The photographs present the stored collections as both an evolution of the collecting and storing process, and as an historical and contemporary perspective on how we systematize and assign value to nature.

Link (Thanks, Heather Sparks!)

Today's New York Times profiles swordswallower/prestidigitator Johnny Fox, proprietor of the recently-closed Freakatorium, a cabinet of curiosities in New York City's Lower East Side. From the New York Times (photo by Douglas Healey):

In January, Mr. Fox's rent went up and he had to close. Now he has moved his wonders to a farmhouse in Connecticut where the only thing they collect these days is dust.

His narwhal tusks stand in the attic near a loose pile of taxidermic heads. His elephant's-foot liquor chest sits in the living room, seen by no one but himself.

His two-headed turtle lives downstairs in the basement with a sleepy boa constrictor. Out in the garage - forgotten - are Tom Thumb's vest and Sammy Davis Jr.'s glass eye.

"I'd love for this stuff to be in New York," said Mr. Fox, a sinewy and black-haired man of 52. "New York needs this kind of stuff, but who supports it anymore?"

It is a hard question to answer. Mr. Fox discovered that his Freakatorium was not the tourist destination he had hoped it would be. Even with its relatively modest $5 admission fee, it drew only 5 to 15 visitors a day....

He has even thought of changing the roguish name of his establishment to cater to a different clientele.

"I figured we could call it the Chamber of Wonders, not the Freak-atorium," he said. "Freak sometimes has a stigma to it. We could do something family-inviting."

Even at its height, the Freakatorium was never meant to be a profit center. It was rather Mr. Fox's chance to earn a living while sharing his obsessions with the world.

Link

This morning I went to the LA garment district knockoff haven known as Santee Alley, with pals Jeff Koga and Sean Bonner. We found lots of neat-o bootleg crap, including these awesome framed pirate gangsta artworks (bad unauthorized photocopy of a still from Scarface on one side, and little diorama of toy machine gun, fake money, and blinged out bullets on the other side). Other finds included scrolling digital LED belt buckles, clothing stores promising plus size fashions for "Phat Women", toy laptops running pirated warez, and much more. The best we can't blog yet... stay tuned for a report on the best booty of pirate-town, slated to run in Wired News on Tuesday (with photos shot by Sean and Jeff).
Link to my Santee Alley Treo snapshot flickr set. Here are more snaps from today's li'l field trip, from Sean: Link

real art
art or crap
silhouette cutting
rasterbater
do it: manual
is this important?
pac mondrian
selling digital art
abc of art
the-artists.org
web zen home, web zen store, (Thanks, Frank).

Nina Gordon, late of Veruca Salt, has recorded a mind-blowing cover of NWA's Straight Outta Compton, in the style of a Baezesque guitar folksinger. It's funny at first, then it's beautiful, then it's both. 5.5 MB MP3 Link, Nina Gordon music download page (Thanks, Ben!)

David Weinberger notes that the Indian film industry is going to start pixellating cigarettes in movies "to avoid glamorizing them" and may add anti-smoking messages onscreen while cigs are present.

Weinberger wisely observes, however, "Doesn't the Indian government know that in American movies smoking is a sure sign that you're a bad guy/gal whose comeuppance will come long before lung cancer can take hold?" Link

This year's ExtremeTech casemodding competition theme was "science fiction," and the first winner has been announced: a Star Wars TIE Fighter mod that cost $300 (not including computer components)and took four months. Link (via Wonderland)

I don't hardly eat sugar, and I practically never eat dessert, but last night, Ben Hammersley took me to Hemingway's, a chocolate joint in Florence, Italy. I have never, ever tasted anything remotely as good as the things I tasted last night. I ate so much chocolate that I sweated it all night. It was completely worth it. Examine this picture of me closely: that expression on my face is chocolate ecstasy.

There were many delicious things on offer at Hemingway's, but two were so good as to be life-changing. The first was a flourless, eggless dark chocolate torte, which had the consistency of the inside of a truffle and was served slightly chilled. Every mouthful of this made me feel like something important in my mouth was bursting. There were medieval princes who spent lifetimes searching for experiences that did this sort of thing to your sensory apparatus. Whatever they found was nothing so good as this.

But the very best was their Mexican-style drinking chocolate, called the Montezuma, a viscous drink made with very bitter chocolate, seasoned with chillies, aged Cuban rum (I don't drink, either, but I had two of these), and cinnamon and nutmeg. The longer I held sips of Montezuma in my mouth, the more flavors and subtleties I discovered. The chillies suffused my sinuses and the rum made my whole abdomen glow gently, like banked coals. This was, without a doubt, the best thing I ever tasted, and possibly the best sensation I've ever experienced. I've seen people in religious ecstasy. That's what this felt like.

Afterwards, I fell asleep for half an hour on the sofa in Hemingway's, collapsed on one of my dining companions. My brain was overwhelmed with the tastes, and it had to shut my body off so that it could process the input. I have a feeling that from now on, whenever a little money finds its way into my pocket, the temptation to blow it on a plane ticket to Florence (cheap from London, as these things go) and have a cup of Hemingway's Montezuma is going to be nigh-irresistible. I no longer feel the need to blow my cash on computers or gadgets -- just hook an IV of this thing straight into my arm and leave me to die by chocolate. Link

The people in the Twin Towers who ignored the instructions from the cops to stay put survived. The ones who paid attention to them died. Gary Wolf's tantalizing piece in this month's Wired concludes that the future of American security lies in ignoring the Department of Homeland Security, with its "rainbow of doom," its magic airport involuntary nudity machines, and its suspension of the Constitution and relying instead on common sense and democratic fundamentals.

After both buildings were burning, many calls to 911 resulted in advice to stay put and wait for rescue. Also, occupants of the towers had been trained to use the stairs, not the elevators, in case of evacuation.

Fortunately, this advice was mostly ignored. According to the engineers, use of elevators in the early phase of the evacuation, along with the decision to not stay put, saved roughly 2,500 lives. This disobedience had nothing to do with panic. The report documents how evacuees stopped to help the injured and assist the mobility-impaired, even to give emotional comfort. Not panic but what disaster experts call reasoned flight ruled the day.

In fact, the people inside the towers were better informed and far more knowledgeable than emergency operators far from the scene. While walking down the stairs, they answered their cell phones and glanced at their BlackBerries, learning from friends that there had been a terrorist attack and that the Pentagon had also been hit. News of what was happening passed by word of mouth, and fellow workers pressed hesitating colleagues to continue their exit.

Link