nottruebutwellfounded

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For Decades, Cartographers Have Been Hiding Covert Illustrations Inside of Switzerland’s Official Maps. 

They’ve eluded one of the most rigorous map-making institutions in the world to do so.

https://eyeondesign.aiga.org/for-decades-cartographers-have-been-hiding-covert-illustrations-inside-of-switzerlands-official-maps/

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Clive James: A Point of View: Congratulations!  BBC Radio 4, first broadcast 6 April 2007

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Word magazine Word Diary, Issue 107, January 2012

[nottruebutwellfounded]

The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald

The last, and arguably best, of Fitzgerald’s novels is a lattice of bright moments from the life of Fritz von Hardenburg (1772–1801), the romantic poet Novalis: the first view of the von Hardenburg household on washday; the fingers of a fellow student severed in a duel and kept warm in Fritz’s mouth; the moment of his heart’s surrender to 12-year-old Sophie von Kühn; the matter-of-fact end – consumption – that brushes all the characters aside. The frame holding these pieces together is a style, felt but unattributable, like a hand lodged suddenly and not quite reassuringly in the small of one’s back.

Via https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/apr/03/top-10-fictional-takes-on-real-lives

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Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar

On the brink of death, the Roman emperor Hadrian writes to his successor, Marcus Aurelius, about his life, his victories, and his philosophy: a proto-stoicism of self-critical candour that values stability above triumph. It is this political sangfroid, the reverence for ancient ideals of culture and conservation ranged against the tumult of events themselves, that gives the emotional centre of the book – Hadrian’s relationship with the Greek boy Antinous – its surprising depth. Yourcenar’s research is fully absorbed, and the lapidary style, learned but intimate, evokes a monumental figure in glimpses, or perhaps cries. Above all, said Yourcenar, her novel was to be thought of as the “portrait of a voice”.

Via https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/apr/03/top-10-fictional-takes-on-real-lives

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From Nabokov to Woolf to Coetzee, novelist Jonathan Gibbs selects the best imaginary lives presented as the real thing.

Fictionalised biographies – novels based on the life of a famous person – are ten-a-penny. And why not? They’re easy enough to turn out. Other people – the actual biographers – have done the hard work. All the novelist has to do is to twist the “facts” to suit their own interpretation of the life in question, and away they go.

In writing a novel based on the Young British Artists, I decided I wanted to do something different: write the biography of a made-up person as if they were real. The trick would not be to fool the reader into thinking they had actually existed (see William Boyd’s Nat Tate, below) but to access that special kind of reading we slip into when reading something we assume is factual – by which I mean, basically: gullibility. Where a reader might ask, of character in a novel, “Now, would they really do that?” of a character in a biography the question would be, “Wow, why on earth did they do that?”

Here then are 10 “fictitious biographies” (Nabokov’s term) that I’ve found particularly inspiring.

1. Doctor Faustus by Thomas Mann This slow, stodgy, quite wonderful novel gave me the template for my own fake memoir. Mann’s book is the story of the modernist composer Adrian Leverkühn, as told by his childhood friend Serenus Zeitblom. The pathos of the book comes from dull, plodding Zeitblom’s realisation that he can never hope to catch the mercurial personality of his genius friend, but that he must try nonetheless.

2. Orlando by Virginia Woolf Woolf’s light-hearted “escapade” is a satirical romp through the very idea of a biography, with its portrait of a nobleman who lives from the Elizabethan era right through to the 1920s, somehow changing gender along the way. Its sentence-by-sentence delight in evoking past times offers a model that few “proper” historical accounts can hope to follow – not least because it’s skipped on a decade before they’ve tied their bootlaces.

3. The Real Life of Sebastian Knight by Vladimir Nabokov It’s no surprise that many “fictitious biographies” include a fair bit of the biographer in their narrative. The model for this is surely AJA Symons’s The Quest for Corvo, with its detective story premise, which came out shortly before Nabokov started writing this, his first English language book. It is the tale of celebrated writer Sebastian Knight, told by his half-brother, V, though as you’d expect with this author the elusive quarry retreats even as the befuddled hunter advances, and by the end we’re as uncertain about the one as we are about the other.

4. Sartor Resartus by Thomas Carlyle This almost uncategorisable book takes the form of a critical biography of the fictional German Romantic philosopher Diogenes Teufelsdröckh, who saw clothing as the governing metaphor of human existence. If that makes him sound rather like Roland Barthes avant la lettre, then the comparison ends there. It’s a tough read, not least for the difficulty in getting a handle on the tone. Carlyle’s style is a heavy-handed parody of academic prose, yet he’s using the figure of Teufelsdröckh to give us a disguised autobiography.

5. Nat Tate by William Boyd Boyd’s benign art-world hoax presented itself on publication as a serious monograph on a real but little-known American abstract expressionist painter, who supposedly threw himself off the Staten Island Ferry at the age of 31, after destroying nearly all his paintings. The book is far more than a prank, however – it’s a melancholy treatise on the limits of biography. We know scarcely more about Tate at the end than at the beginning. The gaps and absences are all.

6. Kiss and Tell by Alain de Botton This early novel by the pop philosopher turns the central idea of biography on its head by taking as its subject not just a non-celebrity but someone wholly unremarkable: one Isabel Jane Rogers. De Botton has great fun with the paraphernalia of the genre, including an index, and various photographs of quite staggering banality: you could swap about the shots of Rogers’ boyfriends, and the book would be changed not one jot.

7. An Equal Stillness by Francesca Kay Fictitious biographies, left to their own devices, will tend to drift towards the novelistic (fictitious autobiographies, from Robinson Crusoe onwards, are too common to be of use here). That’s something that happens with Kay’s book, though at least she covers her back by having the biography of abstract painter Jennet Mallow written by a poet (and family member) who is quite open about imagining his subject’s thoughts and feelings “when I could not have known them”.

8. The Big Music by Kirsty Gunn This is more “fictitious memoir” than “fictitious biography”, but is far too interesting to omit. Gunn plays the Carlyle trick of acting as supposed editor for a set of “found papers”, detailing the history of Scottish bagpipe player and composer John Sutherland. The “papers” read like fiction, yet come with notes and appendices. Gunn is not playing the parody game, though: it’s the music she’s after, and it’s the music she gets. A seriously good book.

9. DooDaaa: The Balletic Art of Gavin Twinge by Ralph Steadman Authors, composers, artists: it’s no surprise that writers like picking other creators for their fictitious biographies – no politicians, footballers or royals here. As you’d expect, Ralph Steadman’s biography (“by” Ralphael Steed) of Doodaaaist Gavin Twinge is a full-throttle, rambunctious satire that writes an alternative history of British and international art, with plenty of original art and illustration to liven up its pages.

10. Summertime by JM Coetzee Another anomaly: after two volumes of semi-fictional autobiography (Boyhood, and Youth) Coetzee’s third entry in the genre produced this, which could perhaps be best described as: a memoir in the form of a novel in the form of notes towards a fictitious biography of an invented character modelled on the author. It is largely made up of transcripts of interviews conducted by Coetzee’s surrogate author with people who knew “John Coetzee”, though they repeatedly fail to give the biographer what he is after. Point taken, John.

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/aug/27/top-10-fictitious-biographis-jonathan-gibbs-nabokov

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“Man is an onion made up of a hundred integuments, a texture made up of many threads.”

“Man is an onion made up of a hundred integuments, a texture made up of many threads. The ancient Asiatics knew this well enough, and in the Buddhist Yoga an exact technique was devised for unmasking the illusion of the personality. The human merry-go-round sees many changes: the illusion that cost India the efforts of thousands of years to unmask is the same illusion that the West has labored just as hard to maintain and strengthen.”

Steppenwolf, Herman Hesse (1927, trans. 1929)

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His book was called ‘History of the Kings of Britain’. Yet Geoffrey didn’t claim to have written it...

“The man who penned [King) Arthur’s story was a monk, Geoffrey of Monmouth, in the year 1136. His book was called ‘History of the Kings of Britain’. Yet Geoffrey didn’t claim to have written it. Cleverly, he claimed to have translated it, from “a very old book in the British tongue”, which he had been given. Nobody has ever found this “very old book”, probably because it doesn’t exist. But Geoffrey was very keen to claim it as a source, to make his history seem more ancient, more venerable, more true. He wanted to create the authentic account of a glorious but vanished age.”

> “Ian Hislop’s Olden Days” on Daily Motion via BBC: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x1pmlmt

[nottruebutwellfounded]

Design Fiction

The School for Design Fiction – organized by James Langdon, introduced in November 8, 3-8pm, Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst, Leipzig – offers a short course in reading objects, environments and messages. Stimulated by the curious genre of design fiction, the programme asserts storytelling as the primary function of design.

A design fiction (to be read in the same register as science fiction) represents a designed object that — materially, functionally, or conceptually — cannot presently be realised. More speculative than a prototype, a design fiction does not necessarily require the potential ever to exist. It is a suggestive form that prompts us to reconsider our assumptions about — or operates as a critique of — existing objects. It may do this by projecting into the future, or into a parallel reality.

Lectures at the school will be centred around a collection of such narrative objects, each a newly commissioned artwork realised by a member of the faculty. These objects will be employed performatively, to visualise subjects including the discovery of the human brain’s innate mechanism for narrating experience; the legibility of the built environment; and strategies for continuing unfinished stories.

> Content from ManyStuff

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[nottruebutwellfounded]

What Should Spaceships Look Like?

As the next generation of spaceships is being conceived, should shuttle designers take their inspiration from sci-fi illustrators?

Generations of schoolchildren, openly, and many adults, perhaps more guardedly, have delighted in fantastical depictions of space travel. 

From Star Wars back to 2001: A Space Odyssey and even further back to comic hero Dan Dare and Victorian illustrations for the stories of Jules Verne and HG Wells, the way spaceships should look has been an important issue - before the first rocket booster ever fired.

> Content from BBC

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Images of Jesus with Dinosaurs

> Daily Dawdle

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Images of Modern Jesus from Goodsalt

> Goodsalt

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Adam Dant

Dant's fantastic maps, charts and satirical projects – such as 'underneathism', the painstaking depiction of things from below – show a peculiarly British wit.

Adam Dant's hyper-detailed drawings are like objects magicked out of a fictional realm. With their ornate borders and trompe l'oeil crinkled edges, his fantastic maps, books and charts navigate worlds whose strange territory seems to depend on figures of speech or even hallucinations. 

His Bureau for the Investigation of the Subliminal Image included studies of self-portraits supposedly hidden in paintings in the Louvre. Dant meticulously documented these concealed images, apparently rendered subconsciously by artists, as if they were part of orthodox art history. Elsewhere, he has turned categorisation itself on its head with "underneathism", painstakingly depicting from below everything from supermarkets to beach life.

> Adam Dant at The Guardian

#Images #Identity

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Ian Ward: Bunti's Picture Show An Exhibition of Futuristic Dream Cars

Ian’s series of futuristic car drawings were created between 1958 and 1963 whilst working in accounts for the Borough Treasurer at Watford Town Hall. Totally untrained as an artist, and never before exhibited, the work shows an adept draftsmanship whilst revealing a desire for a life less ordinary, an escape from a stifling job locked behind files and copy machines, and from life at home with his parents.

Ian Leslie Ward was born in 1942, a time of war and upheaval. Growing up in a Britain locked down for decades with the restrictions of rationing. His love affair with car styling was ignited when his father Leslie gave him an Ian Allan book ‘The ABC of British cars’. He soon became infatuated by the iconic ‘Space Age’ influenced American car designs that emerged in the mid 1950’s. These heavily stylized automobiles exuded opulent luxury, the wanton aspirations of Hollywood glamour and of a sheer splendour at odds with a monochrome suburban Britain, still in recovery from the war.

Early renderings of American saloon cars and limousines soon morph into customized streamline Hot Rods that then evolve into a series of evermore baroque extravaganzas, with a profusion of curlicues, baubles, bells and horns. As the years progress his cars expand further into massive architectural pavilion like structures featuring Doric columns, chandeliers, elaborate umbrella tables, stylized sofas, vases of fantastic flowers, pagodas and fountains. Like exotic operatic sets or carnival floats these finely detailed dream vessels become such abstractions that the only symbolic reminder of their former automotive selves is the micro thin chassis, tiny wheels, and an antique starting handle which remain.

The imagination employed by Ian develops further still, and by 1963 the cars have become complex psychedelic star ships, detailed with obsessive kaleidoscopic patterns reminiscent of Louis Wain’s later period cat paintings, predating LSD inspired poster imagery by several years.

The metamorphosis from Ian to Eon Ward which began in the 1980′s continues. His flamboyant dream machines will be exhibited alongside recent paintings of toy characters and other imaginative pictures, in his first solo exhibition now in his current persona, ‘Bunti’.

> Ian Ward at The Horse Hospital

#Images #Identity

[nottruebutwellfounded]

Unobtainium: Fictional Element

In engineering, fiction, and thought experiments, unobtainium is any fictional, extremely rare, costly, or impossible material, or (less commonly) device needed to fulfill a given design for a given application. 

The properties of any particular unobtainium depend on the intended use. For example, a pulley made of unobtainium might be massless and frictionless; however, if used in a nuclear rocket, unobtainium would be light, strong at high temperatures, and resistant to radiation damage. The concept of unobtainium is often applied flippantly or humorously.

> Unobtainium at Wikipedia

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The Complete Known Works of Lucian of Samosata

> Lucian at Sacred Texts

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Mingering Mike

The Mingering Mike Collection is comprised of well over 100 pieces of musical ephemera made between 1965 and 1979 by a self–taught Washington, D.C. artist who has consistently chosen to conceal his true identity. The collection consists of "vinyl" LP albums (made from painted cardboard), original album art, song lyrics and liner notes, 45 rpm singles, and more pertaining to the artist's youthful fantasy of being a famous soul singer/songwriter. The lines between reality and fantasy are fluid in this body of work—commercially produced tapes with Mingering Mike's fabricated labels mingle with tapes and demo records holding his original music; made–up reviews supposedly written by real musicians (such as James Brown) dot the covers, and recordings are stamped with claims of having been made live in D.C. venues such as the Howard Theatre. Comprehensively, the uncanny detail of Mingering Mike's synthetic career powerfully evokes black America in the 1960s and 1970s.

The collection, which was lost to the artist in the 1980s, was rediscovered at a D.C. flea market in 2004 by "record digger" and music advocate Dori Hadar. Hadar recognized that as a collection this body of material reflected an historical moment when D.C. played a pivotal role in music history and therefore held tremendous cultural significance. Black radio was new and musicians like Marvin Gaye, who grew up singing on D.C. street corners, were claiming national attention. Mingering Mike was among the countless kids who dreamed of being discovered. Untrained as either musician or visual artist, Mingering Mike nonetheless embodies a critical component of the American Dream, in which a poor black youth conquers tough circumstances by actualizing—to whatever extent possible—a world filled with fame, fortune, and happiness.

> Mingering Mike at the Smithsonian

#Images #Identity #Music