This just in from Kelsey Cyr- Is Art Nouveau really dead?

Facebook: The So Coal Network?

 

I'm always amazed how often we forget that the immaterial world is still solidly based on the material.  When Greenpeace began calling Facebook "The So Coal Network" last February, activists drew our attention to information infrastructures and the data centers that serve them.  Specifically, activists pointed to the energy sources being used at Facebook’s data center in Prineville, Oregon.  The New York Times profiled this problem last week, noting that the data center would be powered by PacifiCorp, a company that gets 58 percent of its energy from burning coal.  Is communication really becoming more ethereal? Perhaps.  But even in the age of global flows and digital networks, the entire system still relies on physical supports and real-world infrastructure.

Abel's Signs of the Times

I’ve just finished reading Elizabeth Abel’s Signs of the Times: The Visual Politics of Jim Crow (University of California Press, 2010). Spread across a vast region of the Southern United States, Jim Crow signage confirmed the remarginalization of African Americans in the aftermath of the Civil War and Reconstruction. Abel does not consider these signs within a design tradition, but I do; for several years I’ve been collecting examples of miscellaneous “Whites Only” and “Colored This Way” signs.  When seen as part of a lost design history, they challenge us to reconsider our notions of design during this period.  Can these signs be considered a repressed underside to the work of Otl Aicher at the 1972 Summer Olympics at Munich or the AIGA’s sign symbol system for the US Department of Transportation? Only traces of these segregation signs remain today. After years of research, Abel notes that she has found roughly a hundred images of Jim Crow signs. I add this striking image, taken by Gordon Parks for Life magazine in 1956.