Catch of the Week
Ten ideas this week. Live Los Angeles traffic turned into music, a hundred million children's drawings read as a record of what children actually care about, an album cover grown from mould in petri dishes, and a public vote on the penguin that fronts Tokyo's transit cards. Two of the ten are decades old: a 1960s house built from bus windows, and a painter's garage still full of the tubes and brushes his museum-hung pictures were made with. The common move is noticing what was already there.
Five lanes of Los Angeles traffic, playing themselves in your browser
Jay Judah pointed a page at a live traffic camera over the southbound 101, put two sampling patches in each lane, and turned every passing car into a note, with a different voice for the trucks. Nothing is recorded and nothing is stored, so the piece only exists while people are driving, which is a nicer definition of live than most.
A hundred million children's drawings, sorted by what the children were thinking about
Riley Walz took two decades of uploads from Artsonia, the online gallery where art teachers post their pupils' work, and turned them into a searchable record of passing obsessions: which characters arrive, which fade, what an ordinary week looks like when a nine-year-old draws it. Nobody involved was asked what was popular, which is exactly what makes it usable as a chart.
Japan is holding a public vote on who replaces a penguin
The Suica penguin retires next March after twenty-five years on Tokyo's transit cards, and JR East has put three successors by young designers to a public ballot: a squirrel with a railway line running from head to tail, a purple rabbit, an orange creature carrying a mole. Handing the succession to the people who tap the card is the part worth stealing.
The harp was already the right shape, and it took a hundred and sixty years to use it
AMV BBDO dropped the Guinness harp into the word Lovely in place of the v, reviving a 1930s line without redrawing the logo or touching the symbol. The general lesson is cheaper than a rebrand: find a new job for the asset you already own.
The house made of bus windows and refrigerated-lorry panels now belongs to everyone
Richard and Su Rogers built 22 Parkside in Wimbledon in the late 1960s out of industrial steel frames, windows taken from a bus and insulation panels from a refrigerated truck. Rogers said it led to most of what he did afterwards, the Pompidou included, and the family has now given the house to the National Trust, with tours to follow.
The paintings are in museums and the paint tubes were in the garage
Erin Barnes is conserving what her father Ernie Barnes left behind in his Los Angeles studio: the Liquitex and Grumbacher tubes, the brushes, the containers, on the grounds that they are the physical remnants of his process. The Sugar Shack sold for 15.3 million dollars in 2022 while the evidence of how it was made sat in a garage.
A hundred petri dishes of mould, one for each track
Robocobra Quartet's saxophonist Thibault Barillon grew a hundred cultures at home on different organic matter and photographed each one from the same angle, re-shooting some over weeks as they spread. The band worked out afterwards that it matched how they record, chance-based moments spreading like spores, so the artwork turned out to be a description of the method.
The first virtual world ran in sixty-four kilobytes and the players immediately founded a cult
Virginia Postrel on Habitat, the Lucasfilm world built for Commodore 64s, which invented avatars, in-game currency and cosmetic purchases before anyone had words for them. Within weeks players were running arbitrage schemes and swearing allegiance to the Order of the Holy Walnut, and the designers' conclusion has held up for forty years: people will do everything that can possibly be done.
Ten thousand agents worked for eighty-eight hours and a Millennium Prize problem fell over
OpenAI's agents proved that the Navier-Stokes equations can blow up, and the proof checks out in Lean, which makes the argument that followed the more interesting half. Terence Tao's objection is that solving a problem privately, at a cost only a frontier lab can pay, deletes the wrong turns and half-methods the rest of mathematics actually runs on.
The man who rewrote 17,000 words so every line would end in the same place
Marcin Wichary on a 1990s Super Metroid guide whose author, faced with monospace text that refused to justify, solved it by choosing different words until every line fit. A small monument to doing the hard version of a job nobody asked you to do.
“Art does not reproduce the visible; rather, it makes visible.”
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