John Menick Blog | Archive for January, 2007

A fascinating archive of (mostly) abandoned US airfields compiled by Paul Freeman. The above photo is the first helicopter flight simulator, also featured on the site.

From Errol Morris’ First Person.

Morbid Victorian theatrical effects, phantasmagoria, television before television, and the women of the Moulin Rouge.

Amazing.

I can’t help thinking these two stories have something to do with one another. The first comes from Chris Anderson’s Longtail blog, and concerns his visit to the Zappos’ Las Vegas headquarters. Actually, the entry is about random inventory storage: according to Anderson, it’s easier for companies like Zappos to randomly store inventory rather than in some hierarchical taxonomy.

[Zappos] made peace with messiness. The shoes are logged in by UPC when they arrive and assigned a spot wherever there is room available. When it comes time to pick-and-pack, the computers tell the warehouse staff where to go. No single trip is optimized, but the system as a whole works as a minimum-effort machine. Just as random access works best for bits in disk drives, it turns out to be great for atoms in warehouses, too.

The second archive-related story comes via “we make money not art.” The blog points to an article in Deutsche Welle on the work of Anke Heelemann, an artist from Weimar. She’s been purchasing entire boxes of discarded private photos and displaying them in her storefront in Weimar. Members of the public can come and “adopt” the photos. Unlike Zappos, Heelemann is not letting chaos reign, and instead she has “begun categorizing photos and filing them according to themes. “Beach,” “animals,” and “birthday” are among the more obvious ones while others are called “Handbags” or “linked arms.”

In one case, the inventory arrives in a very managed, pre-planned way, and is then stored randomly. In the second, it arrives randomly and is then placed into a somewhat subjective order. Perhaps Heelemann and Zappos should keep their techniques, but switch inventories…

From a description of “New Athens,” a future artists’ utopia in Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End (1953):

The group of artists and scientists that had so far done least was the one that had attracted the greatest interest — and the greatest alarm. This was the team working on “total identification.” The history of cinema gave the clue to their actions. First, sound, then color, then stereoscopy, then Cinerama, had made the old “moving pictures” more and more like reality itself. Where was the end of the story? Surely, the final stage would be reached when the audience forgot it was an audience, and became part of the action. To achieve this would involve stimulation of all the senses, and perhaps hypnosis as well, but many believed it to be practical. When the goal was attained, there would be an enormous enrichment of human experience. A man could become — for a while at least — any other person, and could take part in any conceivable adventure, real or imaginary. He could even be a plant or an animal, if it proved possible to capture and record the sense impressions of other living creatures. And when the “program” was over he would have acquired a memory as vivid as any experience in his actual life — indeed, indistinguishable from life itself.