Tag: Brussels

Futuristic Electronics of the Past

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As games like Cyberpunk 2077 and recent shows like Andor have demonstrated, the appeal of devices that were designed to be futuristic, but during eras now left in the past, is revealing a kind of desire for an alternate history—a world in which this became the future.

A dictaphone is a fascinating example—a sleek, technological device for an era in which one would have had a secretary to transcribe their dictations.

DG 501

Minitel terminals, in particular, speak to an alternative world that might have existed in place of the World Wide Web we experience now.

Minitel 2

Atelier NL Drawn from Clay (Soil Samples 2015)

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This array of clay samples on display at the Design Museum of Brussels was made from soils collected from around the Netherlands and Germany. Though the variety of tones are are of course interesting, I’m most drawn (as a materials scientist) to the varying amounts of shrinkage experienced by each piece upon firing. Differences in the microscopic structure of the underlying clay bodies prior to firing (e.g., amount of moisture) likely contributed to macroscopic differences upon firing.

Unless the original samples were different sizes. But given the rest of the homogeneous approach (even down to the identifying stamps in each), I’d be awfully disappointed in the artist if that were the cast.

Atelier NL Drawn from Clay (Soil Samples 2015)

Simon Stålenhag Snack Bar

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The retro-futurist art of Simon Stålenhag places intimate, perhaps even old-fashioned scenes in the foreground of images with strange, alien machines in the distance. A lone pair of nighttime snackers waiting at a slab-sided friterie trailer in the environs of the authentically 1950s Atomium represented such a real-world manifestation of the phenomenon that I had to stop and capture the scene.

Simon Stålenhag Snack Bar

The Atomium

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The scale of Belgium’s Atomium seems to be poorly captured in pictures—perhaps because it’s difficult to capture the structure and its surroundings together, or perhaps because the 102-m-tall structure so resembles something we might be more comfortable seeing at 10 m scale. The shrinking lines of sculptural lampposts helps a bit, but it’s night that I believe truly fixes the scale issue. See the band of red in the topmost sphere? That band is the array of full-length windows of the restaurant at the top of the structure, and the red light is the lighting inside.

The Atomium