A few months ago I came across a copy of Sins of New York on the outdoor bargain table of Argosy Books. Sins of New York is an amazing compilation of stories and illustrations from The National Police Gazette, a 19th-century tabloid which, according to wikipedia, "was well known for its engravings and photographs of scantily clad strippers, burlesque dancers, and prostitutes, often skirting on the edge of what was legally considered obscenity."

Edward Van Every compiled stories from the Police Gazette for Sins of New York in 1930, by which time its popularity had substantially waned, intending to select, according to his foreword, "the Gazette's worst features" and to "confin[e himself] to the sins that went on in New York." Van Every did follow up with a collection of non-New York Gazette stories called, appropriately, Sins of America, images from which have been dutifully scanned by The Nonist.

So, here are a few of the choice engraving reproductions from Sins of New York. Pretty hard to believe this passed for salacious in New York City not so long ago, eh?

How She Cured Him
A young wife astonishes her erratic husband by emulating his example, and causes him to promptly abandon the vagabond habits of his bachelor days.

Check out the expression on the husband's face! Also worth noting is that the wife is reading the Police Gazette!

The Female Rights' Musketeers
What may be expected if the schemes of certain strong-minded women in America are realized.

This dystopian image pretty much speaks for itself.

Beauty and the Beer
An incident of the beer-maker's strike in New York—How the dashing daughter of a brewer supplied the place of one of her father's striking employees—A pretty girl's practical protest against teetotalism.

I'm not sure this was so much a protest against teetotalism as a rich chick ensuring her wealthy family would have enough dough to keep up their lifestyle despite labor movements, but at any rate "Pretty Girl's Practical Protest" is definitely a phrase I'm going to be keeping on hand for later use.

Would-Be Voters
A bevy of strong-minded Amazons make a sensation at a New York uptown polling place.

Fantastic!

Cupid in Tompkins Square Park
A place which cupid has made his favorite stamping ground, and where the stern paterfamilias is wont to appear.

Gotta love the detail of the upper right corner:

Sign: "Keep Off the Grass" Editorial: But they don't!

She Grabbed the Reins
The sensation produced on a Broadway car by an impatient young lady passenger.

And who hasn't wanted to do that during their morning commute??

If you can't get enough, policegazette.us attempts to recreate the effect of the original Gazette with today's news—although, to tell you the truth, I think we all know Drudge comes a lot closer to the intended effect.

Wow, there are way more barcode fans out there than previously imagined!

As a follow-up to barcode arts & crafts, here are some of the interesting links I received in response:

Roger from the QR code-obsessed London-based site 2d code sent me this hilarious video from The Voice of the Street explaining how their project, which gives street artists QR codes, is supposed to work. Get a load of the voiceover.

And Jerry of Bar Code Nerds (tagline: "Yep. Not only do we admit it, we're damn proud of it.") sent me a link to his massive online collection of old-school barcode graffiti and art, including this awesome picture of a print (I think?) called spaceball by someone named AlmaZ.

spaceball by AlmaZ

Closet barcode lovers, take heart. Kindred spirits abound on the WWWs.

So two weeks ago when we were all having a chuckle at Google ad sales people's surprising faith in the future of scannable barcodes for tracking print ads, I wanted to post a few notable barcode arts & craft projects. As I commented on Sean's post, geeky artists and are way more likely to increase the virtually nonexistant adoption of barcode cameraphone scanning in the U.S. than…uh…advertising—and it's still a long shot.

But then I got extremely distracted by the primaries, so I never posted it. Well, now that Super Tuesday is over and our hopemonger (best new word ever) is finally ahead in the delegate count of everyone except The NYT (which seems to be refusing to count even one more delegate until Hillary starts wining), voilà!

QR code needlepoint

This awesome needlepoint QR code by tikaro apparently uses semapedia to point to the wikipedia article on pillows [via craft].

QR code cake

Flickr user Magitisa must have an incredible amount of patience, because she stenciled a QR code onto a cake [also via craft].

every barcode

In case you forgot what barcodes used to look like, there's the non-cameraphone-compatible Every Barcode animation by the barcode-obsessed Scott Blake of Barcode Art. He's got plenty of other barcode goodness, but Every Barcode is definitely the best—how can you beat a flash animation that cycles through all 10,000,000,000,000 possible barcodes (if you let it run for ten years, that is)?

space invaders scarf

This extremely geeky scarf, made by a strange collaboration between British knitwear designers Office Lendorff and "mobile enthusiasts" (although it's not really clear what they do when not encouraging knitwear enthusiasts to knit QR codes onto scarves) Kaywa features a secret QR code knitted below a pixelated Space Invaders pattern. According to one purchaser, the code reads "insert coin for new life."

eRuv: A Street History in Semacode

And, of course you all remember the previously kenspeckle eRuv project, in which Elliott Malkin bravely plastered the Lower East Side with semacode posters that pointed to old photographs of the former Third Avenue El.

"memory box"

I'm not totally convinced by the idea of universal serial bus as a metaphor for non-computer-related connectivity, but I really wish someone would make working flash drives based on these conceptual pieces [via ffffound] by dialog05.

"eternal love" ("it's all about give and take — synchronize!")

Except I'm not sure what the "female" piece of the ring set above would be. Obviously it should be a reader, but where does it output the data?

"data injection" ("not only for data junkies, also in the event of a virus. or simply for your daily data rations!")

From the statement on dialog05's site:

USB, an abbreviation for a technical user interface, is nowadays often used as a synonym for a universal connection. originally only used by computer experts and nerds, this so-called former high-tech standard has developed into an every-day item and low-tech symbol for such universal connections.

this is an example of technology being clearly understood and accepted by the general public. something democratic evolves and develops and therefore often even receives a totally different usage than was originally intended. given the current, often exotic use of USB, it would even be argued that there is a 'USB subculture'!

"french connection" ("unplug and play!")

Tellingly, the metaphor works best in reverse, with "french connection," the bra with USB closure pictured above. But they definitely should've thrown in some sort of joke about hot swapping.

Apparently hip typophile types have known about Bembo's Zoo since 2005, but since I only found out about it this week from word[is(not equal to)]art, it's time to share the awesomeness!

The flash version of Roberto de Vicq de Cumptich's children's book by the same name morphs the names of 26 animals written in bembo into illustrations of said animals using nothing but the letters that make up their name and the occasional punctuation mark.

Ok, it's a lot cooler than I made it sound. My faves are the unicorn (above) and flamingo (below).

Happy 2008! How better to celebrate than with some kenspeckle tech art that crossed my desk in December 2007?

Camera Obscura 1-∞

To create Camera Obscura 1-∞ [via Network Research], Przemek Zajfert and Burkhard Walther auction off two holes of a pinhole camera on eBay every week. The camera is sent first to one high bidder to take a picture with it, then to the other bidder to take another, usually in a different part of the world, creating an overlapping composite picture.

The example above is from Pinholes #207 and #208. The right shot (#207), called Higher Education, was taken by a John Earl Jones in Schwenksville, Pennsylvania, and the left shot, called Higher Hey du Kaetzchen (unfortunately Google translator renders this as "Higher Hey du kittens") was taken by Manfred Rosenthal in Stuttgart, Germany.

Sounds fun, but I couldn't find any current eBay listings.

Why are numbers so comfortable?

Cody Trepte's hand-quilted binary blanket, Why are numbers so comfortable? [via rhizome] needs little explanation (except for the fact that the binary pattern actually represents the title of the quilt, unless you are actually a computer), but here's his statement on his binary work (which also includes binary needlepoints):

With only a one and zero, all information can be described in binary; it has become the universal language that connects both physical and technological spaces. Binary is so fundamental to our everyday lives, yet when seen out of context it appears abstract. While computers use binary as an efficient method for processing data, I am interested in the process of manually executing information, bit by bit, to explore the differences between human and technological expression. Each cross-stitched piece is the artifact of a performance of inefficiency, an attempt to hold onto the rapidly disappearing human hand in modern life. As each piece is stitched, a bizarre combination of new and old technologies is mixed together to form an image of information, the literal translation of the title into binary.

Encyclopedia of Radio Waves

Encyclopedia of Radio Waves [via information aesthetics] is a book of fanciful drawings by Ingeborg Marie Dehs Thomas of radio technologies (Bluetooth, DMB, GSM, RFID, Wifi, and Zigbee, to be exact) represented biologically. Pictured above is the drawing of Bluetooth from her book.

Ingeorg created the project for Timo Arnall's research project, called Touch, which "investigates Near Field Communication (NFC), a technology that enables connections between mobile phones and physical things."

Timo refers to the book as resembling "an age-old dusty guide to flora and fauna," but I think these drawings look more like microorganisms. At any rate, I love the latin names she gave her radio "species":

Bluetooth: Nevrotis Dentus Aquarae
DMB: Spherum Elektrum Multanum
GSM: Spherum Magnea Globalum
RFID: Raptus Arphadus
Wifi: Videus Fidelus
Zigbee: Nevrotis

data.tron

I admit, after reading the installation description, I have no earthly idea what data.tron [via rhizome] actually is, but all those numbers look awesome in a sort of monolith-from-2001: A Space Odyssey way, no?

Here's the explanation, such as it is:

How many points are there in a line?
What is the number of numbers?
How can we verify that the random is random?

data.tron and data.film are parts of the datamatics project, which is a series of experiments that explore such questions, physically and mathematically. Visitors will experience the vast universe of data in the infinite between 0 and 1.

data.tron is an audiovisual installation, where each single pixel of visual image is strictly calculated by mathematical principle, composed from a combination of pure mathematics and the vast sea of data present in the world. These images are projected onto a large screen, heightening and intensifying the viewer’s perception and total immersion within the work.

I'm recently returned to my beloved home after a somewhat disappointing trip to Madrid (flickr set).

Madrid proved to have an excessive number of pickpockets (one of whom I thwarted, in classic New York style, as she attempted to rob my mother), and a disappointing lack of olive tapenade. Main lesson learned: When you live in a city as incomprable as New York, it's best to limit vacation to the countryside and take only short day trips into nearby cities. If you stay in one city too long, all you can think of is how much better New York does that whole "city" thing.

But the best part of Madrid, by far, was the Museo Nacional Reina Sofia, which showed me an awesome new side of everyone's favorite surrealist.

My hometown, St. Petersburg, Florida, happens to have a larger Dalí collection than the Reina Sofia, but some rather peculiar and interesting stuff of his does call Madrid home.

exhibit a: "Girl at the Window," 1925

Wait, who did you say this was painted by??? I mean, the colors and textures are totally Dalí but what's wrong with this picture? (Answer: Nothing, which is exactly what's wrong with it.)

exhibit b: L'Âge D'Or, 1930

Embeded videos don't work in all RSS aggregators. To see the videos, you may have to sojourn to the actual post.

And only five short years after painting "Girl at the Window," Dalí co-wrote this savagely weird movie with fellow crazy-man Luis Buñel, which, according to the BBC's movie site, actually caused audience riots. One has to wonder: What were these people expecting to see when they bought tickets for a Buñel/Dalí collaboration???

I couldn't understand a word of it at the Reina Sofia, but luckily the YouTube version provides subtitles. Check it out at 1:10 after 20 seconds of vanity from the uploader (not undeserved, since she did dig this up, in addition to tons of other classic stuff) and 90 make that 70…errr…50 seconds of titles [Thanks, brother! I never could get my units of measurement straight.].

Even on its own, the opening scorpion montage is pretty much priceless.