around the internet (artful things and ruins)

On things visible, audible, and audiovisual! Because I am still pulling together comments on recent events in Turkey.

• The Tactical Tech Collective recently launched “Visualizing Information for Advocacy: An Introduction to Information Design,” which you can download in pdf form here. Fantastic stuff, including some tools, websites, and campaigns I've noted here before. I heart the TTC so very much; they do marvelous work helping not-so-tech-savvy activists/advocates/NGOwallahs (like myself) figure out how make use of new technologies in our work to bring about change.
• The Book Design Review notes the "Kara Walker effect" in recent silhouette-based cover designs. Speaking of which, A and I managed to see the Walker retrospective at the Whitney just before it closed earlier this month, and it was remarkable and dizzying.
• Here is a short film by someone I’m fond of, the sentiment of which I share.
• If you see something, say something: I've already sent the Iranian intelligence ministry's recent adventure in film shorts to about half of the readership of this blog, but the rest of you should watch it too. Do so via the Arabist so I don’t have to link to MEMRI.
• I’m still refraining from blogging about US politics (since most of the non-p0rn internet already seems to be covering that topic adequately). But I can’t resist passing on this link to ExtraGolden—a Kenyan/American funk band—and their buoyant tune “Obama” (third song on the myspace page). Via Leo Africanus.
• A new Bidoun, yay! Including thoughts on Qatari weddings from Sophia (who has been making some delightfully creepy art since she ditched NYC for London). I refuse to read it online, though—Bidoun is so reliably gorgeous it deserves to be experienced in all its ink-and-paper glory.

Finally, via Neha V., the blog Sweet Juniper presents a remarkable and haunting collection of words and images on the abandoned Detroit Public Schools Book Depository. I can't stand to excerpt it; go read it in full, and take the time to look at the accompanying photoset. A writer I know in Brooklyn has told tales of sneaking into the derelict Michigan Central Station back in her Detroit days, but I had never before heard of this "warehouse full of abandoned hope."

Impossible not to think of these lines from an essay in Pamuk's Other Colors, copied to send to a friend back in the autumn:

There are two ways of looking at cities. The first is that of the tourist, the newly arrived foreigner who looks at the buildings, monuments, avenues, and skylines from outside. There is also the inside view, the city of rooms in which we have slept, of corridors and cinemas and old classrooms, the city made up of the smells and lights and colors of our most cherished memories. To those viewing them from the outside, one city can seem much like the next, but a city's collective memory is its soul, and its ruins are its most eloquent testimony....A city's ruins also help it to forget. First we lose a memory, but we know we've lost it and we want it back. The we forget we have forgotten it, and the city can no longer remember its own past. The ruins that cause us such pain and open the road to forgetfulness become, in the end, the lots on which others can found new dreams.