I’m in love with this teacup! I bought a set of two from this etsy shop. It makes me think of the sort of charming rustic stoneware a hobbit would use for their tea (okay, maybe I’m just super excited for The Hobbit this winter, but STILL.)
Collection of Nordic Modern: Floor lamp model 9609 by Paavo Tynell for Taito Oy (Finland, late 1940s), stoneware floor vases by Gunnar Nylund for Rörstrand (Sweden, c.1950s), Josef Frank armchair model no.508 by Firma Svenskt Tenn (Sweden, 1932) and a stool attributed to Philip Arctander (Denmark, c.1930s). / Instagram
Late summer photo shoot of my Neolithic Venus. I took the piece to the “Côa” river valley, a place that seemed to be of utmost importance scince at least 20 000 years. Thousands of rock engravings have been found on this site, no one knows what the meaning of such a high concentration of engravings is but… it feels right to bring my sculpture over here. It’s also delicious to finalize a piece with a glorious landscape photo shoot.
Ceramics can be tough, but… it beats the heck out of casting, every day of the week without breaking a sweat! This is how my piece was a few weeks ago… After being modelled I sliced it into pieces, then, I assembled it back again and now with some luck it won’t explode In the kiln…
A sneak peek at the development of this Neolithic Goddess interpretation. After this it’s the Tetris stage… also known as hollowing out… I’ll have to cut the piece into a puzzle, let it dry out, and then, to the kiln. Exciting moments!
its so fucked up that optical discs straight up rot though right? something about digital media just feels like it shouldnt be susceptible like that to the forces that govern the physical world and yet discs rot as if theyre an organic thing
This also happens with digital data due to the degradation of the physical storage medias! This book (best before by james newman) talks a lot about it in the context of videogames and the the implications it has for the ongoing efforts to archive them!
I collect Laserdiscs and certain runs of them are notorious for laser rot. Afaik there is a problem with the adhesive layer and it damages the disc. Generally it’ll just start out as video artifacts and worsen over time; what’s nuts is that you really can just watch it happen if you look closely at the disc. Now, I’m a little paranoid about some of my older DiscoVision discs, lol.
And yeah the major problem with digital storage that’s mentioned in that book excerpt is damaged analog media is often still readable! It’s just damaged! So you might have missing parts, distortion, etc, but it’s easier to recover from than if critical chunks of digital data get wiped out. I think as a whole video/audio is probably less susceptible since damage may be more likely to be recoverable, but it’s potentially very bad for software. Digital is just an all or nothing type of storage even if you try to put in error correction; you just hope a loss isn’t noticed, like dropped packets on a video/phone call or a glitchy frame on a Netflix stream. A disc with a lot of errors might be compromised but readable…unless something critical is lost, and then you’re really screwed. (See: one of my floppy disks that can’t play a game at all because it gets stuck on one track.)
What’s really interesting too is how well-made some tape was. Consumer stuff isn’t always as good, and some old cassettes are notorious for “shedding”, but there was some fantastically well-made computer tape that’s probably still holding data written 40 or 50 years later.
This is why preservation and archival matters so much, including making multiple backups in case, for example, one copy of something is lost. Demonization and dismissal of emulator projects, software and video game historians, and film/music archivists, will eventually lead to tons of information being lost.
People need to step back from their desire to patent troll and sit on copyrights forever and really ask themselves what they are going to do when the discs rot and no good copies are left.
(Thankfully, I don’t think this will happen for a lot of things…maybe just for very rare or uncommon stuff.)
Before I started down a technology career path I studied art, and specifically I studied ceramics and sculpture.
One of the things that fascinates me about ceramics is it is a permanent process. When the firing is complete stoneware essentially is just that — stone. It can be smashed or ground into dust, but it will remain stone. Bury it or seal it in a tomb, and it’s not going to change much for eons.
Pottery is one of humanity’s oldest surviving art forms. We have found pieces dating back 20,000 years. We have great painted earthenware pots thousands of years old that still proudly display their scenes. We have clay tablets nearly 4,000 years old that still tell stories of swindling copper merchants.
Ceramics have come a long way since the fragile earthenware our ancestors made. Stoneware is much stronger and more durable. A well-fired stoneware is vitrified and non-porous, and thus less susceptible to destruction by water seeping into it. We’ve spent centuries studying every element and mineral on this planet to find how to get brilliant colors out of a 1400°C inferno.
Digital storage is temporary. Wood and paper will rot. Steel will rust. Paint will fade. Plastics will embrittle and disintegrate.
Stoneware is as close to permanent as we can get.
Others have written at length about what will anthropologists find when they look back at our era. Our art, largely stored digitally, will have been lost to time. Our identifying artefact will be a layer of fine particles of plastic. What will they be able to read of our culture? Of our stories?
I’ve often contemplated how we could tell the stories of our time on stoneware. How do we convert the fleeting, ephemeral nature of contemporary culture into something permanent? What would we tell? What lessons are worthy of passing on to generations far into the future? Where do we store it?
I am a child of the digital age. I came of age steeped in the culture of the internet. I have seen memes live and die. I have seen great works of art lost to shuttered businesses, failed hard drives, and the constant march of Progress. One of my hobbies is the Sisyphean task of maintaing 40-year-old digital equipment that was never intended to last more than a few years, just so their history can be remembered a little longer. But always in the back of my mind — this is only temporary.
Perhaps we can hold onto some of it, by throwing it first into the fire.
This saltglazed stoneware jar with the black embossed anchor is handcrafted in Germany by one of the last stoneware manufacturers with a company history of more than 350 years. Looks great on a desk as a pen cup or for your kitchen utensils and is also ideal for cool drinks.
