Signal A Running Record of Findings from the Internet / September 29, 2026

Tom Overton Spent Years Inside John Berger's Papers

Overton was John Berger's archivist and editor, and Scott Schomburg gets him to describe what that access did to the man who wrote Ways of Seeing. The conversation runs from the 1972 Booker speech, where Berger gave half the prize money to the British Black Panthers, through to the ordinary business of handling a dead writer's boxes and deciding what a paper trail is actually evidence of. It is a working account of the archive as a place rather than a metaphor.

Read the story By Scott Schomburg · The Paris Review
Tom Overton Spent Years Inside John Berger's Papers

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Intuit Dropped Its Capital Letters and Commissioned a Typeface to Do It 
Christian Becksvoort Rebuilt a Shaker Tailor Counter and Found Its Sister Piece 
Ron Gilad Says a Perfectly Lit City Has Already Been Over Designed 
SunWoo Ari Jang Lets the Cloth Decide Where the Work Goes 
A Conservator Opened a Butterfly Book Nobody at the Met Had Looked At 
Embroidery Reaches Monumental Scale by Accumulation, One Stitch at a Time 
Jesse Draxler Built His Own Platform Instead of Releasing an Album 
Four Hundred Punk and Activist Zines in a London Library, Opened One by One 
One Hundred and Forty Five Pianos, and the Man Deciding Which Get Broken Up 
Gary Giddins on Fifty Years of Writing About Jazz, at Home Among the Records 
Hiram Builds Music From Wooden Flute, Synth and the Sound of a Place 
Four Days at the DC JazzFest, Written From the Wharf 
Two Parker Pens Traced Back to the People Whose Names Are on Them 
The 1988 Minolta That Shipped With Plug In Cards to Change What It Did 
A Dual PDP-10 Brought Back Up on Memory From MIT's Old ARPANET Machine 
Midway's Cancelled 1982 Gorf Sequel Rebuilt From Recovered Floppies 
Jack London Printed His Ranch Invitations in Bulk and Told Guests Not to Call Before Noon 
Fifteen Books in Richmond Hide Watercolors on Their Page Edges 
Share Number 809 Went to a Nine Year Old in 1806 and She Held It Thirty Seven Years 
The Fifteen Pre 1701 Book Labels at the American Antiquarian Society Are the Largest Group Known 
Gina Kamentsky Animates by Shooting, Scrambling and Destroying Her Own Footage 
Jared Sprouse Kept the Violence Off Screen to Hide a Microbudget 
Serge Losique Brought Godard to Montreal to Teach Fourteen Sessions 
Ainslie Henderson and Will Anderson on the Puppets and Frame Rates of Small Prophets 
Signal A Running Record of Findings from the Internet / September 28, 2026

Reporting From the Zine Tent at the New York Art Book Fair

Lakshmi Rivera Amin walked the twentieth New York Art Book Fair at MoMA PS1 and filed from the outdoor zine tent rather than the main hall, where more than three hundred exhibitors were showing. She interviewed Jenna Hamed, Aya Krisht and Rhonda Khalifeh of the Book Arts Solidarity Network about MAKEREADY, a risograph publication made with artists in Gaza and South Lebanon, and got Hamed on the record on how the cross-border production actually works. What comes back is a report on small press labour and what it costs to make a book across a closed border, rather than the fair roundup the occasion invites.

Read the story By Lakshmi Rivera Amin · Hyperallergic
Reporting From the Zine Tent at the New York Art Book Fair

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Peter Saville and Nick Knight on How the Coming Up Sleeve Was Built 
Walking the 1746 Edge of London From Buckingham Gate to Constitution Hill 
Valve's Steam Frame Opens Easily Until You Try to Reach the Fan 
Two Dutch Designers Paint Antique Cabinets With Television Static 
Two Weeks With the Last Members of the Colony Room 
Ottessa Moshfegh Calls Joseph Yaeger and Neither Lets the Other Off 
Denis Boulze Pulled His First Book Out of Forty Years of Contact Sheets 
A Photographer Shot His Portrait Series Through the Hatch of His Own Roof 
A Tuareg Punk Group Dropped the Drummer and Rebuilt Around Drones 
Paul Dunmall Played Meditations in a Birmingham Club for the Coltrane Centenary 
The Rio Band That Cut a Psych Record Under the Dictatorship and Vanished 
Tolgahan Çoğulu Answers the Standard Objections to Microtonal Music 
What a Cleaned Coin Is Worth, and Who Can Authenticate a Short Snorter 
Two Watchmakers on How the Bulgari and Vianney Halter Piece Got Made 
The 1978 Catalogue That Sold Batman Stunt Planes and Squirting Phasers 
A Collector on Forty Years of Buying Artists Everyone Else Passed Over 
The Baron Who Patented a Kiln and Then Became the First American Cremated in One 
Rebuilding a 1510 Book of Hours Printed on Parchment and Bound in Blue Velvet 
Three Photographs of the Twin Towers, Taken in 1983, 2001 and 2002 
What a Provenance Researcher Actually Does All Day 
Gregory Markopoulos Edited The Illiac Passion Inside the Camera 
Ishmael Bernal's Restored A Speck in the Water Makes the Island a Character 
Five Directors on What They Took From Robert Bresson 
Dennis Lim on How The Secret Agent Was Built From Split Screens 
Signal A Running Record of Findings from the Internet / September 27, 2026

A 1941 Barragan And Cetto Studio Block Reopens As A Gallery

Luis Barragan and Max Cetto built the Edificio para Artistas in Mexico City between 1939 and 1941, a block of live-work units for painters at a hinge point in Mexican modernism. Roberto Ortiz de Landazuri walks through the apartment the painter Juan Soriano occupied, now reopened as PARA A Gallery, and treats its double-height rooms, mezzanines and steel-framed windows as working equipment rather than period style. What emerges is a hybrid plan in which habitation, production, storage, display and informal gathering were all designed to overlap, and a gallery that inherited that arrangement intact.

Read the story By Roberto Ortiz de Landazuri · ArchEyes
A 1941 Barragan And Cetto Studio Block Reopens As A Gallery

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Wilesco Has Been Selling Desktop Steam Engines As Kits Since 1950 
Saul Bass Drew Three Hundred Posters Before Kubrick Picked One 
An Artist Built A Fifty Square Metre Home Behind A Newcastle House 
Five New Listening Rooms Were Planned Around Silence First 
Jane Brown Developed Her Photographs in Eucalyptus Oil 
Dataland's AI Museum Left a Fourteen Year Old Unimpressed 
Rubinacci Moved Thirty Five Tailors Out of Naples 
The Art bell hooks Kept Hangs Together in Boone 
Gorgatron Cut Turmoil Across Four Cities With Two New Members 
Anton Newcombe and Josefin Ohrn Trace Where Their Records Come From 
Four and a Half Pounds of Future
Chris Frisina Sold a Hundred Watercolors to Fund the Next Lou Hazel Album 
The Smithsonian Displays Aircraft Guns From the Lewis to the Minigun 
An Architect in Scottsbluff Has Kept More Than Four Hundred Jeeps 
Nobody Can Find a Trace of the Company That Built the Merica Flex 
A Bootleg Farrah Fawcett Doll and a Snuffleupagus Rug Surface on eBay 
Rena Struggles Wrote to Massachusetts After the Blitz Took Her Mother 
Fifty Years On, I Claudius Still Sets How Rome's First Family Is Read 
Alfred Vail Built the Register That Took Morse's First Message 
Vermont's Phi Beta Kappa Chapter Argued in 1875 Over Two Women 
Larry Weinstein Filmed Kurt Weill's Songs in a Toronto Warehouse 
Thomas Ruff Enlarged JPEGs of 9/11 Until the Pixel Blocks Showed 
Roosje Klap Put Thinking Hands in a Former Tobacco Factory 
Paul Greengrass Shoots Handheld Because Documentaries Had No Dolly Track 
Signal A Running Record of Findings from the Internet / September 26, 2026

Melissa Auf der Maur Shot Nearly Ten Thousand Frames on Tour With Hole

Melissa Auf der Maur joined Hole in 1994 at twenty two and carried a camera for most of the decade that followed, first with Hole and then the Smashing Pumpkins, accumulating nearly ten thousand photographs of dressing rooms, buses, soundchecks and fans in an era before phones. Iva Dixit reads that archive against the current appetite for nineties nostalgia, and finds the period's actual cynicism rather than the warm version being sold back. Auf der Maur did not revisit the negatives until 2020. Two hundred of them now hang at the Art Gallery of Ontario, following a memoir published in March.

Read the story By Iva Dixit · Aperture
Melissa Auf der Maur Shot Nearly Ten Thousand Frames on Tour With Hole

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A Furniture Maker Fitted a 400 Square Foot London Flat in Soaped Beech 
Ford Built an Inline Four Barrel Carburettor to Bend the 1970 Trans Am Rules 
A 1971 Inverted Pyramid in Sherman Oaks Becomes Ninety Five Apartments 
Studio KO Turned Tashkent's 1912 Tram Depot Into an Art Centre 
John Edmonds Photographed a Collector's African Sculpture in Washington Heights 
Linder Returns to Blackpool With Her First North West Show in Twenty Years 
Selena Kimball Cut an 1856 Arctic Book Into Three Tones 
Black Artists Take the American Horizon Apart in Albuquerque 
One Original Member Remains on Fleshcrawl's Tenth Album 
Radney Foster Lost His Voice and Wrote Short Stories Instead 
Steve Tushar Now Codes Every Basehead Feature With a Machine 
Weston Olencki Built an Album Around Bowed Vibraphones and Mains Hum 
A Gilt Bat That Passed From Montesquiou to Warhol's Business Manager 
A 1960 Atkinson Lorry Rebuilt as a Caravan With a Balcony 
The Steel Block That Lettered the Edge of Malaysia's 1971 Fifty Sen 
Edward R. Murrow's Bulova, the Only Gold Spillman Case Known 
Brooklyn Took Edwin Litchfield's Hilltop Villa to Build Prospect Park 
John Gould Predicted the Thylacine's Extinction in 1863 
A Sing Sing Property Ledger and 525 Wartime Letters Join the Clements Library 
A 1930s Borough Guide Still Maps a Walk Through Bermondsey 
Vincenzo Pagliuca Photographed the Bunkers Mussolini Left in South Tyrol 
Jamie Starr on Pushing a Dolly So Nobody Notices 
Octave Holds Renoir's Rules of the Game Together 
Nathan Lee Reread Film Comment's Early Case for Leos Carax 
Signal A Running Record of Findings from the Internet / September 25, 2026

Lucifer Played Thirteen Gigs a Week and Never Released a Record

Klemen Breznikar reconstructs the Australian hard rock band Lucifer from the people who were in it. They played Western Australia at a rate of as many as thirteen gigs a week, supported Queen at Perth Entertainment Centre on 11 April 1976, and got as far as Armstrong Studios in Melbourne with Vanda and Young being courted as producers, before the earnings went, along with the truck, the lighting rig, the instruments and Tom Matthews's Les Paul. The masters stayed at the studio. Fifty years on, the band's only official record arrived on 18 September, fourteen tracks pulled off front of house mixing desks and cassettes nobody meant to sell.

Read the story By Klemen Breznikar · It's Psychedelic Baby Magazine
Lucifer Played Thirteen Gigs a Week and Never Released a Record

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GM Built a Two Seat Electric Commuter in 1969 and Shelved It 
Wartime Shortage Is Taking the Colour Off Japanese Snack Packaging 
Two Concave Concrete Bays Turn a Sydney Laneway Back Into a Street 
A Mass Timber Museum in Quebec Holds Forty Thousand Cast Iron Objects 
Betty Moody Has Kept a Houston Gallery Open Since 1975 
Lee Miller Stands on Both Sides of the Camera in Chicago 
Ed Atkins Filmed a Cardboard Stage Set Coming Apart in Seoul 
Two-Person Saws and Axe Throwing at a Sierra Nevada Logging Jamboree 
Grandmaster Flash Sets His Tables at Thirty Seven Inches 
A 1939 Walnut Banjo Carries Two Hundred and Sixty Folk Signatures 
Marty Ehrlich and Tim Berne Remember Julius Hemphill 
Deja Voodoo Put Out Twenty Eight Records on Og Music 
The High Chest du Pont Won From Hearst for Forty Four Thousand Dollars 
Three Circles of Envy, Charted by a Collector of Blanket Chests 
Collecting the Helmets From a War That Only Happened on Screen 
Margaret Stillwell Compiled the Incunabula Census Before Goff Did 
Ten Books at Princeton Carry Timothy Alden's Initials 
The Stevensons Took Lighthouse Building From the Bell Rock to Japan 
Soviet Marxists Were Not the Technological Determinists Everyone Assumed 
Laki Erupted in 1783 and the Hunger Reached Paris 
Peter Hujar Marked the Frames He Wanted in Red Wax Pencil 
Jason Fulford Overlaid Pairs of Negatives and Kept Fifty Four 
Japan's Y2K Horror Boom Left Its Strangest Hybrids Behind 
Xin Yumeng Made a Hit Animated Film Inside Architecture Software 
Signal A Running Record of Findings from the Internet / September 24, 2026

American Librarians Opened a Reading Room in Paris in 1918

The American Library Association raised five million dollars for its Library War Service and pushed more than ten million books and magazines out to soldiers across five thousand locations, thirty six of them purpose built camp libraries. April White follows that effort to 10 rue de l'Elysee in Paris, where a reading room of more than seven thousand titles opened on 29 August 1918. Photographs held by the American Library in Paris show the circulation desk, the shipping department and the staff, among them Mary Josephine Booth, forty two that year, who handed out magazines to departing soldiers and then went home to Illinois for twenty five more years.

Read the story By April White · JSTOR Daily
American Librarians Opened a Reading Room in Paris in 1918

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A Roof Cavity Found Mid Build Reshaped a 1914 Perth House 
Oslo's Architecture Triennale Moved Into a Gothic Brick Church 
Mexico's Labelling Rules Took the Cartoon Churros Off the Box 
Studio Blackburn Folded a C and an H Into a House for Sunderland 
The Met Puts Krasner and Pollock in the Same Room 
Retrofete Built a Burnout Fabric From a Print Found in Paris 
Park Kwang-Jin Shows Forty Years of Painting at Ninety One 
Oscar Oiwa Paints Japanese Sweets Growing in Fields 
GA-20 and Charlie Musselwhite Cut Blues Now in Five Days at Rare Signals 
Ortofon Cut the Stylus Hole Into a Diamond Cantilever With a Laser 
Wilco Built the Opening Track of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot to Come Apart 
Koji Kondo Wrote Ocarina of Time to Assemble Itself in Eight-Bar Pieces 
Fifty Pieces of Victorian Hairwork Leave a Closed Missouri Museum for Brooklyn 
A 1907 Binding Set With a Hundred and Ninety Amethysts 
Nine Machines for Nine Console Generations, From the Odyssey to the PS5 
Rolf and Mette Hay Open the House Where They Keep What They Collected 
A Carpenter Cut Tight Joints Into an Egyptian Coffin in 680 BCE 
Cicero Called It Probabilia and Meant Something Harder Than Doubt 
Mississippian Potters Kept Their Clay Recipe Secret in Tampa Bay 
A Cypriot Hermit Cut His Own Cave in 1159 and Was Never Left Alone 
Joe Hart Photographed a Month of Mexico's Independent Lucha Libre 
Adam Rifkin Spent Forty Years Getting His Mother's Western Made 
Evan dos Santos Shoots Fashion on a Nikon F3 and a Mamiya 645 
Pig Iron Works Put Twenty Seven Photographers Into One Book 
Signal A Running Record of Findings from the Internet / September 23, 2026

Steven Heller Gives Away the NASA Archive He Started at Nine

Steven Heller founded the Astronaut Fan Club in 1959, aged nine, shortly after NASA introduced the Mercury Seven, and spent the following decades writing to the agency for brochures, booklets and photographs. What came back filled two legal boxes that travelled with him through every apartment and office he ever occupied. His column walks through what survived: club circulars he typed himself, astronaut correspondence, early mission literature, the paper residue of a boy's fixation on space. After sixty six years he has handed the whole thing to a new caretaker, writing that all things must pass, and hoping researchers of the early space programme will want it.

Read the story By Steven Heller · PRINT Magazine
Steven Heller Gives Away the NASA Archive He Started at Nine

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The Only Clue to Who Carved This Furniture Is a 1967 Receipt 
What Skoda Got Right Inside Its Smallest Electric Car 
Four Shipping Containers Make an Office for a Spanish Seed Company 
Martin Venezky Treats the Scraps Before the Design as the Work 
Wanda and Marion Wulz Ran Trieste's Leading Photography Studio 
Jake Burt Painted His East London Shop for Four Hundred Pounds 
Six Tokai Artisans Made Objects With Designers They Had Never Met 
Peter Doig's Lion Hangs in a House on Filicudi 
Stockhausen's Helicopter Quartet Reaches Berlin on Four Screens 
RZA Pressed Two Thousand Copies of Protect Ya Neck Before Radio Noticed 
A Hundred Years of Coltrane, Heard Through the Records Nobody Cites 
AC/DC Cut Dirty Deeds in 1975 and America Waited Until 1981 
A Thirty Dollar Estate Sale Painting Turns Out to Be a Lost Abercrombie 
The Game Boy Museum Fits Its Whole Collection on One Cartridge 
A 1963 Citroen DS Cabriolet Hauled Out of a Garage After Fifty Three Years 
Nine Cameras That Carried Pentax Through a Hundred and Ten Years 
A 1926 Film Gave Captain Ahab an Evil Half Brother 
Leo Lionni's Mouse Gathered Light and Colour Instead of Corn 
An 1851 Gunfight at Christiana Drew the Largest Federal Indictment Yet 
A Collector's Seal Sits in the Corner of Hokusai's Great Wave 
Nicolas Winding Refn Screened a Thousand Actresses for One Part 
Jaka Mojskerc Cuts and Tapes His Photographs Back Together 
Coyote vs. Acme Came Back From a Thirty Million Dollar Write Off 
Rock Hudson Played a Man Who Paid Thirty Thousand for a New Face 

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