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.

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A 1941 Barragan And Cetto Studio Block Reopens As A Gallery

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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.

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

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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.

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Lucifer Played Thirteen Gigs a Week and Never Released a Record

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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.

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American Librarians Opened a Reading Room in Paris in 1918

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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.

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Steven Heller Gives Away the NASA Archive He Started at Nine

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Signal A Running Record of Findings from the Internet / September 22, 2026

Suwa Shin Knocked on Five Hundred Doors to Ask for a Shower

Over six months the Japanese photographer rang or knocked at five hundred doors in her own apartment building with a single unusual request: to take a shower in the stranger's flat. Nine neighbours said yes. Marie Baranger reports how the series Be Nu came out of that refusal rate rather than in spite of it, what the negotiation at each threshold actually involved, and how photographing herself undressed in other people's bathrooms turned an ordinary block of flats into a study of intimacy, consent and the exact limits of neighbourliness.

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Suwa Shin Knocked on Five Hundred Doors to Ask for a Shower

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Signal A Running Record of Findings from the Internet / September 21, 2026

Fifty Years Photographing Dioramas, and the Last One in Colour

Hiroshi Sugimoto began photographing the habitat groups at the American Museum of Natural History in 1975, on a premise he found at the start: a diorama reads as convincingly alive through a lens and not to the eye. Zoë Lescaze follows the project to its close in the autumn of 2025, sets it against Carl Akeley's conservation driven taxidermy and against museums swapping habitat groups for interactive displays, and reports that the final shoot was his first in colour, where a bird sanctuary group that had held its camouflage in black and white gave the birds up.

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Fifty Years Photographing Dioramas, and the Last One in Colour

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