“99% Invisible is about all the thought that goes into the things we don’t think about — the unnoticed architecture and design that shape our world.”
Most of my inspiration comes from places other than just art. I am usually driven to new ideas by learning about history, science, and technology. The feeling of discovering something I didn’t know before always excites and inspires me to make work about it. 99% invisible is an excellent podcast for learning about new things, and I wanted to share a few of my favorite episodes.
Making Up Ground
Did you know there are a bunch of 19th century ships buried underneath San Francisco? Harbored ships during the gold rush in San Francisco served as everything from storefronts to hospitals, and even as jails. After they were all burnt down in a massive fire, the thick soup of rubble was filled in with sand and built back up. This episode chronicles how humans have changed the landscape in San Francisco and around the world. We now even have our own geological layer –the archaeosphere!
Americas Last Top Model
I am a sucker for dioramas and models, so naturally one of my favorite episodes talks about one specific and very large mid century model of the Mississippi river, how it worked, who built it, and what’s happened to it now.
Home On Lagrange
Physicist Gerard (Gerry) O’Neill, had dreams of colonizing space. In the 1970’s he started to turn on society towards ideas of space colonization as a way of dealing with the critical resource shortages that we are bound to eventually face on earth.
The Nutshell Studies
I really can’t get enough about dioramas in my life. I loved listening to the story of Frances Glessner Lee, whose gruesome dollhouse dioramas helped students learn how to solve crimes.
Devils Rope
How was The West won-? Barbed wire of course. This episode talks about the history and the controversy of barbed wire. It helped to shape the newly settled American West, but not everyone was happy about it.
Mooallempalooza
John Mooallem’s book, Wild One’s, was pretty life changing for me. It gathered up all these feeling I had about climate change, natural history, and vanishing species and help me realize that many others feel the same passionate and simultaneously disillusioned feelings about nature and our relationship to it. Set to the music of Black Prairie, John Mooallem reads some exceptional excerpts from his book.
Billy Possum
Following Theodore (teddy bear) Roosevelt’s presidency, William Howard Taft became embodied by the symbol of the Billy Possum. The toy manufacturers thought the possum would be their next big seller… or not. Sometimes it’s all in how you market yourself.
There’s plenty more over on 99percentinvisible.org
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