Author: Matthew Battles
Part of the founding HILOBROW crew, Matthew Battles is a maker and thinker whose work merges literary, scholarly, and artistic forms of inquiry. His writing on the cultural dimensions of science and technology has appeared in such venues as The Atlantic, Harper’s Magazine, and Orion. His most recent book,Tree, was published in Bloomsbury's Object Lessons series in 2017. After ten years exploring the dark abundance of libraries and museums with metaLAB (at) Harvard, Matthew now edits Arnoldia: the Nature of Trees, the magazine of the Arnold Arboretum.
Metamorphoses
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The catalogue of the MIT Press arrived in the mail today. One of my favorite university presses, MIT publishes books that are terrifyingly smart, but often audacious and surprising as well. (last year’s Digital Apollo […]
Read This PostTO THE MOON!
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FREELANCERS, GIVE UP your paltry hopes of making a killing by cooking up a killer iPhone app. The Google Lunar X Prize — $30 million to the first private enterprise that lands a rover on […]
Read This PostGERD ARNTZ: TYPE & ISOTYPE
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BORN IN 1900, German artist Gerd Arntz designed a pattern language for life in the twentieth century. His prints and designs were intended to further the purposes of a socialist world even as they dreamt […]
Read This PostWild Things
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WHY DO WE go to the woods, where the wild things are? Because it’s where the wild things are. Lars von Trier’s forthcoming film ANTICHRIST will debut at Cannes this May. Von Trier may be […]
Read This PostHigh-Altitude Hilobrow
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MELDING ‘PATAPHYSICS and popular mechanics, Proust and power tools, Dada and do-it-yourself, Eric Kraft is a hilobrow novelist par excellence. With the publication of his latest novel, Flying Home, Kraft’s cracked mythology is arguably complete […]
Read This PostOf Coral, Crochet, & the Hyperbolic Sublime
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MARGARET and CHRISTINE WERTHEIM are crocheting a coral reef, and they’re eager for help. The sisters direct the Institute for Figuring in Los Angeles, which supports lectures, publications, and projects that explore the “figurative ecology” […]
Read This PostTHOMAS DOYLE: Crucibles of Hazard
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The art of Thomas Doyle is at once inviting and unsettling. Miniature tableaux under glass, his pieces have the quirky, lilliputian charm of the model railroad, the dollhouse, and the museum diorama. But upon further […]
Read This PostMy Robot Overlords Are Cuter Than Yours
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CB2 has one job: to win your heart. With its silicone skin, its bark-like cooing calls, and its lurching, needy gestures, the robot stimulates people to reach out in caring supplication, just as evolution has […]
Read This PostHighbrow Skyscraper, Lowbrow Plaza
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Susan Sontag pays a visit to the Seagram Building (“gleaming like a switchblade”) to interview architect Philip Johnson. Embedded here with thanks to Joanne McNeil, who posted this at her terrific blog Tomorrow Museum. Sontag’s […]
Read This PostThe Highbrow Kite
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Thomas Horvath’s kites are like every kite you’ve ever seen, and like no kite you’ve ever seen. They’re what kites dream of when they lie sleeping in a tangle of string at the bottom of […]
Read This PostThe Upset: Hilo for Your Coffee Table
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Much contemporary art prides itself on posing questions. But too often the questions are rehearsed, and the answers prompt only tepid flickers of sensation. Works that engage the imagination in a total fashion — that […]
Read This PostDon’t Be a Bystander: Remembering Kitty Genovese
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Winston Moseley’s brutal murder of Kitty Genovese in the small hours of March 13, 1964 remains one of the most riveting stories in the annals of crime. In a famous New York Times story about […]
Read This PostThe Ether Dome
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Today, at long last, I saw the Ether Dome. It’s not a fan remix of a Mad Max movie, nor is it a fancifully named head shop. One of Boston’s most neglected historic sites, the […]
Read This PostAction Figure Smackdown!
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We’re happy that French-Canadian animator Patrick Boivin likes to play with toys. Ever wonder who’d win a Bruce Lee/Iron Man action figure smackdown? Ah, but things aren’t so simple as that–not by half.
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