Month: August 2014

Jacobin on industrial action at supermarket chain Market Basket, as workers demand the reinstatement of a CEO who treated them well:

25,000 store employees are still showing up for work, while at the same time asking customers to boycott Market Basket. They are demanding the reinstatement of their recently fired CEO, Arthur T. Demoulas, deposed by his cousin, Arthur S. Demoulas. Arthur T. is an atypically benevolent corporate head.

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Market Basket workers are doing what is generally unthinkable in the precarious service economy: exerting their power as workers and risking their paychecks for their pride, good benefits and pay, and vision of how their workplace should operate — without the encouragement or protection of a union.

Last night I was blown away by the work of So Kanno, a Japanese electronic artist based in Berlin. He was presenting at the Creative Coding Stammtisch, a digital artist meetup which — judging by my one and only visit — has an exceedingly high level of knowledge.

One of his neat ideas is the graffiti robot. Exploiting the chaotic motion of a double pendulum, this spray-paints quasi-random tags onto a wall. It’s not just fun to watch robot vandalism, but the results come out looking uncannily similar to plenty of human graffiti.

He also showed some very, very cool work with automatic 3D modelling, clothing manufacture and celebrity photos — but since he seems not to have written about it yet, I’d better keep schtum.