Signal v. Noise pointed to a couple cool things the other day. New to me is the Humument, a really cool illustrated treatment/ reincarnation of an old Victorian novel. Check out the gallery. Also getting a blurb are Austin Kleon’s blackout poems. This brings to mind that essay in Harper’s I linked to the other day, the one about plagiarism, copyright, and public imagination.

Today, when we can eat Tex-Mex with chopsticks while listening to reggae and watching a YouTube rebroadcast of the Berlin Wall’s fall‚Äîi.e., when damn near everything presents itself as familiar‚Äîit’s not a surprise that some of today’s most ambitious art is going about trying to make the familiar strange. In so doing, in reimagining what human life might truly be like over there across the chasms of illusion, mediation, demographics, marketing, imago, and appearance, artists are paradoxically trying to restore what’s taken for ‚Äúreal‚Äù to three whole dimensions, to reconstruct a univocally round world out of disparate streams of flat sights.