We recently discovered a stash of loose vintage U.S. Forest Service pamphlets under the sofa mattress in the basement office of our Information Ambassador, Pokey the Pigeon. Apparently, he teamed up with Woodsy Owl—a lesser-known but equally strange Forest Service mascot who is now banned from several national parks for reasons we won’t get into—and […]
One of our unpaid interns found this pamphlet from 1978 underneath the office kitchen fridge while cleaning the drip pan after they spilled one of those paper trays of to-go coffees all over the floor. In exchange for class credit and office redemption we had them sterilize and photograph it for our consumer report and […]
The Department of Information is closed for winter break. All offices, including the Main Campus, the taco truck in the parking lot, the Xerox Climate Lab, and the library are closed to officers, staff, and visitors until January 1st, 2025. Thank you.
We told our unpaid interns that they would not be permitted to take off work on Election Day unless they created a civic-minded, positive, art-oriented post by the end of the week. This is what they came up with. Please take a look at some of the more visually interesting voting advocacy or voting advocacy-adjacent […]
It’s campfire season here at the Department, and whether you’re burning barrels full of confidential documents or old office furniture full of asbestos, it’s important to practice fire safety. We’ve enlisted our newly minted Information Ambassador, Pokey the Pigeon, to dig through the U.S. Forest Service Smokey Bear Collection at the USDA National Agricultural Library […]
Captured by Landsat 1, the first satellite of the US’s Landsat program, in the early 1970s at a scale of 1:500,000 (1 cm equals 5 km), these satellite images of Florida were superimposed with a Mercator grid, printed onto oversized poster panels, and then—likely decades later—scanned and digitized in ultra high-resolution. The resulting images, showing […]
Television test cards were elaborate, strange patterns and graphics used for visual calibration or for filling gaps and dead air in the early days of T.V. broadcasting. Often appearing for hours overnight when stations would “sign off”, they would have entered the cultural imagination as hypnotic oddities—likely untrusted and alien—but would come to fill a nostalgic void made up of colorful, wild, and geometric glowing shapes. What weird, luminous, and mesmerizing patterns do we use today to fill up our empty spaces?