Art & Design

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 […]

As our staff and officers trickle back to campus from their summer vacations we asked our outgoing unpaid summer interns to climb through the Carol M. Highsmith Archives one last time before heading back to Ohio and Nebraska, respectively. In the latest entry of our ongoing series Back to the Office, we examine the absolute […]

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 […]

The Department of Information Office of Public Awareness, Division of Film, Radio, Television, and Books is proud to release the first publication in a series of unsanctioned but greatly improved reproductions of original USDA Fruit and Vegetable Market News Reports from the National Agricultural Library. These semi-faithful reproductions have been lovingly brought back to life […]

The United States Department of Agriculture began publishing reports on supplies, demand, and prices of “over 400 fresh fruit, vegetable, nut, ornamental, and other specialty crops” in 1915 according to a strange corner of the USDA National Agricultural Library website. These “Fruit and Vegetable Market News reports” were and are published under something called the Agricultural Marketing Service and are intended to help growers, buyers, and producers navigate an often fluctuating produce market.

Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) is a nonviolent movement promoting boycotts, divestments, and economic sanctions against Israel. Its objective is to pressure Israel to meet its obligations under international law. In the spirit of the current moment we have instructed one of our officers to compile a collection of some of the more interesting BDS […]

To kick off our new ongoing visual series, ‘Back to the Office’, we are taking a stroll down memory lane. Which specific memory, you might ask? The one where you drove your Oldsmobile to a sleek, carpeted 1980s corporate office building on the edge of town near the mall and the interstate. We are taking a look at the absolute best reception areas and common spaces from the 1980s commercial office buildings.

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?

Wow, what a year. With 2024 just around the corner we are looking back at some of the most exciting requests for proposals, goods, or services in government or quasi-government spaces in 2023. Here are eight procurement listings and notices that absolutely blew our socks off.

We looted the basement of the Smithsonian Institution Archives by posing as doctoral researchers interested in the preservation techniques of really old flags. Our unpaid interns made us fake badges to gain entry to the cryogenic room—next to the Smithsonian staff sauna—where they keep the good stuff. They then helped us digitally smuggle out some […]

While we here at the Department of Information have successfully stamped out many attempts over the decades at unionization from within our own ranks—sometimes through illegal, quasi-legal, and morally dubious methods—we still know how to appreciate good union branding when we see it.

In August 1950, the CIA secretly purchased the assets of Civil Air Transport (CAT), an airline that started in China. CAT would continue to fly commercial routes throughout Asia, acting as a privately owned commercial airline. Under the guise of CAT Incorporated, it provided airplanes and crews for secret intelligence operations. Naturally, with any substantial […]

Mark Twain once said something along the lines of, “The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A government logo who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.” And over the years since our countrymen first started drawing circles with eagles inside of them, many logos–along with their organizing bodies–did die. […]

James E. Lawrence would have been about 25 years old when he was assigned to survey the wild deer population outside of Brookhaven National Laboratory, a top-secret government research center full of particle physicists and experimental happenings, where said deer were running amok scaling the 12ft tall fence to eat radioactive plants. Was this the […]

Can you own the airwaves? Probably not. This didn’t stop William Howard Taft, then president of the United States, from declaring war on unregulated frequencies in 1912, according to an article headlined “President Moves to Stop Mob Rule of Wireless.” Since the early 1900s there have been numerous unlicensed, unwarranted, or quasi-legal radio stations operating […]

What may be an example of one of the greatest celebrations of cataloguing, edible nature, and art as a means of production civilization has ever realized exists in its entirety in the probable basement of the United States National Agricultural Library. Yes, we have one of those. Luckily for us it also exists on a […]