iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by surya bowyer

Margot Finn @eicathomefinn.bsky.social · 14/04/2026

Full-funded (home or international) collaborative PhD studentship (Kew and Royal Holloway, University of London) available. Deadline 8 May. Topic: ‘Just acquisitions? Law and ethics over time in Kew’s overseas plant collecting history’ #Skystorians

royalholloway.ac.uk

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surya bowyer @suryabowyer.com · 30/03/2026

Nominative determinism of the week:

A photo of a text panel from the Bayon Temple in the Angkor complex, with this text highlighted in blue: “In 1933, the Jaya Buddha Mahanath statue pieces were discovered at the bottom of the well by French archaeologist, Georges TROUVÉ”

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surya bowyer @suryabowyer.com · 25/03/2026

This is good (and impressively concise)

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surya bowyer @suryabowyer.com · 25/03/2026

In other news regarding art world residences, the former director of the Louvre has exactly the kind of home you’d imagine

A photo of the former director of the Louvre at home, with a gallery wall of gilt-framed paintings behind him

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surya bowyer @suryabowyer.com · 15/07/2025

Yeah this is a fair assessment. Also get your point about the repeated mispronunciation by anglophone commentators

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surya bowyer @suryabowyer.com · 15/07/2025

I hear the stress on the first syllable

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surya bowyer @suryabowyer.com · 15/07/2025

why is google search so good but google books search so bad?

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surya bowyer @suryabowyer.com · 02/04/2025

Today I'm looking at: Remedios Varo's "Simpatía (La rabia del gato)" aka Sympathy (the cat's rage).

A painting: Remedios Varo's "Simpatía (La rabia del gato)". A surrealist scene. A woman sits at a table, looking down at an orange cat with its hind legs held aloft in the air. A glass of water has spilled on the table; the water runs off, creating a river on the floor.

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surya bowyer @suryabowyer.com · 26/03/2025

Today I learned that @theguardian.com is running a contest for “Invertebrate of the Year”. At a time of increasing climate crisis, of course the tardigrade—which has survived all 5 great extinction events—should win www.theguardian.com/environment/...

theguardian.com

‘Lego and tardigrades’: when humans finally destroy the world, what will remain?

Milnesium tardigradum is only 0.5mm long and has survived all five great extinction events – plus it’s cute

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surya bowyer @suryabowyer.com · 19/03/2025

In Waterstones. What’s the story here then

A pair of black shoes on the floor of a Waterstones. The shoes’ owner is nowhere to be found.

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surya bowyer @suryabowyer.com · 14/03/2025

I’ve read it but haven’t logged it on my Goodreads, but I’d give it 5 stars

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surya bowyer @suryabowyer.com · 10/03/2025

Some of us will go to an art gallery this weekend. Maybe it will help us reflect or inspire us. Isn’t that part of a life well lived? ... But what if you didn’t? What if there were no galleries, theatres, publishers or concert halls? What if we got rid of art? www.theguardian.com/books/2025/m...

theguardian.com

The big idea: should we abolish art?

Down with expensive trophies at art fairs: it’s time to reclaim a more radical vision of creativity

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surya bowyer @suryabowyer.com · 07/03/2025

What about the good half 😏

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surya bowyer @suryabowyer.com · 07/03/2025

Today I'm thinking about Ceal Floyer's Working Title (Digging), a stereo sound installation that aurally represents the act of shovelling dirt. freunde-der-nationalgalerie.de/en/blog/acqu...

Ceal Floyer's Working Title (Digging), a stereo sound installation that aurally represents the act of shovelling dirt. Two speakers lying face up on the floor, in opposite corners of an otherwise blank room in a gallery. A CD play, connected to both speakers by wires, sits in another corner.

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surya bowyer @suryabowyer.com · 05/03/2025

I think it’s one of the best emoji because it is so versatile

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surya bowyer @suryabowyer.com · 05/03/2025

Oh I can certainly imagine

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surya bowyer @suryabowyer.com · 05/03/2025

A sad day: RIP to the @britishlibrary.bsky.social's vaguely Italian-sounding, impressively laconic sign which greets visitors on the entrance piazza. Replaced with this much more conventionally grammared yellow sign. Interesting to note the continuing commitment to capitalising "piazza".

A (now outdated) sign outside the British Library in London which reads: Please take care, Piazza slippery. Please take care. Piazza can be slippery in wet/icy conditions. British Library Estates."

The new sign outside the British Library, which reads: "Please take care, the Piazza can be slippery in wet or icy conditions."

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surya bowyer @suryabowyer.com · 04/03/2025

"The painting had been hanging in the National Museum in Gdańsk, when on 24 April 1974, a cleaner knocked it from the wall, the frame broke, and she discovered the painting had been replaced with a photograph." www.theguardian.com/world/2025/m...

theguardian.com

Brueghel painting stolen from Poland in 1974 found in local Dutch museum

Art detective and magazine help crack case of Flemish masterpiece thought to have been stolen by Polish agents

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surya bowyer @suryabowyer.com · 05/02/2025

Will be in New York next week for the College Art Association annual conference #CAA2025 — so looking for NYC recommendations

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surya bowyer @suryabowyer.com · 28/01/2025

To the tune of “we found love in a hopeless place”

A label from the British Museum exhibition “Silk Roads”. It reads: Byzantine connections in a desert palace -
Also from Jordan, this section of a vibrant mosaic once decorated the floor of Qusayr Amra, an Umayyad 'desert palace' built for royal entertainment. Mosaics in early Islamic architecture drew from Byzantine traditions, sometimes reusing tesserae (small blocks) taken from churches. Wall paintings at this site also reference Byzantine art in their figurative imagery. Qusayr Ama was one of the desert complexes that the Umayyad caliphs constructed. Many were built along major routes connecting the Silk Roads, and may have provided respite for travellers.

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surya bowyer @suryabowyer.com · 23/01/2025

Aren’t arguments stories?

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surya bowyer @suryabowyer.com · 21/01/2025

If you told me this, an image of the Horsehead Nebula captured by telescopes, was a promo image for the film Wicked, I would believe you www.eso.org/public/image...

eso.org

The Horsehead Nebula*

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Margot Finn @eicathomefinn.bsky.social · 12/01/2025

'The feeling of the show, then, is of provisionality, of history in the process of being digested and rewritten.' Wonderful encapsulation of what History is and how it 'works'. (And NB the exhibition itself is also a real treat).

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surya bowyer @suryabowyer.com · 07/01/2025

Like just LOOK at this panopticon... Wonder what Foucault would have thought

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surya bowyer @suryabowyer.com · 07/01/2025

This is a great, Pynchon-esque story: Secretive underground exploration group assists with missing museum artefacts in Melbourne. Members of clandestine group retrieve objects from drains after burst pipe at Australian museum’s storage facility. www.theartnewspaper.com/2025/01/06/s...

theartnewspaper.com

Secretive underground exploration group assists with missing museum artefacts in Melbourne

Members of clandestine group retrieve objects from drains after burst pipe at Australian museum’s storage facility

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surya bowyer @suryabowyer.com · 07/01/2025

Escape from the terrordome: how Netherlands panopticon prisons are being reborn as stunning arts hubs. They were built to instil fear. Now these giant domed jails, which date back to the 1700s, are being turned into creative centres www.theguardian.com/artanddesign...

theguardian.com

Escape from the terrordome: how Netherlands panopticon prisons are being reborn as stunning arts hubs

They were built to instil fear. Now these giant domed jails, which date back to the 1700s, are being turned into creative centres – complete with cells for rent and escape rooms

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surya bowyer @suryabowyer.com · 06/01/2025

hi @willpooley.bsky.social just to say I really enjoyed "Sheet Happens" and have found it helpful in my own work. so thank you

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Dr. Peter Paul Rubens @peterpaulrubens.bsky.social · 06/01/2025

El Greco’s portrait of the great renaissance miniaturist Giulio Clovio in 1570, holding one of his masterpieces. Today has been his day.

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surya bowyer @suryabowyer.com · 03/01/2025

This handbag would EAT at Paris Fashion Week

The “VARSYREN” tea light lantern sold by IKEA, with me holding it

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badaude @badaude.bsky.social · 31/12/2024

Lacan wishes you a happy new year, from the first seminar of Lacan.

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surya bowyer @suryabowyer.com · 30/12/2024

"patriarchy puts women in a sceptical scenario, making the distinction between the men you can and can't trust difficult to draw." An excellent, important piece by Sophie Smith in the @londonreview.bsky.social - www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

lrb.co.uk

Sophie Smith · Sleeping Women: On the Pelicot trial

Gisèle Pelicot doesn’t conceive of her now ex-husband or the other men who raped her as ‘bad apples’, aberrations...

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surya bowyer @suryabowyer.com · 27/12/2024

Depends how good the lasagne is

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surya bowyer @suryabowyer.com · 18/12/2024

That’s ok in this instance because you are, indeed, special!

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surya bowyer @suryabowyer.com · 18/12/2024

I hate the term "museum professional". It's work. You are a museum worker.

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Nit Nurse With Wound @dannybirchall.bsky.social · 18/12/2024

It's my tenth anniversary of moving to Neasden today. To celebrate, here are ten Top Facts about the suburb everybody loves to deride ... #NWology

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Dr Bendor Grosvenor FRHistS @bendorgrosvenor.bsky.social · 17/12/2024

I don't see many long threads on here, but I'll try one - it's about Holbein's Ambassadors, his 1533 masterpiece in the National Gallery. It's often presented as a great mystery, but I think once we understand the circumstances in which it was made, its meaning becomes clearer. 1/

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surya bowyer @suryabowyer.com · 17/12/2024

My pleasure. Would be interested to hear your thoughts on it in light of (and potentially as an antidote to?) the Van Gogh example.

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surya bowyer @suryabowyer.com · 14/12/2024

Genuine question: is the role of the critic to add value

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