Aaron Straup Cope
@thisisaaronland.bsky.social
maps and museums and airports / I have come to see these spaces as the absolute worst for anything resembling "conversation" / but I like you all so here I am for now / likely lurking for a while as I figure out how to think about this place
Jun Kaneko arrived in California from Japan in 1963 to study painting and encountered the revolutionary work of Peter Voulkos, who was using clay as a sculptural medium. The experience was transformative, and he devoted himself to working in clay and experimenting with large-scale ceramic sculptures
"In the end I did have just enough googly eyes..." – www.aaronland.info/weblog/2026/...
Postcards from Montréal, 2026
We were in Montréal recently. I made some postcards while we were there.
aaronland.info
At SFO Museum, mounts are custom made for each object before they’re put on display. Our upcoming exhibition “Heroes of the City: Early Firefighters of the San Francisco Fire Department” will feature several firefighter helmets, each of which will require their own mount #behindthescenes #sneakpeek
"Maybe we will [sign those files] if only to highlight why it feels important for institutions to assert, as best they can using the cryptographic means at hand, that the things bearing our names really were produced by us." – millsfield.sfomuseum.org/blog/2026/06...
Asserting claims: Cryptographically signing the digital artifacts we produce
Why is SFO Museum signing the vector embeddings that we’re producing? To provide an additional guarantee that the data we are publishing is, in fact, the data we published. Vector embeddings are, by t...
millsfield.sfomuseum.org
one way to account for the inherent shonkiness of print-on-demand / is just to treat it like an underpainting
"...and a whole bunch of updates to the tooling used to generate and query vector embeddings targeting local-first and consumer-grade hardware" – millsfield.sfomuseum.org/blog/2026/05...
Shared vector embeddings updates
There is a lot of ground to cover in this blog post: The Met publishing their own vector embeddings, SFO Museum publishing 1152-dimension vector embeddings for its images, SFO Museum producing 1152-di...
millsfield.sfomuseum.org
"The reality is that we have learned a number of tricks to coax these systems in to doing things but our understanding of how or why they do is still basically on par with that of a rat in a Skinner box." – www.aaronland.info/weblog/2026/...
"On bad days, I fear it will only re-enforce the existing power dynamics in museums: That there has only ever been a thin crust of well-paid senior executives operating museums built atop the bones of an army of replaceable grad students crushed under foot." – www.aaronland.info/weblog/2026/...
Weird-shaped tools
My point here is not to say that the foundations of large language models and intersectionality are the same. My point is to say that if you understand that things (people) are not static and that the...
aaronland.info
"The ability to automate software production has ... had the interesting side-effect of validating the Cooper Hewitt's approach to collecting software in 2013." – www.aaronland.info/weblog/2026/...
Weird-shaped tools
My point here is not to say that the foundations of large language models and intersectionality are the same. My point is to say that if you understand that things (people) are not static and that the...
aaronland.info
"These common attributes are meant to be the least amount of metadata necessary to provide a simple preview and suitable attribution for the item for which vector embeddings have been produced." – millsfield.sfomuseum.org/blog/2026/04...
OEmbeddings - What is the least amount of metadata necessary for shared vector embeddings?
This is a blog post describing a proposal for a set of common attributes to include with shared vector embeddings. These common attributes are meant to be the least amount of metadata necessary to pro...
millsfield.sfomuseum.org
it is 2026 / and I am wondering why my email client needs access to the GPU
"In as much as no one seems to really understand what’s happening inside the guts of any given machine model, and in as much as the cultural heritage sector is still a consumer rather than a producer of these models..." – millsfield.sfomuseum.org/blog/2026/04...
Shared cross-institutional vector embeddings – how we might get there
We are proposing a simple‑is‑best approach to sharing vector embeddings of our collections, a step that moves us closer to realizing the long‑standing ‘holy grail’ of cross‑institutional collections s...
millsfield.sfomuseum.org
Maxine Crookston (1915–2016) was known as “The Voice of San Francisco Airport” from the late 1940s through the 1950s. Born in Salt Lake City, Crookston dreamed of flying as a child and recalled jumping as far as possible from her parents’ porch while flapping her arms as wings. #WomensHistoryMonth
Nobody asked, but hey we just enabled HTTPS on Pretty Maps, an old project from 2010 by Stamen alum Aaron Straup Cope (@thisisaaronland.bsky.social). Amazing that it still works! Enjoy it here: prettymaps.stamen.com #ttmprettymaps #prettymaps #maps #cartography #design #flickr
here is a picture / to tell you that I will be speaking (remotely) at papercamp 5 / later this year in london / about postcards / with a throwaway placeholder title / that seems more likely to stick with each passing day – www.designswarm.com/papercamp-5/
this morning / I briefly considered making Larry Wall's 1999 talk "Perl, the first postmodern computer language" my AGENTS.md file / then I went back to doing something else – www.perl.com/pub/1999/03/...
Perl, the first postmodern computer language
wall.org
Exciting News! We’ve added a new feature to the SFO Museum Aviation Collection website! You can now see similar object images derived using machine-learning computer-vision models on object pages. Check out our collections page at: bit.ly/4r8R8IC
"Here is a silly example summarizing each paragraph in this blog post." – millsfield.sfomuseum.org/blog/2026/02...
Updates (and additions) to machine-learning tools running on consumer hardware
These are not “silver bullet” tools. Rather, they endeavour to be part of a set of building blocks for creating an infrastructure that preserves and guarantees the cultural heritage sector some agency...
millsfield.sfomuseum.org
See more of Afatasi the Artist’s Afrofuturist designs in "Women of Afrofuturism" on display, post-security, in Harvey Milk Terminal 1 and online at: bit.ly/Women-Afrofu... #AfatasiTheArtist #BlackHistoryMonth #Fashion #Afrofuturism
Women of Afrofuturism | SFO Museum
bit.ly
"Obviously, the circles could also just be seen as bagels. That wouldn't be wrong either." – www.aaronland.info/weblog/2026/...
stones and cans and comic books in a kettle
In this way those four plates could just as easily be used as the symbology for an updated coat of arms for the city of Montreal, the province of Quebec or even Canada as a whole, but one thing at a t...
aaronland.info
"As such these objects are included because they are generally similar in nature, or spirit, and as a way to help you discover things in our collection which you might have otherwise missed." – millsfield.sfomuseum.org/blog/2026/01...
Similar object images derived using the MobileCLIP computer-vision models
Like a lot of things involving machine-learning, the image similarity results while not always right aren’t necessarily wrong either. In the same vein as searching collections by color this “fuzzy” an...
millsfield.sfomuseum.org
If you would like our 200+ page exhibition catalog, please email us at curator@flysfo.com and we will send you one, free of charge! bit.ly/FashioninFli... #FashionInFlightFriday
Fashion In Flight: A History of Airline Uniform Design | SFO Museum
bit.ly
"At the end of the day it’s a jacket. We hope the certificate of authenticity offers some guarantees, or comfort, if you need to treat it as a financial asset but, mostly, we hope you just enjoy wearing it." – shop.orthis.social/pages/certif...
Certificates of Authenticity
For as long as we have had material “things” people have made replicas of those things and tried to pass them off as originals for fun, profit or both. This is especially true in a world awash in gene...
shop.orthis.social
The @sfomuseum.bsky.social aviation collection has new aerial imagery / and we have published some experimental work about hosting and serving the entire planet OSM @protomaps.com pmtiles database, locally and offline, on a recycled ipad – millsfield.sfomuseum.org/blog/2025/12...
Map updates, December 2025 - Now with more PMTiles
In addition to 2025, we’ve also added new imagery from 1920, 1936 and 1961 all produced using the Allmaps Editor to georeference existing collections materials. I’ll talk more about some of the tools ...
millsfield.sfomuseum.org
In October, SFO Museum conducted a special tour of “Women of Afrofuturism” lead by our curatorial consultant Ingrid LaFleur and San Francisco artist Afatasi The Artist. Watch the video on our YouTube channel! www.youtube.com/watch?v=0upz... #WomenofAfrofuturism #IngridLaFleur #AfatasiTheArtist
Women of Afrofuturism Exhibition Tour with Ingrid LaFleur
YouTube video by SFO Museum
youtube.com
See “49 Scenic Mile Drive” by Bradley Smith and Tyler McPherron in the Video Arts Gallery, located pre-security in the Mayor Edwin M. Lee International Terminal Departures Hall, and open daily from 8:00am to 10:00pm. Learn more about this month’s films at: bit.ly/Video-Arts #VideoArts #VideoArtsSFO
Video Arts | SFO Museum
bit.ly
SFO Airport Museum's map viewer is powered by a raster pmtiles archive + leaflet millsfield.sfomuseum.org/map/#2025/fg/
I wrote up the notes for the talk I gave to a museum studies class at USF / titled "everything that is wrong in museums starts with wall labels" – www.aaronland.info/weblog/2025/...
Everything that is wrong in museums starts with wall labels
It is difficult to separate the issues and questions that contemporary machine-learning and “artificial intelligence” technologies raise in the context of museum without addressing the long history of...
aaronland.info
"Raven had been sleeping so long, he had molted and regrown a full coat of feathers and his new feathers were white and beaming light all over the world and everybody laughed at Raven as he danced around like a kite playing in the wind. ... " #PrestonSingletary #GarthStein
