Bits: 10.19.11

• A student at Cambridge in 1979, artist John Devlin was forced to move home to Canada after a year due to mental illness, and ever since he's been obsessed with the university's architecture -- the beauty and mathematics of it; the new book NOVA CANTABRIGIENSIS features Devlin's renderings of reimagined and reconfigured Cambridge buildings as they appear on his imagined utopian island of the same name in Nova Scotia's Minas Basin.

• In his book Pig 05049, Christien Meindertsma tracked all the products made from a single pig -- the title is its tracking number, of sorts -- which ranged from ammunition and photo paper to heart valves and chewing gum. The project is part of the Walker exhibition Graphic Design: Now in Production, which opens Saturday.

• In a similar vein, photographer Dacia Pierson explores the meat industry, noting that a half million chickens are killed for food each hour in the U.S. "Within the American food system, this process is largely hidden by the USDA and willfully ignored by consumers," she writes. "The project aims to create more transparency in this system."

• The Guggenheim diversifies... into house paint.

• What I've been writing at my day job: "The Hippocratic Oath of a Photographer," "Aesthetic Apparatus’ ‘Monotonous’ Poster Installation and ‘Waterfall’" at the Walker, " and "The Art of Letterhead," among others.

• Bookmarkable: The ACLU on the rights of photographers.

• Walker director Olga Viso (full disclosure: my boss) on what the Istanbul Biennial is lacking: "an indefatigable spirit of generosity and faith in the potential of art to not only transcribe the exigencies of the present moment but transcend them too."

• Urban farming... on wheels.

• Your moment of hobo skull nickels.