Sunday, August 30, 2009

Leap



Short trailer for the film Leap by Dan Gaud - traveling between parallel worlds wearing only snorkel gear.

Thursday, August 27, 2009

Crash

Picked up this t'other day under Waterloo bridge...

Crash by J. G. Ballard

A starkly powerful novel where the technology of the automobile explodes into a repellent yet totally fascinating climax of violent sexuality...

Most Coveted Covers

Estación Drassanes

Estación Drassanes by ON-A

Eduardo Gutiérrez Munné and Jordi Fernández Río, the partners of Spanish ON-A Arquitectura chose as an image-concept of the interior of an existing train to create a new skin for the Drassanes metro station in Barcelona’s Ciutat Vella district. The existing metro station, built in 1968, does not give much room for creativity and ON-A had no other option but to accept the limitations of the constricted space making the best of it by covering the old station with new surfaces.

Estación Drassanes by ON-A
Estación Drassanes by ON-A

Via The Cool Hunter

Tuesday, August 25, 2009

A Short Manifesto on the Future of Attention

Author and journalist Michael Erard has published a short manifesto on the future of attention:
“Now we have a wide-ranging discussion about what is and what can’t be free, which is basically about the future of profit. Maybe we should be considering a dilemma of a human nature: the future of attention.

Because there’s a connection between the two.

Making something “free” is obviously an allocation strategy. “Free” attracts attention. Making things brief is an allocation strategy as well. The problem is that free isn’t sustainable, and that brief is underpriced.

We need a Ronald Reagan of attention, someone to inspire us away from the fight over smaller and smaller pieces of the attention pie. Someone who will inspire us to make the attention pie bigger.”

Read the full article here »

Paintings of Buildings Are Portraits, Too

Enoc Pérez - untitled
Enoc Pérez untitled

Enoc Pérez: It's a matter of attraction-attraction to the building, to the object, to what I'm going to paint. In terms of architecture, I see buildings as ready-mades, in the Duchampian sense. I see them as metaphors, and I respond to metaphors almost physically-I know whether a building is something I want to use pretty much immediately.

Monday, August 24, 2009

360°



Video for Beautiful Day for the U2 360° tour by Michael Paul Young. The screen that displays the work is composed of 888 individual hexagonal panels that support 500,000 Barco LED pixels, transforming from 7 meters to 22 meters high (i.e. big!).

Michael Paul Young - U2 360°
Michael Paul Young - U2 360°
Michael Paul Young - U2 360°

Michael Paul Young started his career as one of the directors at the progressive firm Vir2l from 1998-2000. In 2000, he left Vir2l to start the design firm WeWorkForThem that has worked with companies such as MTV, VH1, Ford, Coca-Cola, Pepsi, HP, Apple and Microsoft. Since then, Michael has also founded, managed and directs daily the online design shop, YouWorkForThem.

Via Computerlove

8-Bit Trip

1500 hours of moving legobricks!

Annie Leibovitz Faces Ruin

LUIS TORRES DE LA LLOSA | NEW YORK, UNITED STATES - Aug 23 2009 08:57 — Annie Leibovitz is as famous as the people she photographs but now the genius behind the lens is close to financial ruin -- a victim, some say, of her own relentless artistic ambition.

Read the full article here »

Annie Leibovitz and assistant Robert Bean on the Chrysler Building, New York, NY, 1991
Annie Leibovitz and assistant Robert Bean on the Chrysler Building, New York, NY, 1991
John Loengard © Time Inc.

Tuesday, August 18, 2009

X-Plantation

Hubert Blanz is a german artist who creates intricate photo manipulations. His 'x-plantation' series features surreal collages made from aerial photographs of airports digitally sewn together.

Hubert Blanz - X-Plantation
Hubert Blanz - X-Plantation
Hubert Blanz - X-Plantation

TODAY DISTANCE IS NO MORE THAN A NUMBER

Monday, August 17, 2009

Apocalypse

Ricky Allman - False Memory

Liking the contrasting organic forms with geometric structures of American painter Ricky Allman's work - apparently his work reflects many aspects of his upbringing, including the geographical environment, mountainous landscapes, and Mormon architecture, and frequently includes the themes of the apocalypse stemming from Mormon theology.

Ricky Allman - Disco Peak
Ricky Allman - Familiarity Stops Breeding

Wallpaper Magazine article on Ricky Allman

Sunday, August 16, 2009

A Walking City

the city as a unique organism

Archigram » Ron Herron » The Walking City

The Walking City was an idea proposed by British architect Ron Herron in 1964. In an article in avant-garde architecture journal Archigram, Ron Herron proposed building massive mobile robotic structures, with their own intelligence, that could freely roam the world, moving to wherever their resources or manufacturing abilities were needed. Various walking cities could interconnect with each other to form larger 'walking metropolises' when needed, and then disperse when their concentrated power was no longer necessary. Individual buildings or structures could also be mobile, moving wherever their owner wanted or needs dictated.
Source: Wikipedia

Snow Crystal

Snow Pictures
Snow Pictures
Snow Pictures
Snow Pictures

Snow through a microscope.

Source: maZm

Saturday, August 15, 2009

Advanced Beauty

Maxim Zhestkov is a 22 years old, art director and designer based out of Russia.

Maxim Zhestkov
Maxim Zhestkov
Maxim Zhestkov

"It all started with 2d illustrations, that smoothly turned into 3d illustrations and spaces. Then I developed a passion for architecture and graphic design. Then I realized that the most important thing is video art

Influenced by science, universe, infinity, fractals, black & white, space, motion, architecture, physics, sound...
"



PORTFOLIO: http://www.zhestkov.com/
FLICKR: http://flickr.com/photos/zhestkov/

Aeroliving Labs

Lebbeus Woods « Fluid Space « Aeroliving Labs

Aeroliving Labs is a interesting concept by Lebbeus Woods - based on the idea of architecture that moves and interacts differently with the fluids - air and water - that we live within; with their ebbs and flows, their flux and interactions.

A community of heavier-than-air, experimentally inhabited structures in the air over Paris. The moving structures drag immense sheets of light-weight material through the earth’s magnetosphere, generating static electricity in sufficient quantities to levitate them silently, much like a mag-lev train, but freely in the open sky.

Lebbeus Woods « Fluid Space « Aeroliving Labs Lebbeus Woods « Fluid Space « Aeroliving Labs
Lebbeus Woods « Fluid Space « Aeroliving Labs

LEBBEUS WOODS « FLUID SPACE

Friday, August 14, 2009

'Hidden Portal' Concept

ScienceDaily (Aug. 14, 2009) — While the researchers can't promise delivery to a parallel universe or a school for wizards, books like Pullman's Dark Materials and JK Rowling's Harry Potter are steps closer to reality now that researchers in China have created the first tunable electromagnetic gateway.

Read the full article here »

Julianne Swartz- Placement (Family)
Placement (Family) by Julianne Swartz

The Parachute Ending



Fantastic animation illustrated by Will Sweeney and directed by Steve Scott for the Birdy Nam Nam song The Parachute Ending.

The Parachute Ending

On Amazon: Parachute Ending

Perspectiva Corporum Regularium

Perspectiva Corporum Regularium - Wenzel Jamnitzer
Perspectiva Corporum Regularium - Wenzel JamnitzerPerspectiva Corporum Regularium - Wenzel Jamnitzer
Perspectiva Corporum Regularium - Wenzel Jamnitzer

'Perspectiva Corporum Regularium' [1568] -- 16th century book on Platonic solids/polyhedra featuring engravings by Jost Amman after designs and drawings by Wenzel Jamnitzer

"Jamnitzer created an extraordinary collection of both regular and semi-regular bodies in his Perspective of Regular Solids (1568) which, as he explained in his title, was based on Plato's Timaeus and Euclid's Elements. Accordingly, he associated the tetrahedron with fire, octahedron with air, hexahedron with earth, icosahedron with water and dodecahedron with heaven respectively. Using a "particular new adroit method never before in use" he provided six regular, six truncated, six stellated and six double stellated variants for each of the regular solids to create a total of 120 versions which, as he pointed out in his long title, was but an 'introduction how, out of these five bodies, many other bodies of various kinds and shapes may be made and found without end'."

Jamnitzer Perspectiva on BibliOdyssey
Jamnitzer Perspectiva Flickr set

Reconfigured Grid

Love these abstract paintings from Jeff Depner -

Jeff Depner - Reconfigured Grid Painting No 4
Jeff Depner - Double Diamonds
Jeff Depner - Reconfigured Grid Painting No 1

Via BOOOOOOOM!

Thursday, August 13, 2009

Project Echo

The Echo satellites were NASA's first passive communications satellite experiment in the sixties. Nicknamed a 'satelloon' by those involved in the project, each spacecraft was designed as a metallized balloon satellite acting as a passive reflector of microwave signals.

Satelloon of Project Echo

In his 1995 history of NASA Langley, Space Revolution, Dr. James Hansen wrote:

The Echo balloon was perhaps the most beautiful object ever to be put into space. The big and brilliant sphere had a 31,416-square foot surface of Mylar plastic covered smoothly with a mere 4 pounds of vapor-deposited aluminum. All told, counting 30 pounds of inflating chemicals and two 11-ounce, 3/8-inch-thick radio tracking beacons (packed with 70 solar cells and 5 storage batteries), the sphere weighed only 132 pounds.
For those enamored with its aesthetics, folding the beautiful balloon into its small container for packing into the nose cone of a Thor-Delta rocket was somewhat like folding a large Rembrandt canvas into a tiny square and taking it home from an art sale in one's wallet.


Satelloon of Project Echo

Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture

In Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture, author Ellen Ruppel Shell asks, "What are we really buying when we insist on getting stuff as cheaply as possible?" Her answer: a low-quality food supply, a ruined economy, a polluted environment, low wages, a shoddy educational system, deserted town centers, ballooning personal debt, and the loss of craftsmanship.

Read the full article here »

Via Boing Boing

District 9

Want to see this, looks awesome... released August 14th



DISTRICT 9 depicts a fictional world where extraterrestrials have become refugees in South Africa, based on Alive in Joburg, a short film directed by Neill Blomkamp, Sharlto Copley, Simon Hansen and Shanon Worley.

DISTRICT 9

Wednesday, August 12, 2009

The Computational Aesthetics of Love & Hate

A_B_ Peace & Terror, by The Luxury of Protest - the design practise of Peter Crnokrak - depicts the degree to which each member state of the UN contributes to peace (shown on a poster's "A-side") or terror (displayed on its "B-side").

A_B_ Peace & Terror by The Luxury of Protest

DESCRIPTION—A_B_ ... is a geopolitical survey of the 192 member states of the United Nations with regard to the quantitative degree to which each contributes to peace and terror in the world. The project is a dual-sided poster where the A_ side displays measures of peace, while the B_ side, measures of terror. For each of the A_B_ measures, the graph is divided into 3 rings (3 separate indexes for peace and 3 separate indexes for terror) that are individual quantitative measures obtained from researchers working in the field of geopolitics. The quantitative variation for the peace and terror measures is represented as variation in line thickness: thin line=low value, thick line=high value.

A_B_ Peace & Terror by The Luxury of Protest
A_B_ Peace & Terror by The Luxury of Protest

A_B_ Peace & Terror is available as a gorgeous dual-sided screen print - the A_ side is printed verso in metallic graphite ink while the B_ side is printed recto in pearlescent white ink - from Design Supremo

What if a building could dream?



555 Kubik by urbanscreen is a giant projection that moves across the stoic facade of "Galerie der Gegenwart" in Hamburg, Germany. According to Art Director Daniel Rossa "Resultant permeabilty of the solid facade uncovers different interpretations of conception, geometry and aesthetics expressed through graphics and movement."

555 Kubik by urbanscreen and Daniel Rossa555 Kubik by urbanscreen and Daniel Rossa

Via L u c k y R e d

Tuesday, August 11, 2009

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