ICON_do

Great series from Viktor Timofeev:

Movemento

Mono Chrono Pneumatic Red

Mono Chrono Pneumatic Red by Darren Almond

Darren Almond - Selected Works - Matthew Marks Gallery

Gebrauchsgraphik

06 Gebrauchsgraphik magazine, Sept. 1969 cover

Via prosthetic knowledge

A Peek Inside Pantone

Via brainpicker on Twitter

Concrete Proof

Ballard: "Concrete is a beautiful material. Handled intelligently it's much more 20th-century than wood or brick."






Awesome Tumblr - Concrete Proof
Via Twitter / Simon Sellars

Pacific Star II Project

Photographer and tinkerer extraordinaire Colin Rich just released an awesome video montage of his Pacific Star II project where he sent a weather balloon up in the atmosphere to take pictures and footage of the trip.

"This is the second trip of my home made high altitude weather balloon photography project, Pacific Star. The balloon was launched at 5:37pm (PST) from Oxnard, CA and reached an altitude of 125,000 feet snapping photos and recording video along the way. The balloon burst, the parachute deployed, and the payload floated down for 35 minutes, landing near an old olive orchard Northeast of Santa Paula."





Via Ufunk.net

Sync Speed Explained

I picked up a second-hand Nikon SB-24 Speedlight flash at the weekend (after reading about it here) - the start of my journey in to off camera lighting! Anyways, whilst wandering the interweb reading up on lighting I came across something called the Flash Sync Speed (or Max Sync Speed), which put simply is the maximum speed at which your camera can take a photo and still get the flash to hit the entire sensor. Took me while to figure it all out and why it's important - so I thought I'd post some links that helped explain:

Sync-speed Explained on Lighting-Practice
Understanding the Flash Sync Speed

Vergence

"This 6.5-minute long video of Tina Frank focuses on the threshold of spatial perception. Like a chromographic pendulum yellow-black patterns contract, unfold and overlap. They evoke rapid speed mementos of Brion Gysin’s Dreamachines aswell as Tony Conrad’s The Flicker or of Gestalt Theory from the early 20th century.
After an induction period of some minutes the viewer can no longer tell if what he sees are afterimages from the color space or if these psychedelic visions are part of the videosequence.

This experience is intensified by the four-channel-soundtrack from Florian Hecker. Dynamic pulsating rhythms bring narrative cartesian coordinates from front, back, left and right into a permanent oscillation. Binaural stereophonic and quadrophonic arrangements add up to an acoustic whole which consolidates a timebased déjà vu together with an acoustic déjà entendu."

Simulacra

"Simulacrum is not a copy of the real, but becomes truth in its own right: the hyperreal."






Josef Schulz, born 1966, studied photography with Bernd Becher and Thomas Ruff. In 2001 he was named European Architectural Photographer of the Year, in 2007 he received a grant from the ZF Art Foundation, Friedrichshafen (Germany).

Josef Schulz - fotografische Arbeiten

Above June Lake

Following on from the aerial photography theme for the day:



"In Above June Lake, Florian Maier-Aichen presents an aerial view of the popular California tourist destination. Trading on the area’s celebrated 5 million year old geological heritage, Maier-Aichen’s photograph transforms the topography into something strangely primitive. Pin point trees, smooth glaciers, and contoured rock connote a biological animation, carved through with vein-like roads, and infectious microscopic houses. Scrutinised with alien perspective, evidence of development and luxury become etched upon the terrain as crude scratchings as the artificial white outline of ski-slopes attain the brutal elegance of cave painting."

Much larger view here at the Saatchi Gallery site - with amazing detail.

Human Landscapes

Patterns created by human landscapes from above; photographer Jason Hawkes hangs out the door of a helicopter to capture these images:






Human landscapes from above - The Big Picture - Boston.com
(I can spend hours going through the archives of The Big Picture, and have - simply some of the most stunning photography on the interweb)

The Sun (from a backyard)

Three words - A-MAZ-IN! These pictures of the sun, by photographer Larry Alvarez, were taken in a backyard using a camera (obviously), telescope, and some homemade gear:






The Flower Mound Observatory - there's video on there as well.
Via Unique Scoop

Geometric Abstractions

Artist Marko Spalatin has been producing these Serigraphs (posh term for a screen print) of geometric shapes since 1969

Voyager in Paint

Bas Zoontjens is a voyager in paint.

"Often referencing architecture and natural topography, the horizon line emerges above the heaps, opening up to a pale sky. The architectural forms are not premeditated before they reach the canvas and have no obvious function in this world, enforcing even further their futuristic quality. Through using his strong force of his own imagination he not only conveys imaginary worlds but also conveys his opinion about painting itself." -- Sam L Rees

Typology of Anonymous Architecture

'buildings where anonymity is accepted to be the style'



Since 1959 married couple, Bernd and Hilla Becher have photographed the industrial architecture of Western Europe. Arranged in grids or as a sequence of monographs 'to make families of objects' or 'to create families of motifs' they invited examination of the similarities and differences in structure and appearance.



Everybody who collects something groups, whether you collect beer mugs or butterflies. ... Or stamps, for instance: you collect them for countries, colors, images, time. [Likewise] you can also group these very difficult to understand industrial buildings. -- Hilla Becher



Artist Idris Khan (in)famously produced his own homage to the Becher's, appropriating their images in all-encompassing composites consolidating them into single ‘super-images’:


“every… Bernd and Hilla Becher Spherical type Gasholders: 2004″



The Photographic Comportment of Bernd and Hilla Becher - Tate Papers
Bernd and Hilla Becher (Getty Museum)
Bernd and Hilla Becher on Wikipedia

On Amazon: Bernd and Hilla Becher: Life and Work

Emily Hass

Emily Hass' SIDES Berlin, abstracted forms of Berlin buildings painted with gouache: