Section 2 of New York City’s High Line, designed by James Corner Field Operations and Diller Scofidio + Renfro, finally opened! The new section of the elevated park includes a thicket, wildflower field, lawn, and more.
Dutch designer Maarten Baas designed this chair with a ladder-back reaching into the sky for human rights charity Amnesty International.
The name of the five-metre design, The Empty Chair, refers to Chinese Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo who was unable to receive the prize in person last year as he had been imprisoned.
Baas presented the piece in Amsterdam to mark the50th anniversary of Amnesty International.
Canadian artist and designer Tobias Wong died last year at the young age of 35, or more specifically, 13,138 days. In tribute, his friend Frederick McSwain created this immense portrait of Wong entitled Die using 13,138 dice as part of the BrokenOff BrokenOff exhibition at Gallery R’Pure in NYC in memoriam to the artist during NY Design Week.
Chickens on the roof, fish in an aquaponic farm, fruit in the polytunnel, mushrooms in the basement… FARM:shop in Hackney, London is an emerging urban space not to be missed.
WHOISIN was asked to create a spatial and visual experience for the visitors at the 2010 Norberg Festival; to create something from nothing, deep in the Swedish woods, next to a huge old mine.
Flotilla by Etienne Cliquet is a video of micro-origamis (2 ou 3 centimeters long) which are opening slowly onto the surface of the water by capillarity.
These high-magnification composite photographs are created by Treasure Tolliver combining hundreds of individual images using computer-aided focus stacking and panorama stitching. The result is a dramatic increase in depth of field but traditionally impossible and resolution, removing the scale cues normally apparent in micro photography, and allowing for large high-quality prints .
A captivating and idyllic video shot by Brian Thompson (http://vimeo.com/user1458566) of the Festival of Colors, also known as Holi, (http://en.wikipedia.org http://vimeo.com/22641476/wiki/Holi) at the Sri Sri Radha Krishna Temple in Spanish Fork, Utah.
Have you seen this?
Portraying skydiving in a way we’ve never really seen before, this short clip called ‘Experience Human Flight’ was created by Betty Wants In for the Melbourne Skydive Centre.
Beautiful ethereal stuff with a gorgeous soundtrack by Alex Khaskin which almost makes us want to jump out of a plane too.
South Korean artist Myeongbeom Kim’s work is all about breathing life into inanimate objects by juxtaposing man-made elements with nature. The end result: a surreal world where light bulbs are converted into goldfish bowls and floating trees are covered in bright red balloon foliage. In other words, she has the kind of aesthetic that we imagine Tim Burton would heartily approve of.
What Happens When is a temporary restaurant installation in New York that transforms every 30 days for 9 months, offering guests an ever-changing culinary, visual and sound experience.
On show at ‘this way’, Design Academy Eindhoven’s exhibition at Milan Design Week 2011 is Akko Goldenbeld’s musical device Stadsmuziek. A scale model of the city of Eindhoven is transformed into the role of the recorder as each building, unique in size, shape and proximity to others, creates the musical score. We can say: the city makes its voice.
A new commercial for NTT Docomo’s Touch Wood SH-08C wooden-encased phone, created by Drill Inc. The video follows a small wooden ball that traverses a sloped xylophone “track”, relying only on the force of gravity to gradually play Bach’s Cantata 147. If only more advertising was this brilliant.
If you would like to move permanently to another country, to which country would you like to move?
From 2007 to 2010, Gallup posed this evocative question to people in 148 countries all over the world. To include an additional dimension, the responses of young people aged 15 to 29, as well as educated adults, were also tracked. Together, the conceivable gain in overall population tell a tale of how the wishful relocation of young and educated people could shape what the world would resemble as desire becomes reality.
Before I Die is the latest and perhaps greatest public art project by artist and urban planner Candy Chang. In ‘Before I Die’ she has painted a huge abandoned house in Nola, New Orleans into public chalk board, which invites the public to write down their ambitions for the world to see. Local residents have finished the lines with their life-long dreams and hopes. This Before I Die project is an inspired piece of conceptual urban art that really can revive a sense of community, creating a trickle-down effect of communication amongst the residents.
Liliputian-tiny elevators… which of course open and close and make all the corresponding noises… except actually moving up and down. Discovered the Liliputian “Lift” by Maurizio Cattelan while checking out the legendary Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin in Paris.
Where Children Sleep presents English-born photographer James Mollison’s large-format photographs of children’s bedrooms around the world – from the U.S.A., Mexico, Brazil, England, Italy, Israel and the West Bank, Kenya, Senegal, Lesotho, Nepal, China and India—alongside portraits of the children themselves.
Mollison hopes his photographs will encourage children to think about inequality.
Artist Paulius Nosokas went out (in mid Winter) and bought a number of hand-held light fixtures in a variety of wattages and configurations: fluorescent, incandescent, large, small, flashlights, “to discover what might unexpectedly be revealed as my solitary performance with these fixtures was frozen in stop-motion image.”
Says Nosokas, “I found, as you can see, that light isn’t only a source of illumination, but a wonderful creator of form.” To discover in this gallery
There is a myth, some say a science, suggesting people who have more symmetrical faces are considered more “attractive”. What about you? Are your face symmetrical? Do you prefer left side or right side? Have a look and try Echoism.org, a project by artist Julian Wolkenstein.
The gorgeous premier issue of the new annual publication, Exhibition magazine. This large format on beautiful thick glossy paper has been created for and from within the luxury industry, each issue is dedicated to one specific object or product. This first issue focuses on the LIPSTICK.
The theme is explored from multiple angles; as an object, as an idea, from a feminist point of view, industrially, politically, sensually, revealing, concealing, altering.
Is Natsumi from Japan that loves to levitating, taking pictures and have two cats.
And after taking pictures of herself levitating or the cats (not levitating) she’ll post the photos on her blog.
WWF’s latest film directed by Mato Atom is a unique take on underlining that we are all connected on the planet.
Using intricate rope sculptures, it aims to show that we are all responsible and any disruption in the thin line that connects us will create a disaster for everyone and everything in the fragile ecosystem.
‘Biospheres’ is the name of an installation of Tomas Saraceno for the exhibition Rethink Relations, Contemporary art and climate change in the National Gallery of Denmark.
These bubble like plastic spheres, the ‘Biospheres’ contain plant-based ecosystems. While the big ones invite the visitors to come inside, water filled biospheres on the ground stabilize the installation.
Google launched Google Arts Project, bringing their Street View technology into some of the most stunning art museums around the globe. You can virtually walk around, zoom in on artworks, etc. Very cool!
Social iLLumination is an ever-evolving interactive projection. Each animation is pulled from the constant feed of twitter participants contributing in real-time by tweeting with the hashtag #SoiLL.
Give a minute is no less than an ambitious attempt to reinvent public participation in America. How? The project asks the public a simple and direct question about city services and public life, through ads in the paper and the public spaces of the city. It then invites everyone to respond with their ideas by text, tweet or direct post on giveaminute.info.
Serving as a welcome escape from the winter cold, new york’s multipurpose exhibition space openhouse gallery is hosting an indoor pop-up park where visitors are encouraged to lounge around on the faux-grass. running until the end of january, ‘park here’ offers the normal comforts of a public green space including fake trees, reflecting pond, a see saw, and even an audio recording of chirping birds.
Director Mathieu Wothke takes the production side of things and spins it around in this creative video for ‘Very Busy People’ by The limousines. Adobe, facebook and a handful of other programs take center stage in this well executed visual.
One Hundred and Eight is an interactive wall-mounted Installation mainly made out of ordinary garbage bags created by Nils Völker. Controlled by a microcontroller each of them is selectively inflated and deflated in turn by two cooling fans.
Although each plastic bag is mounted stationary the sequences of inflation and deflation create the impression of lively and moving creatures which waft slowly around like a shoal. But as soon a viewer comes close it instantly reacts by drawing back and tentatively following the movements of the observer.
Space photos from the International Space Station taken by Colonel Douglas H. Wheelock that has been tweeting pictures to his twitter followers since he arrived at the space station. See more on Astro_Wheels’ twitpic account.
Breathtaking. Our planet is so beautiful.
With WindowSeat from AppOven, air travelers can now track flights without needing GPS or a persistent network connection. All you need to do is enter your departure and arrival airports, and your actual wheel-up time. WindowSeat then does the rest. As you fly, update your travel time and your flight path for an even more accurate tracking and anticipated arrival time. And, of course, share everything with online friends!
College professor and artist Michael Jones McKean made a machine that generates two-story rainbows with the flip of a switch. His rainbow machine is comprised of commercial jet pumps and custom-designed nozzles that spray a dense wall of water into the sky—it’s the same as how you can get a rainbow from the sprinkler in your backyard, just on a much more impressive scale.
London designer Simon Heijdens has applied a special film to windows at the Art Institute Chicago that creates constantly-changing shadows in response to weather conditions outside. Each triangle in the grid is linked to sensors that monitor wind currents past the outside of the glass, causing the panels to change their level of opacity. The projections are therefore constantly changing, depending on the wind conditions and path of the sun over the course of a day. The installation is part of the Hyperlinks exhibition on show until 20 July 2011.
Music Roamer adds another dimension to music map sites, by not only providing suggestions of similar artists, but also allowing you to listen to music directly on their site.
The World Wildlife Fund (WWF), the world’s largest independent conservation organization, has just launched a new file format called WWF that is aimed at preventing the unnecessary printing of files. The modified PDF format is actually impossible to print. The initiative’s tagline is: “Save as WWF, save a tree.” Downolad here.
Facebook data infrastructure engineering team intern, Paul Butler, has made a beautiful infographic mapping friendships through plotting their coordinates and connections… and what lit up looks a lot like the Earth At Night!
Butler’s goal? “One that piqued my curiosity was the locality of friendship. I was interested in seeing how geography and political borders affected where people lived relative to their friends. I wanted a visualization that would show which cities had a lot of friendships between them.” And how did he do it? “I began by taking a sample of about ten million pairs of friends from Apache Hive, our data warehouse. I combined that data with each user’s current city and summed the number of friends between each pair of cities. Then I merged the data with the longitude and latitude of each city.”
Stunning portraits from Stefan Ruiz. These images are full of contradictions: Ruiz manages to be at once distant, almost ironic in his compositions, while shockingly highlighting the humanity in his subjects. There’s a strong, sincere sense of empathy here, It paints a portrait of a photographer who’s, yes, very skilled within his medium, but who also wields an impressive ability to relate to strangers on an intimate level and bring them consciously into the process of creation. Good job, Stefan!
Grain & Gram is a “new gentlemen’s journal”… a website dedicated to writing feature articles about craftsmen that are keeping timeless techniques alive. The images and the design of the all the pages are exceptional: a really nice application of editorial rules to web design. We’d really like to see them turn this website into a book or magazine using the same design style and photography.
On seven pedestrian crossings in Shanghai an enormous drawing of a bare tree was placed in the middle of the road. As people crossed the street they walked over a patch of green paint which then spread their green footprints across the canvas, painting the branches of the tree with leaf footprints. An ingenious piece of artwork that won the Grand Prix at the Green Awards in London last week. Watch the video of how they made it work…
Purely fantastic! This doorknob could be a piece of art but it’s a project by Japanese architect HIDEYUKI NAKAYAMA. He teamed up with UNION, a manufacturer of door handles and levers, to create a glass globe doorknob in which “you catch a glimpse of what appears to be another world, waiting for you to enter and join, but in fact is a reflection of the room on the other side of the door“.
Rejoice – there’s an alternative musical history of the Big Apple. Ladies and gentlemen, get your walking shoes on for a journey through Flavorpill’s essential Manhattan lyrical topography. Click here for a larger version of the NYC Rock ‘n Roll map.
Japanese designer and electronic musician, Yuri Suzuki develops Urushi Musical Interface themed ‘collacqueration: designed in the UK – lacquered in Japan. The lacquer of wajima is a cultural property of Japan and to make it more impressive Yuri Suzuki teamed up with British composer and musician Matthew Rogers. It’s good effort to revive lacquer craftsmen of wajima and to test young talented designers. Urushi Musical Interface is up for the exhibition at embassy of Japan in London till today.
Milan-based collective Carnovsky (Francesco Rugi and Silvia Quintanilla) presents ‘RGB’, an exhibition which showcases a series of wallpapers that mutate and interact with different chromatic stimulus. The wall coverings consist of three different patterns (in red, yellow and blue respectively) that when overlapped, result in a disorientation of images. when colors and patterns mix up, the lines and shapes entwine becoming oneiric and not completely clear. through a filter (a colored light or transparent material) it is possible to see clearly the layers in which the image is composed. each one of the red, green and blue (RGB) filters serve to reveal just one of the three patterns, hiding the other two.
For your inspiratios! Olympus Bioscapes 2010 – see the winners of the eighth year this dynamic photo competition that honors the world’s most extraordinary microscope images of life science subjects.
Ariel by Stateless is the first single on famous record label Ninja Tune, a digital dance performance exploring the eternal struggle between good and evil.. The video contains some great digital animation, which fits perfectly with Stateless’ futuristic music. And don’t miss the ‘making of’ video.
Flutter is an interactive video installation created by designer dominic harris of cinimod studio. The piece consists of a linear array of 88 vertical double-sided video fins hung from an architectural framework. As a user approaches the installation, sensors trigger the images on the screen, in this case a butterfly flapping its wings. The image is projected onto the fins andas the user walks by the displays, the image is brought to life in a virtual flight path.
This video is provided by Stanford University. In 2005, Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple Computer and Pixar Animation Studios addresses the Stanford graduates about staying true to your dreams, never giving up and doing what you love. He ended his commencement speech with the following words, “Stay hungry. Stay Foolish.” A wonderful mantra to live by.
There are two ways to learn the complete Eames story, the most influential and important furniture brand of our time. The first one is told in unparalleled detail on 800 pages with more than 2,500 images at the “The Story of Eames Furniture” book by Gestalten and the second one is told in 16 minutes by Marilyn Neuhart, author of the book, and her husband John in this video. Enjoy it!
Boston-based filmmaker Erik Proulx is working to tell a story of rebirth and reinvestment in Detroit, and to complete the project he’s asking individuals to fund the project. Frame-by-frame.
You’re invited to purchase individual frames and become an IMDB-credited producer in the process. At $1 a frame and 24 frames per second, they’re hoping to raise around $120,000 for a 90-minute film.
Bllank is a company that has developed a projection system that enables users to make projections on objects, matching their form exactly. To demonstrate their system, bllank made this video showing their system projected on a car. Live graphics were created and projected onto the car, rather than wrapping around the car, the projections look straight and aren’t contorted. From moving graphics to flat textures, the system can be used with many different applications including, projected car parts.
It seems as though the latest news on sharing ideas and socialization can be found in sitting rooms and kitchens at home. In Brooklyn, designer Julia Ziegler regularly organizes strictly biological dinners opening the doors of her house to 14 people who come to spend an evening chatting and meeting new faces. In Milan there’s an event called Tavola Periodica – it’s a brunch open to everyone able to finance creative projects in all fields of art through a common platform based on good food and merrymaking. For more info, check out dates and menus on the respective websites.
Instagram is an iPhone app that lets you share photos and snaps with your friends. Nothing new about that but the novelty here is that it makes use of 11 vintage filters you can swiftly apply to photos. There’s a simple-to-use interface that lets you geo-locate every single shot and share it on its own internal social network or on Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Tumblr and Flickr. The result? Well wired.com is already calling Instagram the photographer’s Twitter. So what are you waiting for!
So what’s the best way of reconciling graphic design to literature? Designer Helena Wahlman has come up with a way that unravels the complicated plot of Shakespeare’s Hamlet with graphic creation full of arrows, icons and initials.
Maybe it could be a useful crib for literature students! You can buy the poster on the Etsy website.
In his biography, Jason deCaires Taylor writes about how he spent his childhood in the company of the Malay coral barrier reef. And looking at his work, why should we doubt him! His speciality is marine installations or rather underwater ones, to be admired as real exhibits with fins and snorkel. His latest project “The Change Silent” consists of 350 statues that crystallize the final moments of an entire village. Where can we admire this aquatic museum? Just off the Yucatan Peninsula, emblem of the famous “Maya Coast ” where the ruins of that great vanished civilization blend with a fairy-tale seascape.
Guerra de la Paz is a team made up of two Cuban artists who work in Miami and create works out of second-hold clothes and rags. The end result are images of vibrant colour and strong expressive power vaguely reminiscent of Michelangelo’s “Mercy” revisited in military clothing.
All in all a combination of traditional disciplines reinterpreted in experimental fashion. Check out all their projects here: www.guerradelapaz.com
Light graff is a Paris-based collective formed by photographers and writers keen to leave their mark on the city in a more creative and dynamic than the usual traditional approaches.
So no spray paints but rather cameras, LEDs, neons, torches and photographic filters of every type – the Light Graff team create graphic and video projects that need (they insist on telling us!) no post production touch-ups.
So how green is New York? The creative agency PLAID has come up with an eco-map highlighting cycle tracks, parks, bio-product markets, “intelligent” buildings with low environmental impact, zones that use forms of alternative energy and lots of other “green” stuff. Discover it all – just download the map.
A top panel including the performer Laurie Anderson, the artist Takashi Murakami and the designer Stefan Sagmeister to judge the top 25 best videos in partnership with the prestigious Guggenheim Museum. This was YouTube Play, the biennial exhibition of creative video. Over 24,000 entries were submitted for the event.
The award-giving ceremony took place at the New York Guggenheim and was (of course) streamed on YouTube. Here you can view an overview. Click here to see a page listing list of all the award-winners.
What did you learn from your parents? What do you want to hand down to your own kids? What are the hardest moments you’ve experienced in your life. What does love mean to you?
Forty questions addressed to over 5000 people to find out what separates us and what unites us to others. A snapshot of contemporary humanity by Yann Arthus-Bertrand who since 2003 has been working on the 6 billion others project as he travels round the world asking his questions.
An amazing virtual exchange of opinions to get to know those we normally think of as remote and different to us. “6 billion others” is on show at Rome’s Traiano Markets till 26th September.
New York is getting greener and greener. Following the opening last year of the city’s remarkable High Line, this year the Big Apple has gone all out to create hanging gardens all over the place. One project called Woolly Garden School aims to make the most number of vertical gardens in New York and the rest of the United States. Click here to find out more: www.woollyschoolgarden.org
Email has undoubtedly revolutionized our way of communicating with the world even if it has contributed to the demise of handwriting and the age-old art of beautiful calligraphy. For all handwriting nostalgics we have discovered a really interesting application.
Its name is Pilot Handwriting, designed by Pilot, the famous brand of pens and crayons. How does it work? With just a few commands you can transform your own handwriting into a genuine font to use when you write and send emails.
Summer’s here at last: time for events, parties, shows and performances – all rigorously outdoors. One highly curious one we came across on stage in London is called Electric Hotel. It’s a hotel that opens only to accommodate the stage set of David Rosenberg and Frauke Requardt’s dance show. Four floors on which the stories of seven characters intertwine in a dance and theatre experience combined with a strong taste of voyeurism. Look out for the next dates it’s on!
Enjoy a remarkably dreamlike voyage along the seabed through an incredible world full of strange fish and ethereal feminine creatures. That’s where the train wagons running on the Amsterdam metro will take you. Since 2008 the GBV company has been selecting the best projects by artists and designers to transform the old carriages of the city’s subway system into unexpected worlds. This is the year of carriages redecorated by the Million Dollar Design duo.
A throwback to The Unbearable Lightness of Being for the Fallen series by Tony Burrows. Nude bodies twirl and spin light and somnolent – as though they were on an ocean floor – in perfect harmony with nature to express and portray an essential and at times, bucolic world.
After working alongside professionals with highly personal and sophisticated styles such as David Bailey, Richard Avedon, Albert Watson and Nadav Kander, after having documented many remote places in Australia for National Geographic and Australian Tourism, and photographing so many lives in their natural and amazing habitats, Australian photographer Tony Burrows has developed a striking sensitiveness for singular and involving atmospheres. Just visit his website to discover the rest of his work.
A monument to celebrate the heroes of everyday work busy at their activities and portrayed on sports trophies – there are people hammering, pushing a pram, carrying a tray, working at computers and lots more. Everyday Monuments is a project by the Korean artist Jean Shin – out and out specialist at transforming everyday objects and scenes into sculptures rich in meaning.
Evermore refined and evolved street art creations that appear for an instant to then vanish as soon as you change your viewing position.
That’s what’s happening now in Hamburg and Berlin where these painted faces were photographed on the single poles that make up the gratings of gardens and courtyards. The image can only be seen from a certain angle with another face painted on the other side.
If you’re thinking of getting a haircut or restyled, you might do worse than check out Girillahair. Finally a blog entirely dedicated to hair with images drawn from the leading articles in the sector’s key magazines – photographs of catwalk parades and shots from films. An interesting blog to add to your feed.
An extraordinary graphical world that springs forth from a cube, a white sheet of paper and lots of coloured pencils – a world in which architecture and environment live side by side in complete harmony.
This simple and delicate animation with pastel shades is directed by Makoto Yabuki for the architectural studio Sturdy Style.
An organic form that winds its way around the pillars and columns of a warehouse, a sinuous structure which envelops you as you marvel at its volumes and forms. This project is halfway between art, design and architecture. “Tape Installation” – a sort of space-organism made entirely from sticky tape by the use/number collective. On display now at Berlin DMY 2010.
The first thing that comes to mind when you look at one of his works is that something here isn’t quite right – it doesn’t add up! Philippe Ramette is a globe-trotting photographer who likes to reinvent reality by scrutinising the world from unpredictable perspectives. To chase after his vision he suspends himself in space, sits himself down comfortably on a chimney-pot, puts on stilts on a mountain top or organizes a balcony on the Indian Ocean. He is the “Magritte of film” inspired and influenced by Alfred Hitchcock and Buster Keaton alike. Ramette creates irony and wonder through his contradictions of an upturned world as if viewed through the eyes of an eccentric child.
A new scheme to promote sustainable energy from Google. PowerMeter monitors electronic and electrical devices (computers, refrigerators, washing machines, lamps and etc.) and registers our daily, weekly and monthly consumption of electricity while providing us with suggestions on how to reduce our use of energy. These data are then shared with other users over the Internet in a sort of contest to see who cave the most. The system is still in prototype phase undergoing tests but will soon be made available firstly in the USA, Germany and the UK.
She mixes hand-made drawings and computer graphics to reinvent textures inspired by fractal structures that she then prints on silk and other sought-after materials.
The Korean designer Chae Young Kim starts off from a single line in her hands. It is the digitalized, worked and embroidered before being printed in shades of blue, red and grey – and then ultimately used in conceptual and camouflaged interior design projects.
Your iPhone can now thrust you right back into the past. If you’re walking the streets of London download this new iPhine application now! StreetMuseum displays snapshots of the historical photographs and pictures kept in the London Museum – all designed to help you experience the London of yesteryear in 3D as the app superimposes pictures of today over those of the past.
Whaiwhai helps you turn travelling into a game. All you have to do is buy a guide (currently available for the Italian cities of Rome, Venice, Florence, Verona and Milan), go to the place you want to visit and follow the instructions that you receive via sms. Enigmas will be explained and you’ll collect clues as you move around the city. It’s a kind of evolved treasure-hunt in which the city becomes the backdrop for an adventure as the traveller is led to discover a physical space imbued with original tales specifically related to the very location he is getting to know. An original way of finding unusual itineraries and experiencing a city like a real explorer.
James Hopkins makes use of everyday things to create totally original installations. A random and chaotic ensemble of objects that apparently lack any sense becomes a well defined image if viewed from a different angle.
Nature will never be the same again – at least if the photographs by Oliver DiCicco and Barry Underwood are anything to go by. They immortalize evocative landscapes in which natural energy blends with the artificial energy of the city to create effects and settings balanced between the real and the theatrical. These are surreal photographs – a mix of contemporary painting, cinema and art.
Have you ever wondered how the murals that cover the entire façades of buildings are made? No vinyl, transfers of hi-tech solutions – just simple, pre-drawn paperboards and a lot of skill in the same way that Raffaello and Leonardo worked. An excellently portrayed and suspended world waiting to be discovered in the documentary entitled UP THERE.
An absolute must-see collection of silk scarves decorated with Polaroid-format photographs. Seven images have been selected for sale including coloured balloons, raindrops and a bird’s-eye view of New York.
You can now determine exactly where your friends are, share information about the places you visit and frequent, leave messages and post comments on the location’s virtual wall – all this thanks to Plyce, the new localized social network – well worth discovering.
The latest New York craze? Decorating the walls of your home, hotels and stores with black marker ink. One of the latest exploits of this kind – one that that ended up on many blogs – was the one by Big Apple artist and photographer Kate Neckel. With her marker and nothing more, she has decorated on one of the rooms at the Ace Hotel, the hotel designed by the Roman & Williams Studio and which the New York Times calls: “The most original new hotel in the States.” If you want to see the real thing live, check out Room No. 1208.
For all those creative people and artists who spend hours trying to pinpoint the best background colour for their latest project here is a new proposal from Pantone – now presenting its new Plus Range Series: 300 new metallic hues, 40 new neon tints and of course the obligatory iPad application.
You’ve never seen Tokyo like this! An amazing project to suggest a future world teaming with space ships, suspended buildings, endless tunnels and the usual “dark-side” effect beloved of sci-fi films like “Back to the Future”. Enjoy!
Music produced by solar energy – a new dimension for outdoor summer music festivals?
The people behind this eco-concept are Important Records. A few days ago, they organized an event in Nevada. There “solar music” could be enjoyed thanks to an original idea by the artist Craig Colorusso.
Sun Boxes is an installation made up of 20 loudspeakers fitted and powered by solar panels. These create a sunbeam symphony whose volume and content vary depending on the intensity of sunlight: at dusk the music slowly fades away
until finally coming to a halt as the sun dips below the horizon.
A concept based on the premise that we all have interesting ideas from which projects, small and large, could be developed. The problem is that ideas and projects are not always communicated effectively. Or rather they never find the right channel of development. Starting today anyone who has a vision can fill in form and send it off to the TAKE AWAY Project at http://www.deliver-takeaway-ideas.org/ by designer Kueng Caputo hoping his ideas and notions end up in the right hands. Check out some ideas that came through during the recent Milan Furniture Salon.
This is a great idea for putting creative people in touch around the world. The concept – by Kuro Interactive Studio and Vision Design Studio and sponsored by the Art Institute of California in Orange County – works like this. You upload a photograph or video which is then inserted into a kind of cell resembling the ones used by bees. You become part of a large kaleidoscope-like micro-system. An original approach designed to link up working minds and establish interesting exchanges.
Leica cameras are also getting into social media with their CITIES.PEOPLE.PERSPECTIVES project.
The aim is to provide a rather different look at cities by recruiting the services of 11 top photographers around the world. To make everything as clear as possible, the project is associated with Google Maps to show exactly where the city photographs were shot.
To mark the tenth anniversary of broadband internet availability in the United Kingdom, Virgin Media has commissioned United Visual Artists (UVA) to create ‘Speed of Light’ – a series of installations built using optic fibres. The result is a memorable experience celebrating light and music.
The world of product design is now getting into iPhone applications.
This latest product-design app has been thought up by the designer Maarten Baas for the 2010 version of the Milan Furniture Salon. He has come up with an Analogue Digital Clock. This is a development of the Real Time Analogue Digital Clock presented last year at the Salon in the C’N’C Costume National’s showroom. So what’s so special about it? Well the time display is updated manually by a actor who you can see updating the time by cancelling and adding sections of the digital numbers.
Lights and colours in the mist – the latest challenge to our models of perception. Olafur Eliasson, together with the Chinese architect Ma Yansong, has an exhibition at the Beijing UCCA made up of an installation hovering on the very edge of art and architecture.
This is an apparently endless foggy coloured space whose physical and perceptive properties are waiting to be discovered. And how do you do that? Easy – just walk across it!
On the eve of the release of the much anticipated film on Banky, we are focusing on street art’s final frontier. That’s enough of spray paints and indelible pictures, it’s now time for digital graffiti. Thanks to two easily portable devices, street artists can now live out their performances without being chased by the police!
“Digital Graffiti” is a tool invented by Alex Beim. It lets you draw on a large screen as if you were using any kind software for painting and drawing. The future of street art is also coming this way!
A project that allows us to rethink, re-invent and relive urban spaces – in this case abandoned and dilapidated areas in the Italian city of Bari. They have been catalogued, photographed and measured by Radice Quadrata as part of their “Low-Res Project ”.
This is an experiment in ephemeral or short-lived public art given over to artists and creatives – it quite simply provides us with the chance to ask ourselves some hard-hitting questions on how best to exploit residual urban areas.
Nowadays transforming music into visual effects is getting easier and easier.
The Clavilux 2000 is an interactive instrument conceived by Jonas Heuer that creates a vertical projection: every note played on the keyboard triggers a coloured strip which is projected onto the wall for the time the note is played. An out and out visual concert!
And if New York was invaded by Pacman and Co? Don’t miss PIXEL, the amazing video by film director John Patrick produced by OneMoreProd, a video that is quite literally circling the world!
A great idea to stem the problem of car accidents on Saturday evenings in Brazil. The campaign was thought up by the Brazil Ogilvy Agency. A simple idea has succeeded in raising awareness about drinking and driving among hundreds of young people in a series of clubs.
It’s a fair bet you have never seen concerts from this viewpoint before. Gerrit Starczewski is a rather special photographer who gets a real kick out of immortalizing the shoes of rockstars as they perform.
Adam Green, Zoot Woman and then passing on to Rem, Gossip and Mia. This is an out and out tribute to shoes in pop music. You might well recognize some psychological tic belonging to your favourite star just by studying the shoes he’s wearing.
Molly Dilworth is a young American painter who has decided to do thing in a big way. She paints her enormous works on the terrace roofs of Manhattan. These creations are far too large to fit into a gallery but now everyone can see them on Google Earth. So for Molly, Manhattan is just like a huge, open-air canvas!
Interview is celebrating its fortieth anniversary and to mark the event it is launching its very first version – by iPad. Downloadable with iTunes iPad for 99 cents, the magazine – first conceived and produced by Andy Warhol four decades ago – has never betrayed its original mission: to be innovative, intelligent, sophisticated, avant-garde and visually striking. Get your copy now!
A little like Pollock, a little like the pointillist artists – and certainly a lot more in shape than both given the physical commitment required to create a work. A different kind of technique for large format art!
Certainly not the usual, run-of-the-mill street-look website – though a quick glance might make you think so much. Fashion Crowd is a precious collection of secret addresses – or almost – of buyers, fashion reporters and creatives from all over the world. And don’t expect to find the usual names from London, Paris and New York. Here you’ll discover a range of fascinating places and people in far smaller cities.
Skulls transformed into headbands for pure maidens, gaudy horns to wear on fur hats and again studded collars, nails and whips to show off.
The Belgian duo Mouton Collet has struck again with their new autumn-winter collection entitled Ferocious. All according to the programme! They insist on telling us: “We bring to the sophisticated and modern world of fashion what belongs to us namely the countryside, the vegetable world and local craftsman’s traditions of Belgium”. Yes but in rather in an eccentric way, we add!
If you’re keen on photography this is for you. Looking for the very best time of day to shoot pictures in Central Park? Well now you can download Darkness – a new iPhone application that lets you calculate the exact time of day hen the sun rises and sets in more than 20,000 cities around the world. And if you’re a photographer worth his salt you should already know that the best time to shoot is either at dawn of sunset when light quality is low and sweet. Those still without an iPhone can use the Golden Hour Calculator.
These days there aren’t just graphic designers and video makers; creativity’s new frontiers are go by the names of audiovisual art and live visual designers.
The latter are experts at transforming an evening event into an out and out show with effects and live music integrated with projections and a variety o changing stage designs.
To get a better a picture check out some stage creations by Yannick Jacquet, Joanie Lemercier, Olivier Ratsi and Romain Tardy.
If you’re planning to spend your next vacation in Japan, don’t miss the video directed by designer Kenichi Tanaka. With his brilliantly clear-cut graphic style he provides a highly realistic and at times bitter portrait of his beloved island. An overall view of food, work, sex, technology and lots more.
In The strange country the young Tanaka gives us a panorama of Japanese society as though it were being viewed by outside eyes. In his description of the video, the designer says: “My aim is to urge people in my society to reflect on the fact that what goes on here is not really as normal as you might think”.
The PS1 Gallery of New York is getting ready for its annual Warm Up – a music and showtime festival. Every year it selects the main theme out of the results of a competition for young talents. Although they weren’t the outright winners, we’d like to mention the idea proposed by Studio BIG: a skip filled with recycled PVC balls to be reused at the end of the event for limited edition bags . A cloud effect in which we’d love to immerse ourselves!
In just a few seconds the London Taxi iPhone App calculates the cost of a fare taking into account both the time of day and the current traffic conditions. The people who feed this application with up-to-date information on the traffic situation are the very taxi-drivers sending in tweets. So if you’re going to be in London you know what you need to download rightaway from the Apple Store!
Sokozin: a new digital fashion magazine that’s a gem to browse through without too much to read. And who are the photographers and artists featured in the latest number? Nacho Ricci, Mi-Zo, Manolo Campione ed Henrik Purienne. You’ll certainly find something that appeals to you here.
Tired of the common anonymous covers of the latest generation of mobile phones? Now an entire community of artists and a new company are available to help you personalize your cellular phone. .
Uncommon lets you print a one of your own creations – or choose from the works of talented artists and graphic designers – directly onto the object you hold dearest in your bag. A cost-effective, valid and long-lasting concept.
Josef Schulz combines photography, design and architecture and has probably had “Less is more” tattooed on his body somewhere. He’s a master in the technique of removing written messages and graphic signs from advertising hoardings, office block facades and city store names and ads. What’s left is just a silhouette, a blank, an outline and a colour to be added to the overall look of the landscape. And the most interesting aspect of all this is the fact our attention is caught – even if the actual information is missing.
The latest Google street view craze is to view the ski slopes of Whistler Mountain directly on your own pc. To mark the Vancouver Winter Olympic Games, the TV cameras of Google street have been set up in the mountains to observe and cover the slopes where events are taking place. A great way of enjoying the spectacular landscape without really having a clue how to ski!
This guy – an artist and lecturer in the field – is one of the few personalities on the scene of interactive digital art to exploit the concept of interactivity between art and its spectator. Daniel Rozin makes works that behave as though they were mirrors. And so the key player in all this is the spectator himself – he becomes an active and interactive part of the work in question. These creations look simple but are actually quite complex in terms of digital technology and software.
A blend of architecture, engineering, biology and experimental 3D. Matsys is an architectural studio whose work is founded on the belief that architecture can be seen as body-related material – in other words capable of reacting to the forms and spaces in which it is contained. And the result? Matsys’s creations resemble vibrating molecular organisms that morph into constantly changing visual effects – highly suggestive.
A rug that combines elements of sculpture with interior design. The idea springs from the creative mind of the young designer Elisa Stroyzk of rooms in Berlin. Small geometrical weaves in wood cut by laser composed within a soft structure that can be shaped into infinite forms with a range of uses and functions – rugs, works of art and covers
Japan’s capital is becoming more and more digital – unlike the usual advertising hoardings and billboards, the façade of this Tokyo building displays a QR code to allow mobile phone users to access sets of information on stores, make bookings, download materials, tweets and animations that come to life on the screens of their phones. All in all a way of knowing what’s going on in the block down the road without having to visit it directly.
A new life for paper not just used for scribbles or printing documents but as creative material for ideas themselves. One interesting example – completely original make-up by the designer Hector Sos.
Travellers throughout the world – listen up! From today the top ten best-selling Wallpaper City Guides are also available on iPhone.
You can decide whether to check out Amsterdam’s secret venues, visit Barcelona’s coolest nightspots, view the best London theatres or most famous sights of Berlin or the hottest addresses of Los Angeles and New York. And why not discover Paris, Milan, Rome and Tokyo. And the cost? $3.99 with Berlin thrown in free.
This latest iPhone application is just great for the demanding globe-trotter who’s well educated and prefers to travel light!
How can you transform a table, a fridge or even the floor into a PC? You just need Light Touch – an interactive projector that instantly converts any surface into a touch-screen. Its holographic HLP lasers create high quality video images that let you use the projected image as a touch screen. Chic technology!
Polish photographer Szymon Roginski teamed up with fellow photographer Kasia Korzeniecka to create this unusual collection of photo sculptures for fashion designer Ania Kuczynska’s 2009 spring/summer line. Each piece showcases the designer’s clothing by setting a model in a natural landscape. These photos were then re-imagined as three-dimensional sculptures. The photos were printed and then transformed into a variety of shapes and assembled back together to display the image. The photo sculptures were then re-photographed for the final pieces.
The Canadian artist Sean Martindale has chosen an unremarkable public place for his latest installation. The aim is to represent the concept of confines and borders – the boundaries of property, but also as kind of cage or closed–off area. It took him 24 hours to weave this “freedom sculpture” using nylon thread.
Another interesting example of low-cost art from the Italian artists Viviana Checchia and Anna Santomauro: an hour of free art made up of installations, exhibitions and workshops set up directly at home, in the office or in a public place. A great way of bringing the general public and contemporary art together. Check out their site where you can select the artist nearest to you and order him or her by email!
Low-cost contemporary art at home. This is the latest challenge launched by the Spanish group La Casa de los Fideos which has come up with TONG, a publication with a surprise-envelope format that contains a mix of variavble contents. These range from engravings, photographs, videos and other arty items. It all costs just twenty euros and is currently distributed by a circuit of galleries in Barcelona, London and Rome. All in all a good way of starting out as an art collector.
Trendsetters of all the world listen up – you won’t root out the latest trends and seasonal must-have items in New York, London or Paris. Much better to look around in Brazzaville in Congo. Just leaf through the book entitled Gentlemen of Bacongo to discover all the charm of the Le Sape culture. It combines French taste with pink-coloured dresses and accessories from the latest fashion collections.
Just two square metres. Yet inside there’s room for 24 artists. We’re not inside Gulliver’s Lilliput but in Berlin at the world’s smallest art gallery: Smallery. Designed to resemble a small mountain hut with wooden walls and a moveable roof, Smallery was created by the advertising agency Pulk to promote upcoming artists. Thorsten Herker the agency’s creative director explains: “Berlin is full of enormous galleries and so to attract attention we set out to do something quite different.”
There’s even a poetic side to rainclouds if you look hard enough – and it’s creative and really quite surprising. In the skies of Paris – or rather on the façades of buildings you can now admire clouds dripping wet with rain and enlivened with fluorescent colours. So who’s behind it all? The creative group Superbien. Where? Not far from Rue du Fabourg Poissonière. Make sure you take an umbrella just to be on the safe side!
To celebrate the 150th anniversary of the birth of the Eixample district, Barcelona has decided to look into its future by asking citizens and tourists how they imagine the Catalan capital will be in a century and a half’s time.
You have until 10 June 2010 to entrust your wishes and predictions to a special webcam which will be roving around the entire city. The results will then be gathered and inserted into a sort of time capsule not to be opened until 2159! If you’re dying of curiosity, have a look at the forum where you can confront imaginary ideas and expectancies.
Meticulous, visionary, complex, enlightening. Ryan Schude is a brilliant Los Angeles-based photographer. He loves constructing bizarre stories halfway between life’s ironic and grotesque perspectives.
Feeling hesitant because you’re going to Helsinki for Christmas but don’t know even one word of Finnish? You can relax because from today talks to the Airline company Emirates is making available a very useful i-phone application. Once you’ve reached your foreign destination all you have to do is to select the language, male or female voice and one of the 400 language-chunks available for translation. Just stick your cell-phone in front of your mouth and watch the sales assistant’s face as it talks! Have a look to the video.
This is an easy task to try out on Photoshop. It comes from an interesting idea from the Australian photographer Khristian Mendoza. He photographs, retouches and publishes snaps on his blog with parts of the subject’s face and body removed not unlike a conjuror with his magic box.
Obsessions from the web: on-line 7/24 and constantly connected to friends to tell the world what you’ve done, said, eaten, what look you chose today to go to work or out with friends. There really are people who have the irresistible urge to communicate to everyone everything they have bought – and above all how much they’ve spent. A kilo of pears, in a bookshop, a pair of gloves or the latest dress or jacket.
It’s no surprise Kate Bingaman-Burt’s blog is called Obsessive Consumption: an unending, illustrated shopping list. No doubt an original and useful idea because often half-way through the month coffers are empty! …So what’s the next purchase to be highlighted that’s outside her budget?!
It’s an inevitable development considering the times: street artists and wall writers fed up with spray cans and the like are now on the look-out for something more cutting- edge.
The answer – in perfect 2.0 style is called SweatShoppe and it’s the latest creation of the duo made up of the two artists Bruno Levy and Blake Shaw. They have developed “video graffiti” obtained with green LEDs.
So what is it? All you need is a video paint roller that doesn’t leave marks on the wall, a camcorder connected to a projector that follows the roller as it moves and the video that in real time projects every time the artists “paints” on the wall.
We can’t wait to see it go live! Check out the video!
Parallel Universes by Kristina Kostadinova, a collection of snapshots of each individual, windows into each person’s
universe. A truly inspiring concept that explores individual personality and the relationships between them.
Female photographer Chenman is known for her photographs that were placed on the cover of Vision magazine. Her diverse photograph style compliments a high end fashion aesthetic that is fused by seamless 3-D renderings. All of her work including the 3-D renderings she produces is done by Chenman. Born and raised in China, Chenman has been able to make her mark in the western world by having her works published by New York Magazine, Nylon and Sport & Street. Check out the rest of the images after the post.
Quoteskin is the brainchild of Lee Crutchley, a graphic designer who, armed with nothing but a Moleskin and some Asda pens, doodles euphemisms, quotes, song lyrics, and whatever else he wants in his journal.
Then he scans the images and posts them on his Tumblr blog.
Pretty cool idea.
Hair’em Scare’em presents an extraordinary exploration through the fascinating beauty and inventive possibilities of hair as a medium for artistic expression in contemporary art and design. The book documents this palpable trend into a visual sourcebook that presents a captivating collection of hairy works in graphic design, photography, illustration and art as well as interior design, fashion and jewelry design. The extraordinary works featured in this book are the best indication of trends in hair outside the mainstream.
One Year Walk/Beard Grow Time Lapse by Christoph Rehage
November 9th 2007 – November 13th 2008
one year on foot – 4646km through China
unlimited beard & hair growth
The fantastic spectacles of color – the latest trend in street art – are as impressive as fireworks. A host of light sources, from flash lights, bike lights to blinking LED lights, are used to ‘paint’ a picture straight onto the camera lens.
Our friends at Concept Feedback have launched an awesome online (free) review tool that gives designers, marketers and developers a place to exchange feedback and ideas on design projects (websites, logos, etc.).
The website has a very clean design and it works as easy as 1-2-3;
1. Submit a concept.
2. Receive free feedback.
3. Get better results.
Visit the website at www.conceptfeedback.com
A bunch of videos that show the world from the perspective of several animals, including an armadillo, a wolf, a scorpion, a sheep, a bison and a house fly
Designer Roland Tiangco presents not only a fully-interactive poster, but a siren call: This is the first day of the rest of your life! It is you, future person, who has the future in your futuristic, super dirty hands!
Big news for all the blog addicted: Tangs 10×24 Blogathon in Singapore ~ Probably the world’s first WordPress blog that integrates with Flash. And yes, this is a blog.
The Portable Interactive Display doesn’t have a catchy name but the student concept does provide a solution to architects and others involved in building design. The concept provides a way for
professionals to take all their (digital) building plans and discuss them anywhere.
New York – it’s a scorching summer, hot and torrid and there’s not a trace of cool air to be found. There you are, lost and trapped somewhere down in the subway system trying to find the L Line – the one that goes to Willyamsburg where you can cool out and have a drink with friends. So what’s the answer? Well thank God you can now download a new iPhone application to show you the nearest subway stations and the right direction to take including the right connecting passages, stairs and elevators.
Central St Martin’s Jewellery Design graduate, Maiko Takeda, having worked for Stephen Jones Millinery, Scott Stephens and Erickson Beamon since 2006, shows her new collection using pierced metal, made to be worn so the shadows do the talking.
Beck’s asked 10 Illustrators including McBess, Hellovon, Kid Acne, Si Scott, and Laura Jackaman to re-think the best albums of the last 40 years (gleaned from Pitchfork lists). Now the project is open to the public to contribute and complete the collection of 100. Head over here to get involved.
Check out this amazing and astonishing body of photographs by Lina Scheynius, it blows my mind to see how down to earth they are and the realness that is captured in every single picture.
For years now we’ve been watching the development of the High Line, an inspiring landscape design/urban design/regeneration project along Manhattan’s West Side that has only recently opened to the public.
Instead of merely reducing an historic piece of city infrastructure into rubble, landscape architects James Corner Field Operations and architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro have transformed an abandoned elevated train line into a place of robust urban beauty.
If you happen to be cruising along Meat Packing-District, take a break from retail therapy/partying/people watching and have a little look around. You’ll love it, we promise!
A clever little book created and edited by industrial designers, The Melbourne Design Guide one-ups most guidebooks. The 450-page flip book teems with current design intelligence from Melbourne’s creative community, making the publication as attractive to design professionals as it is to savvy locals or travelers wanting a different take on the scene.
Everyone agrees that green is the new black and that the market has room for a range of differing and often hard-hitting and even “extravagant” new ideas.
That’s certainly the case with botanicalls Twitter DIY project that allows plants to communicate through Twitter and Arduino software (an open-source platform to which you can attach a series of sensors). It’s the plants themselves that will remind you when they need water by providing you information on the humidity of the earth and their state of health – and then at the end they thank you!
This twenty-six year old French photographer has an innate sense of the aesthetic. His eye-catching pictures have led him to travel far and wide immortalizing subjects in France, California and Australia. His website is a mix of scene fashion, instant shots and poetic angles imbued with a melancholy vein of rock & roll. Lechat’s diary is particularly poignant even though it comes over as a little too reminiscent of Slimane’s!
In tune with the theme: green is the new black, Japanese studio microworks has come up with a new look for the classic black battery-charger – which is now available in striking chlorophyll green!
This French art group is besotted with the 1980s and pop colours and has chosen paper as its favourite mode of expression. They have built an eccentric and brightly coloured world of fashion consisting of etching, tricks, origami and collages. And all strictly made from paper. From the “do it yourself” series.
A name taken from the Schnitzler novel (which inspired Kubrick film Eyes Wide Shut) and one that promises a different viewpoint in the glossy and ultra-branded world of commercial fashion. Traumnovelle looks like a fanzine. It stands out from the crowd for its cinematographic approach to its fashion features and the absolute purism and veto it applies to any retouching of images.
This to such an extent that if you fill in the removable coupon on the inside back page (as people once did!) they’ll send you an original unpublished photograph taken on the set.
So what can we find that’s authentic and untouched in the thousands of photographs published on sites, in magazines and fanzines throughout the world? Since the advent of photoshop not much. This is the issue highlighted by the English graphic artist Henry Hadlow who thanks to photoshop changes colour, goes out of focus and finally cancels himself from the screen!
Serigraphy is now seen as rather an old-fashioned technique once made famous by Andy Warhol, the king of pop-art. It’s now been dusted down by a new American brand with a strange name: Young Monsters. The people behind Young Monsters hail from far-off Tennessee – four creatives with the yen to put themselves to the test have come up with T-shirts, posters and clotheswear items bearing quirkily interesting graphics and indeed it’s all been done using serigraphy or screen printing.
Again an amusing new application worth downloading for your iPhone. Choose patterns made by the artist Joshua Davis and then draw, colour and mix your creation to kaleidoscopic effect! You then save your final result and share it with your friends. As you would do anyway.
Dragonette: keep an eye for this Canadian electro-pop band – currently one of our favourites.
The “Fixin To Thrill”, video directed by Wendy Morgan, is the first single taken from their latest album. We ♥ CANADA!
Little Red Riding-Hood is now fat and overweight after too many cheeseburgers and French fries. Instead poor Snow White, like all housewives is feeling a little desperate while Sleeping Beauty still hasn’t woken up so the seven dwarfs have had to take her to an old people’s home. These are all examples of Fallen Princesses by photographer Dina Goldstein and they’re all rather more jaded and less romantic than their colleagues – the ones that lived happily ever after!
The proof of the pudding is . . . in waiting the right amount of time; and this time you need exactly a year till the project’s complete! What are we talking about here? Well the Spanish designer Oscar Diaz has made a calendar based on the capacity of paper to absorb ink in such a way it lets you view days and the passing of time. The kit contains twelve tubes of ink in different colours.
Cute idea from Toyota. To get internet surfers talking about its latest small car – the IQ – it’s come up with a phantom font created with the acrobatics of a courageous racing driver. Check out the how-to technologies used by the interactive-artist Zachary Lieberman. He filmed the car’s movements which were then converted into letters by the creative duo Pierre & Damien.
Cape Town born artist Robin Rhode (now based in Berlin) succeeds in creating urbane performances of extraordinary freshness. His canvas is the street and his installations take shape in the German capital’s more anonymous corners with simple actions and stylized drawings.
Classical art museums will always be unending sources of inspiration for every artist. Yet if you still don’t find any satisfaction in classical art, Flemish masterpieces, equestrian statues and ancient Roman busts you can at least seek out some of the curious shots now on offer from the American photographer Andy Freeber.
In 1913 Marcel Duchamp went out and picked up objects from the street and put them in museums. If he were still alive he’d probably do the reverse. That’s the idea of Ji Lee, Creative Director of Google Creative Labs with his new “Duchamp Reloaded” project. This involves setting up a series of installations outside New York’s main museums.
Rings, earrings. necklaces, belts and gloves with a kind of scratchy, chunky and slightly feline appeal that certainly won’t go unnoticed. Behind them is the Domenican designer Dominic Jones who works in London.
Kalos+eidos+scopeo, from Greek – to look at a beautiful shape. The first kaleidoscope appeared back in 1816 with David Brewster but the concept was already known to the Greeks. It usually consists of a tube with mirrors at one end, filters and ball bearings that create an infinity of pleasing shapes within. Every so often on youtube there are some interesting kaleidscope videos – here the ball bearings are replaced by animals that really move!
It all goes to show that to emerge in the internet age you don’t need much – just two yo-yos, a simple but effective graphic design and perhaps some apples, beetles and the Eiffel Tower. And then just upload them all to Vimeo or some other wonderful social networking site. The world’s your oyster!
So what are the interiors of the homes of designers, graphic artists and creatives in general like? You know, the kind of people who shop at Colette’s or down on NY’s Lower East Side – those who love to visit vintage jungles and contemporary art shows and sift through antique markets and stores of every kind as they travel from city to city. “Creative Space” is a book that portrays a world rather like “The Selby” and it’s the work of journalist Francesca Gavin. The homes she focuses on belong to the likes of Julie Verhoeven and Maharishi, Fafi, Ryan McGinness, Wes Lang, Jaybo, Lucio Auri, Roger Gual, Yasumusa Yonehara and Aya Takano. A trip from Berlin to Tokyo, London, Paris and New York.
When you’re away from home are you always looking out for a WiFi connection just like a water diviner? You can now leave the divining up to your WiFi detecting cap with its built-in signal indicator. So from now on it’s easy to stay connected to the internet wherever you may be– with radar on your head!
via | current.com
You need to make the video for your first single but though you’ve got lots of friends around the world don’t have much money available? Well take a look at an amusing experiment conducted by The Sours who certainly exploit webcams in creative ways. Of course some time’s needed to coordinate all the extras but this way satisfaction and results are assured!
Something new from the world of internet search engines! Spezify is a visual search engine that provides a more intuitive way of finding and displaying information. Just key in any name or word and you’ll get a collage of blog posts, photos and videos. It’s not unlike a page from a magazine or newspaper – and it’s all online!
Great for googling your own name and those of your friends! Try it.
In this age of digital information and specially in times of crisis the The New York Times Magazine is changing size and coming out in a smaller format (after over a hundred years of activity this is only the second time this has happened!). But don’t worry – the magazine has gained in terms of sharper graphics and a new colour scheme in its layout. It goes without saying that a valid project and a talented Art Director will always solve all problems!
Every 12 hours, 321 watches communicate a message: “Every 12 hours in Africa, more than 2000 people die of AIDS because they have no access to treatment. Set up by the Paris-based Africa AIDS Solidarity Fund, the installation is based on a work by the artist Nadine Grenier who went all out to make the most of watches and clocks during the Biennale of International Design in Saint-Etienne, France.
The focus here is on global warming. MTV, in collaboration with Ubik, draws our attention to it in a 50-second short that mixes live action with cartoon techniques.
Key elements are a world map in a classroom, toy cars, small planes and clouds.
Check out these mags!
Get going with some wild browsing!
Fashion, art, indie brands, photo-shoots, amazing illustrators and designers capable of planning entire universes not to mention new bands to listen to and lots, lots more.
Just click on magazines for convenient, full-screen viewing.
Have you ever wondered what the world’s most famous encyclopaedia would look like if it were printed in book form? Well artist Rob Matthews has just created the first edition of Wikipedia with over 5000 pages. It’s quite an effort to consult and the work is little more than an interesting artistic exercise. What booksellers will make of it remains to be seen.
Just imagine a building’s facade equipped with a brain and consciousness and so able to sleep and dream. Then go on to imagine this surreal concept in a visible form and you have: BUILDING URBAN MOTION, the latest project from the abstr^ct:groove group. It’s a hybrid from a creative collective and a mobile design studio which has transformed the face of Hotel St. George, in Milan’s Viale Tunisia as the canvas for a multi-sensorial, audio-visual experiment in which narration interacts with architectural design.
A world peopled with pop and electro-soul icons such as M.I.A., Amy Winehouse and Lykke Li. Images with power and provocation often inspired by the irreverent Terry Richardson. Brooke Nipar, Missbehave Mag’s young photo editor is a name to keep an eye on just like his more “exuberant” works.
It’s amazing what can be done with coloured balloons – a lot more than the usual funny animals modelled by smiling clowns.
The Japanese artist Daisy uses balloons in extraordinary compositions – they become decorations, flowers, clothes and brides’ veils – and extremely light-weight of course!
The internet world is a massive crossroads where you can find inspiration; unfortunately it is also a place where creative people often have their ideas ripped off by others. Yet there are folk out there keen to have their ideas “stolen”. In particular we’re talking here about Adam and Jon whose blog Steal Our Ideas is packed with explosive ideas and both funny and at times even poetic provocations on how best to use an I-phone, plan out the new Converce project or just project oneself into the future – a possible spark for other creatives – out and out rabid illumination!
Printed Matter is an interesting visual project developed by designer Evelin Kasikov. It provides three-dimensional reading. What’s it about exactly? Well, integrating graphic design and the world of textiles with a series of books that can help investigate visual perception and the very act of seeing and touching. Most tactile!
So how can you spread the word about your own creative ideas without using the internet? The Berlin-based magazine Papergirl has come up with a most interesting idea – to create works of art by hand, roll them up into tube shapes and then distribute around the city from a bicycle. Ecological, new and a great way of meeting new people!
If you like you can send in your own creations for distribution. Here’s the email to contact mail.
In India people hold a rather special festival to celebrate the arrival of Spring and the triumph of Good over Evil. It’s called Holi, the Festival of Colours.
So what does it consist of? A sort of street fight with coloured water, dusts and multi-coloured tints to shift moods up a gear and banish the winter blues. If you’re keen on seeing it next year, go dressed in white, mix with the crowds and let yourself get coloured.
Otaku Magazine is a new independent voice that promotesthe visual arts in general (graphics, strip cartoons, illustrations, painting, design, fashion, videos, games and accessories) under the emblem of Japan-oriented entertainment. So if anyone out there has some manga-like ideas or maybe a robot-transformer or just some oriental- mood graphics, do send them in!
Toronto based photographer Ian Pool imagines the lives of superheroes if they were average people. In this series of photographs he captures the super human characters, doing completely ordinary things.
The LightScraper is a custom built aluminium structure, fabricated with a layer or semi translucent mesh. The structure can be easily erected in various compositions in an outdoor or indoor setting. A single computer and two projectors are use to bring the sculptures visuals to life. The LightScraper also acts as a giant musical instrument, people’s location influence the melodies emitting from the sculpture.
A simple and effective idea for recycling umbrellas often used just once by the two Italian designers Alice Bertola and Barbara Civilini. They have created an umbrella from extremely resistant material that’s easy to wash, iron and cut without annoying unravelling. After its time as an umbrella, it’s easy to make use of the material – for paper patterns or to make waterproof items such as leggings, bags and saddle covers for bikes.
To launch its latest creation of simple blocks of painted wood, the Millergoodman firm has come up with a beguiling and unusual video. It shows every possible variety of illustration that can be created.
Designed for kids from the age of four up, it’s also a great game for adults keen to give vent to their creative urge. You can also provide your own shape-making contribution by publishing something on Flickr.
He employs the precision and the tools of a surgeon to carve, cut out and assemble old books to create fanciful and surreal effects. Brian Dettmer has a way of revealing hidden meanings as he tells stories that have a gothic flavour – skeletons, young ladies decorated with fancy lace and clouds of butterflies.
Thousands of small medicine bottles filled with coloured liquids become the pixels for the works of the artist Aleksandra Stratimirovic. The result is a curious mix of mosaics and the stained glass effects so beloved by the Byzantine spirit and DAMIEN HIRST’s series of medical pills.
Sometimes a board, some chalk and a lot of imagination can make far more impact than special effects and flawless 3D creations. Check out the Firekites Autumn Story video by Lucinda Schreiber and Yanni Kronenberg in stop motion. Poetry and animation.
A real revolutionary manifesto! Eleven straightforward and valid reasons for repairing broken or flawed objects rather than throwing them in the bin. The idea comes from Platform21 with a call to prolong the life of everything we’re tempted to chuck out. This protest against the “easy-binning culture” finds its justification in creative recycling and includes a pocket reference for creating so-called eco-compatible objects with a generous sprinkling of design, interpreation and imagination.
So let’s all get going! Platform 21 is inviting everyone to send in the most successful solutions so they can be shared and copied.
Incredible, amazing sculptures whose starting-point is hundreds of photographs on every aspect of life and living. This is followed by the meticulous job of recomposing and positioning the photographs to give life to these photograph-sculptures.
The man behind all this is the Korean artist Gwon Osang whom the critics have hailed as “the photographic sculptures artist.” His works are made first by building a sculpture of bodies or objects which is then covered by 10 x 15 images of the object itself to recreate its natural size. Each work of art features around 300 photographs – and a ton of patience!
Food Concepts by Eating-Designer Marije Vogelzang
A trip dedicated to edible design – to taste, smell and the shape and packaging of food all presented on sensorial shelves made to highlight every possible gastronomic signal. An out and out pleasure trip! Eat Love is an almost edible book by Studio Kluif.
Curvy waves, 3-D effects, a stormy seascape, wrenching movements, curves and exciting cracks. Brazilian artist Henrique Oliveira makes use of pieces of wood retrieved from the streets of Sao Paolo to compose windy and undeniably unusual spaces.
The best of contemporary jewellery by over two hundred international designers in an ADORN collection. Curiosities, one-off pieces and some truly bizarre creations – all sharing one common denominator – every piece is to be worn.
SixthSense is a wearable interface that – with just a few hand gestures and with no laptop or PC monitor – lets you take photographs, shoot video, get further information on supermarket products and make phone calls. How, you may ask? Watch the video. So as we wait for the finishing touches to be put to the system let’s start getting used to using our fingers to read our email, surf the web and take photos.
Russian graphic designer Vladimir Tomin has come up with A4 Fontpack – a really simple font inspired by origami folded paper. You can download it or if you have oodles of spare time, try replicating it yourself!
In Hamburg with Batman but where? On the bus! To promote the release of the film the advertising agency Kolle Rebbe is using mini flying-Batmen hanging from the windows of buses. Take a look! Seeing is believing
Those who experience a frisson of pleasure when they hear the word ATARI can now indulge their nostalgia with a special 18-carat ring! Designer Sakurako Shimizu has come up with the ATARI Ring based on the original chip. There’s also a silver version. Just the thing for a stylish, pc-loving geek.
So what are we going to do with all those old music cassettes? Make portraits! It’s an idea by Missouri artist iRI5. He has transformed tape into a graphic medium and come up with some amazingly accurate pictures of famed musicians.
The young Korean artist Myoung Ho Lee makes unusual images with an interplay of natural elements set against representations an tree photographs. Trees are in fact the main theme of his work. His approach is provoking quite a discussion on ideas about how you represent reality, art visions, icons and the ideal.
Head-decorator Miliner Noel Stewart is an eccentric English designer who composes real sculptures to wear on your head. Certainly a great way of getting noticed.
To be named “The Heartbreak Hotel ” – this conceptual space blends art with sex. It’s somewhere to make love you can rent out for hours at a time – for experiences abetted by a kind of special mix as the pleasure increases– an ascension to ecstasy but all done in an arguably artistic way. Heart Break Hotel will rise up at 104, the contemporary arts centre opened last Fall by Paris Municipality. So what does it cost? Not much – from €10 to €15 an hour.
A dash of pungent surrealism in perfect and aesthetic equilibrium with the fascinating world of Gothic Victoriana. The latest offering by top Jewellery designer Bjørg was also created thanks to two talented twenty-year-olds who have interpreted his world.
This is the French artist Zevs, famous for his dripping logos – from McDonalds to IBM. The latest victim to receive the Zev meltdown is Google and its famous logo. His site is well worth a visit – give it a browse!
People are looking for something fresh and new in street art. Any ideas? Well check out Krystian Czaplicki’s creations. She has fun decorating old walls with amazing 3D graphics. The images speak for themselves!
An approach that’s somewhere between painting, sculpture and photography. What look like pixels are in fact wax pastels. So who’s the artist behind it all? Christian Faur, a modern pointillist with the patience of Job!
Mathias Schmied is a Swiss artist who cuts out in-your-face pin-ups from glossy fashion magazines and then has fun hiding them behind large paper creations or transforming them into artistic streamers. This is no street-artist at Carnival time – Schmied’s work is on display in the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Watch the world go by from a “miniature” viewpoint: busy little plastic men
going about their daily business. A curious “documentary” by the photographer Vincent Bousserez.
An unusual cultural step up for the world of TV reality shows: the famous British art collector Saatchi is seeking the next Damien Hirst. And he’s doing it with a reality serial due to be screened by the BBC from September.
The onetime advertising guru will choose six finalists – all young artists who will all frequent courses at a specially organized TV art school to help them nurture their own talent. The winning prize is the chance to exhibit their works at the next Charles Saatchi exhibition to be staged inside the world-famous Hermitage in St. Petersburg, Russia.
Iconic images of man, woman and child hanging out downtown. This is Costume Designer Yvette Helin’s curious project which involves observing and recording the reactions of passers-by to these strange creatures.
The guy responsible for revitalizing soccer gear is the Spanish designer Klas Herbert – even if you might think twice before stepping out to kick a ball around among the dust and puddles!
Maarten Dullemeijer, Rob Stolte and Jeroen Breen are the people behind the highly creative Dutch design group Autobahn. They’ve invented three new irresistible fonts redesigning Helvetica with toothpaste, ketchup and hair gel. Its name? Heldentica, Tomatica and Gelvetica. Fresh Fonts can be downloaded and used right away!
A bus-library fitted out as a temporary store and decorated by a street artist for a Swedish design project. The aim is to spread information and culture to the remotest of zones, far away from the usual circuits exploited by publishers and journalists.
In 2009 the bus will stop by 32 villages in Kiruna Province, Sweden. The project was conceived and designed by the Muungano studio and the van’s graphics were developped by Fredrik Forsberg of They Graphics. Inside you’ll find an endless collection of books, CDs and DVDs as well as a small room for projecting films.
We mentioned his work a few posts back but his latest creation merits a new one: JR has covered 20,000 square metres with the faces, eyes and smiles of Kenyan women and children including a train. That means when it passes through the village, the faces look complete.
A must to look for on Google Earth!
Sculptural shapes and unusual materials such as expanded polyurethane and moss make the jewellery designer Arthur Hash’s creations curious and captivating objects to wear. His studio is in Richmond, Virginia.
Flying objects captured at the perfect moment, actions frozen at the very moment they are about to explode. This shows us how every single instant of time is in itself extraordinary – and already gone for ever! These are some of the key elements in the work of the German photographer Holger Pooten now based in London. His mission? To immortalize the impossible!
Two new phases in Crush & Lovely’s project known as “Fifty people One Question”: Brooklyn and London. Minor confessions from ordinary people stopped and interviewed in the street. Simple, almost banal questions with often surprising answers that possess the taste of poetry.
From now on you can finally feel proud of the ketchup stains on your shirt – yes, the ones you’ve made so many times and which so many of times you’ve tried to hide. The person we need to thank for freeing us from this stress is the designer Yunju Lee fresh from London’s St. Martin School. His solution is collars already stained with lipstick, iron burns, milk splashes and small pins that create the effect of ink stains. An irresistible collection of silver jewellery.
Kim Keever’s works are reminiscent of Constable and Turner: majestic natural landscapes wrapped in light with the threat of heavy showers, flashes of lightning in a sky just after a storm. However here we’re not talking about paintings but photographs. So what’s the photo-set? All created in a fish tank in which Kim reconstructs miniatures of flowers, hills and trees. He then fills the tank with water, illuminates it and shoots. And voilà!
Somewhere between a sculpture, a highly complex origami and a Zaha Hadid installation. The Italian writer Peta just defines them as three-dimensional graffiti.
We add they are also splendid and most original.
Leonardo’s Mona Lisa continues to be an unfathomable masterpiece and the focus of many different interpretations and readings by creative people from all around the world. The latest is the one from the American graphic designer and illustrator Rafa Jenn. His giclee “You Know What I Mean” might not resemble the original that much but it is clearly inspired by the mysterious lady.
If you notice a rather different whiff in the streets of New York, it will be undoubtedly be because of the launch of the new Diptyque store in West Village. Designed by the Benjamin Noriega Ortiz studio, it has one feature designed to drive you crazy, the store assistants. They are so good-looking and won’t mind the slightest if you and your friends go there to shower yourselves in all the various fragrances.
Downtown Delusional Divas recounts the adventures of three young girls – Oona, Swann, and AgNess as they try to eke themselves out a place in the art world of the galleries and worldly social events of Art Basel.
A nice reality show that’s entertaining with a home-made feel. It describes long afternoons in a Tribeca showroom with semi-serious discussions on art and fashion and genial aspects related to making it and looks that are undergoing constant transformation.
Fascinated by graphic effects based on statistical and geographical data, the English artist Whitey Flagg bases his oil or acrylic-painted canvasses on flow diagrams, ASCII codes, graphics, plans and satellite images. Out and out works of art for nerd salons!
It’s a simple and effective idea – lighten up fonts to save on ink. The concept is to use fonts with letters and symbols with internal white spaces. When printed at fewer than 10 pt, they look full.
This method permits savings of as much as 20% less ink. This is not just favourable for the environment but also means a reduction in printing costs. This excellent idea could be applied to many font letters and symbols. In the meantime it can be tested out by using a variant of Vera Sans.
So many defunct technologies in just a few years starting with the first 3.5” ancestors of the floppy disk.
The Turkish studio Antrepo Design Industry has worked out how many floppy disks would be needed these days to install some of the most common and popular software programs. Here are some figures:
- 6 floppy disks for iTunes 8.02
- 358 floppy disks for Adobe Photoshop CS4
- 1760 floppy disks for the Sims 3
- 12 disk floppy disks for Firefox 3 + 36 floppy disks for its added components.
Single-function, lightweight and compact but above all impossible to lose. The ideal solution for those who can never find their mobile phone hiding in some mysterious corner of your bag! Designed by Shirley A. Roberts, it’s called the pre-paid cellular and is worn like a bracelet. Come on girls, your excuses have run out!
The latest in fonts for writing? Try out these handmade ones made from paper created by the London-based Russian graphic designer, Yulia Brodskaya. Another ecology-friendly proposal for precise people who have bags of time for writing messages.
Taken from official campaign drives projects as well as spontaneous initiatives, this round-up of pictures, posters and graphic projects focuses on how the visual was used in support of the new President’s election campaign.
Unusual jewellery by the designer PUREVILE – vintage pieces, pearls, cameos with details that should not be undervalued such as animal jaws and skulls.
Accessories that will certainly won’t go unnoticed!
