What each artist saw was unique to the time, the weather, and the place. The locations ranged from Tel Aviv to Brooklyn, Buenos Aires to rural Georgia. Some saw different hues of blue. Some saw black, pink, or gray. Some saw stars or clouds or fog or rain. Here it was summer. There it was night.
I love projects like these…moments of time, collectively caught in the amber.
Spacetime Coordinates sells prints, metal mementos, and t-shirts that feature the planets of the solar system in the exact locations they were in on the date of your birth (or other significant date). For their new Kickstarter campaign, they’re offering color prints.
When I was a kid, I spent far too many hours mucking around in Lotus 1-2-3 trying to make a spreadsheet to calculate how often all the planets in the solar system would line up with each other (disregarding their differing planes, particularly Pluto’s).1 I could never get it working. Turns out that a precise alignment has probably never occurred, nor will it ever. But all the planets are “somewhat aligned” every 500 years or so. Neat! (via colossal)
I spent many more hours making a spreadsheet of every single baseball card I owned and how much it was worth, updated by hand from Beckett’s price guide. Time well spent?↩
Dear Dr. Marston, I slapped these two out in a hurry. The eagle is tough to handle — when in perspective or in profile, he doesn’t show up clearly — the shoes look like a stenographer’s. I think the idea might be incorporated as a sort of Roman contraption. Peter
The Wonder Woman character was conceived by William Moulton Marston, who based her on his wife Elizabeth Marston and his partner Olive Byrne. (Reading between the lines about WW’s creation, you get the sense that Elizabeth deserves at least some credit for genesis of the character as well.) On the same drawing, Marston wrote back to Peter:
Dear Pete — I think the gal with hand up is very cute. I like her skirt, legs, hair. Bracelets okay + boots. These probably will work out. See other suggestions enclosed. No on these + stripes — red + white. With eagle’s wings above or below breasts as per enclosed? Leave it to you. Don’t we have to put a red stripe around her waist as belt? I thought Gaines wanted it — don’t remember. Circlet will have to go higher — more like crown — see suggestions enclosed. See you Wednesday morning - WMM.
Wonder Woman was created by the American psychologist and writer William Moulton Marston (pen name: Charles Moulton), and artist Harry G. Peter. Olive Byrne, Marston’s lover, and his wife, Elizabeth, are credited as being his inspiration for the character’s appearance. Marston drew a great deal of inspiration from early feminists, and especially from birth control pioneer Margaret Sanger; in particular, her piece “Woman and the New Race”. The character first appeared in All Star Comics #8 in October 1941 and first cover-dated on Sensation Comics #1, January 1942. The Wonder Woman title has been published by DC Comics almost continuously except for a brief hiatus in 1986.
William, Elizabeth, Olive seemed like really interesting people. They lived together in a polyamorous relationship (which I imagine was fairly unusual for the 1940s) and William & Elizabeth worked together on inventing the systolic blood pressure test, which became a key component in the later invention of the polygraph test. Olive was a former student of William’s and became his research assistant, likely helping him with much of his work without credit.
Update: The upcoming film Professor Marston and the Wonder Women is a biographical drama about the lives of William, Elizabeth, and Olive. Here’s a trailer:
Wall Drawing 797 is a conceptual artwork by Sol LeWitt consisting of instructions that anyone can use to make a drawing. I found this at The Kid Should See This1 and I cannot improve on their description:
How does one person’s actions influence the next person’s actions in a shared space? Sol LeWitt’s wall drawings explore this intricate visual butterfly effect in the collaborative art entitled Wall Drawing 797, a conceptual piece that can be drawn by following LeWitt’s instructions. (He died in 2007.)
“Intricate visual butterfly effect” is such a good way of putting it. I have a huge wall right above my desk…I kind of want to make my own Wall Drawing 797 now.
You should be reading The Kid Should See This even if you don’t have children. It’s always so good and interesting.↩
The Tree Alphabet was made by Katie Holten and was used in her book, About Trees (Amazon), which features writing from Jorge Luis Borges, Charles Darwin, Ada Lovelace, Elizabeth Kolbert, and Robert Macfarlane.
In ABOUT TREES, Katie Holten invites us to enter some of these forests. She has created a Tree Alphabet and used it to translate a compendium of well known, loved, lost and new writing. She takes readers on a journey from ‘primeval atoms’ and cave paintings to the death of a 3,500 year-old cypress tree, from Tree Clocks in Mongolia and forest fragments in the Amazon to Emerson’s language of fossil poetry, unearthing a grove of beautiful stories along the way.
Artist Cindy Sherman has had a private Instagram account for some time but suddenly made it public the other day. Scrolling back through the archives, it becomes apparent that Sherman has been playing around with new techniques for altering her appearance, constructing an online exhibition of sorts in the process.
For an artist whose practice is based almost entirely on how she presents herself, Sherman has managed to remain camera-shy in her life outside of the studio. Yet, in a surprising move, the photographer has recently taken to Instagram to share images of herself that echo photographs typically reserved for gallery walls. Not only does this provide a generous look into her process for her fans, it also raises the question: Is Cindy Sherman using Instagram to make new work?
Pablo Picasso painted his first self-portrait in 1896 (top), when he was 15 years old. Many styles, years, and artistic innovations later, he made one of his last in 1972 at the age of 90 (bottom)…it was called Self-Portrait Facing Death. Open Culture has a look at how Picasso’s portrayal of himself changed over his long and productive life.
The severe youth of 15, further up, brooding, world-weary, and already an accomplished draughtsman and painter; the grimly serious romantic at 18, above — these Picassos give way to the wide-eyed maturity of the artist at 56 in 1938, at 83, 89, and 90, in 1972, the year before his death. That year he produced an intriguing series of eclectic self-portraits unlike anything he had done before.
Leonardo da Vinci was an avid taker of notes. Over the course of his working life, he filled thousands of pages with drawings, sketches, equations, and his distinctive mirrored handwriting. The British Library has one of Leonardo’s notebooks and has digitized and put all 570 pages of it online. It’s interesting to see all of the spare geometric line drawings and then every once in awhile there’s this wonderfully rendered 3D-shaded tiny masterpiece in the margin when more detail was required. (via open culture)
Artist Visoth Kakvei makes these intricately patterned illustrations and posts them to his Instagram account. Lately, he’s been playing with faux 3D illusions and augmented reality, which pairs really well with his illustration style.
Fun fact: Koons listens to Led Zeppelin for about an hour every day. From the Museum of Contemporary Art in LA, this is a short documentary on the life and work of artist Jeff Koons, narrated by Scarlett Johansson. I’ve been experiencing Jeff Koons’ art for almost two decades now and I still can’t decide if I like it or not or if Koons is full of shit or not. I would still love to see his project for the High Line come to fruition though.
The photo I submitted for this request is actually a 3D model created on a computer, by means of several different software and techniques used for special effects in movies and in the video game industry. It is a digital image, where the body is absent, the result of an artificial process.
The image corresponds to the official demands for an ID: it is resembling, is recent, and answers all the criteria of framing, light, bottom and contrasts to be observed.
The document validating my french identity in the most official way thus presents today an image of me which is practically virtual, a version of video game, fiction.
If you look long and close enough at the high-res 3D image, there are little tells that it’s fake (the hairline, for example) but you could glance at it 1000 times without suspecting a thing. Even if it’s fake it’s real, eh Sippey? (via @zachklein)
I’ve featured the work of Alexey Kondakov before…he takes people from classic paintings and inserts them seamlessly into contemporary photographs. Kondakov has continued to hone his craft and many of his recent efforts are shockingly good. For more of his work, check out his Instagram or Facebook.
One of his most celebrated works titled “Cosmic Thing” (2002), shows a disassembled Volkswagen Beetle, suspended from wires in mid-air in the manner of a mechanic’s instruction manual. The result is a fragmented object that offers a new perspective of the car first developed in Nazi Germany which was later produced en masse in Mexico. Through his work, Damián Ortega discusses specific economic, aesthetic and cultural situations and how regional culture affects commodity consumption. He began his career as a political cartoonist and his art has the intellectual rigour and sense of playfulness, causing an association with his previous occupation. Ortega’s works highlight the hidden poetry of everyday objects as well as their social and political complexity.
For their playful Artisan Brunch project, Kyle Bean, Aaron Tilley, and Lucy-Ruth Hathaway imagined how noted artists like Damian Hirst, Salvador Dali, and Alexander Calder would incorporate the idea of brunch into their art works. Loved this, despite the conspicuous lack of a bloody mary…perhaps a second edition with a Warhol soup can representation of the bloody? (via colossal)
The computer will open Photoshop and start creating a painting. It will use an array of symbols, brushes, and shapes all, relating to the idea of vacation and its opposite — work. Once the painting has been completed, the software will upload it to the website awayonvacation.live and post it to the Artist’s Twitter and Facebook accounts.
Watch stone carver Anna Rubincam as she goes from measuring a live person (essentially creating a geometric model of their face) to a clay model to a finished stone portrait in three weeks.
On a human face, even though there’s a change in pigment, there’s no end. Like, you come to the end of the lips and it just carries on going. And if you try and make it a stark difference, then the face will look strange. The skin is sort of a continuous surface that undulates and has tension in certain places and slack in other places.
I got so anxious watching her carving the stone piece from the clay model. One false move and… *bites nails* More about how the film was made. (via digg)
For his Photographs of Films project, Jason Shulman condenses entire movies into single photos using ultra-long exposures. Some of the resulting photos are just shape and color, but for films that use longer shots of static sets, you can make out some identifying features, as with the war room and Ripper’s office in the Dr. Strangelove still above. And the Dumbo still I could almost drop in as a new header image for kottke.org.
Wired recently featured Tabitha Soren’s project, Surface Tension, for which she photographed the fingerprints and smudges left on the screens of devices.
The marks on the glass screens that technology users normally try to ignore or get rid of are the focal point of SURFACE TENSION. The textural conflicts in these pictures record how we now spend our lives. They’re not just grime; they’re evidence of the otherwise invisible.
In an earlier project (also, weirdly, titled Surface Tension), photographer Meggan Gould took photos of her and her husband’s smudged iPad screens.
In 2012, Evan Roth produced a series of Multi-Touch Paintings, “paintings created by performing routine tasks on multi-touch hand held computing devices”. The tasks include slide-to-unlock, playing Angry Birds level 1-1, adding two numbers with the calculator app, and typing in a username and password.
I prefer Roth’s take the most (it’s the simplest…and first) but what I like about all of these is they compress many actions over time into a single flat images, not unlike BriefCam does with surveillance videos. Simple examples of time merge media.
Matte paintings are fake sets that-most of the times-used to be made with plexiglass and oil paint. The artists used oversized panels to create the necessary detail that the camera needed to fool the audiences when the film was projected over the large surface of the theater screen. The paintings were combined with live action filmed to match the perspective of the painting. If done well, the public would totally buy into the shot.
Robert Bechtle has nothing on these guys. Bonus painting: the warehouse scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark.
They had to use a painting because the filmmakers were unaware of Ikea at the time.
The School of Life on four uses of literature. I especially liked this bit:
We’re weirder than we’re allowed to admit. We often can’t say what’s really on our minds, but in books, we find descriptions of who we genuinely are and what events are actually like described with an honesty quite different from what ordinary conversation allows for. In the best books, it’s as if the writer knows us better than we know ourselves. They find the words to describe the fragile and weird special experiences of our inner lives: the light on a summer morning, the anxiety we felt at a gathering, the sensations of a first kiss, the envy when a friend told us of their new business, the longing we experienced on the train looking at the profile of another passenger we never dare to speak to. Writers open our hearts and minds and give us maps to our own selves, so that we can travel in them more reliably and with less of a feeling of paranoia and persecution. As the writer Emerson remarked, “In the works of great writers, we find our own neglected thoughts.”
I would argue these points also apply, in one degree or another, to not just literature but to any artful endeavor: film, TV, comics, theater, painting, etc.
Twitter user @fuguhitman has recently done a series of breadbirds with portmanteau names like Croisswant, Breadolark, Pidgingerbread, Bagull, and Crownut. Now I’m hungry and I want to go sit in a quiet forest with binoculars.
British sculptor Anish Kapoor and Zaha Hadid Architects have proposed a massive sculpture resembling a meteorite for the centerpiece of the UK Holocaust Memorial.
Meteorites, mountains and stones are often at the centre of places of reflection, especially in the Jewish tradition. They call on the vastness of nature to be a witness to our humanity. A memorial to the Holocaust must be contemplative and silent, such that it evokes our empathy. It must be a promise to future generations that this terrible chapter in human history can never occur again.
Mexican artist Moisés Hernández makes these simple, graceful bird sculptures by having a machine carve the shapes out of ash and filling in the plumage by hand-dipping them in watercolor paint, as if decorating Easter eggs.
In an attempt of generating a balanced dialogue between machine made and handmade objects, we made soft and continuous shapes milled with CNC technology contrasted with handmade painting done by immersion in coloured water, an experimental technique we developed for this project, which gives the birds a unique personality. This technique of painting allows to achieve an interesting texture of intersections and transparency made by layers of colour that resembles the plumage of birds. The amount of colour, hue and the way sections cross one another depends on the time and position the wood is plunged.
Self Reflected is a project by a pair of artist/scientists that aims to visualize the inner workings of the human brain.
Dr. Greg Dunn (artist and neuroscientist) and Dr. Brian Edwards (artist and applied physicist) created Self Reflected to elucidate the nature of human consciousness, bridging the connection between the mysterious three pound macroscopic brain and the microscopic behavior of neurons. Self Reflected offers an unprecedented insight of the brain into itself, revealing through a technique called reflective microetching the enormous scope of beautiful and delicately balanced neural choreographies designed to reflect what is occurring in our own minds as we observe this work of art. Self Reflected was created to remind us that the most marvelous machine in the known universe is at the core of our being and is the root of our shared humanity.
It’s important to emphasize that these images are not brain scans…they are artistic representations of neural pathways and other structures in the brain.
Self Reflected was designed to be a highly accurate representation of a slice of the brain and is informed by deep neuroscience research to allow it to function as a reliable educational tool as well as a work of art.
Colossal posted these watercolor paintings by Elicia Edijanto on Friday and I’ve been peeking at them all weekend.
“My subject are often children and animal because they are honest, sincere, unprejudiced and unpretentious,” shares Edijanto. “They give me so much inspiration for [a] particular mood or atmosphere, such as tranquility, solemnity, and also wilderness and freedom, which I put on my paintings.”
The pieces are part of an ongoing series titled Drinking Tea, and unlike the mechanical process of producing cans, each object is sculpted and painted by hand.
Oh, I really like these. The detail, the delicate realism, the muted but also somehow vibrant colors. Me Kyeoung Lee has been drawing South Korean convenience stores for the past two decades. There appears to be a recent book of her work, but I don’t know if or where it’s available (Google Translate isn’t working on that page). Doesn’t look like prints are available either. Yo 20x200, get on this! (via colossal)
Artist Simon Birch and architect Paul Kember have recreated the famous bedroom from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey as part of a larger art project called The 14th Factory in the Lincoln Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles. Weirdly, when Birch approached Kember about doing the project, Kember revealed that his uncles had worked on the actual set for Kubrick:
Birch showed the project’s architect, a guy named Paul Kember, a series of stills from the film hoping he’d be able to recreate it. Then Paul goes, and I’m paraphrasing here, “Oh, Si, didn’t I tell you? My uncle and great-uncle — you know, Tony and John? — were draughtsman on that movie, and they literally — literally! — worked on that exact room! Isn’t that bonkers?!”
From the Instagram evidence, it looks as though you can walk around the bedroom, sit on the furniture, lay on the bed, etc. This might almost be worth making a special trip to LA.
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