Tom Gauld, author of the astounding The Gigantic Robot book, has a new print available at Buenvaventura Press, called "Characters for an Epic Tale."
9.5 x 12.5 inches, 2 colors [note the apparition, done in a gray spot-color -- Mark], letterpress printed on Hahnemühle Mould-made Ingres paper. Signed and numbered edition of 150, half available through Buenaventura Press and half through Tom Gauld himself. This edition of 150 has been divided between BP and the artist. If you are in North America you can order direct from us here, for the rest of the world you can order it soon directly from the artist's website www.tomgauld.com
Buy yours now! These are going fast, and the price will increase to $150 when we are down to the last ten!
In this short video by C. Coy, designer Milton Glaser draws a picture of Shakespeare while talking about the ways that drawing helps him think and perceive: "for me, drawing has always been a primary way of encountering reality."
His ideas reminding me of cartoonist Seth's short essay for The Walrus called "The Quiet Art of Cartooning." Both Seth and Glaser are in agreement that your mind opens up on interesting ways while you draw. Teachers who prevent students from drawing and doodling while being taught a lesson are hindering their learning.
A Spanish design firm called The Emotion Lab created a series of home furnishings inspired by things we see on the street. For example, this room lamp is based on mirrors that let motorists see around corners. Also: a coat hanger reminiscent of antennas, and bookshelves inspired by scaffolding.
The Plum Song is the newest music video created by Omodaka, the Japanese experimental electropop group that describes itself as a "mutational fusion of music and motion graphics." It features the voice of folk singer Akiko Kanazawa and art direction by Teppei Maki, and pays homage to the Edo period (1603-1868) red light district in Tokyo called Yoshiwara.
I was reading a Cool Tools review of a company that puts any image on blinds, wallpaper, or flooring, and one of the comments led me to some fantastic illusions made using photo prints on the floor. More info on the bathroom floor and elevator from the Amazing Illusions blog.
UPDATE: Turns out the bathroom was for a Photoshop contest and so, is faux. I hope somebody makes it real though! (Thanks, Dean Putney!)
Michael Wolf took 100 photos of people living in Hong Kong's oldest public housing estate. Each flat is 100 square feet. Almost every room has the same kind of metal bunk bed. They almost all have a TV, electric fan, and rice cooker.
Matt Logue says: I just completed a self-published book depicting an uninhabited Los Angeles, and it got an honorable mention in the photography.book.now competition at blurb.com! The photos were made over a period of 4 years, beginning in 2005, at a variety of locations around LA.
Yesterday I received a surprise package in the mail: a cigar box ukulele kit from Papa's Boxes (which sells kits for four different ukuleles and a 5 string banjo, all based on cigar boxes). It looks like it has everything needed -- a cigar box, strings, hardware, glue, drill bits, and even a piezoelectric buzzer for an acoustic/electric pickup. The parts are all labeled and everything looks like it's been put together with loving care.
The neck is pretty much finished, with fretboard and frets already in place. That means it ought to be pretty easy to make with just a few standard tools, like a drill and a screwdriver.
I think this will be my Thanksgiving weekend project!
This trompe l'oeil back-garden uses painted lines to make it appear that the tree is disappearing into a sink-hole:
Deformscape is an outdoor extension to a private dwelling in San Francisco. Situated in a tightly packed urban neighborhood, this limited space outdoor sculpture garden inherits a large tree, and uses this sole arboreal presence to establish a gravitational pattern of grooves that are focused towards the tree's centroid. This asserts the valued presence of the carbon-absorbing tree and its green canopy overhead, while allowing for a maximum of usable surface area below free of other vegetation. To generate the resultant pattern, a 3-dimensional bulge is formed around the tree, and its distorted wire-grid projected onto a 2-dimensional surface. Taking into account appearance effects created by perspective views from inside, the resultant planar surface appears sink around the tree.
LIFE kindly invited me to guest edit a photo slideshow about the great industrial designer Raymond Loewy. I selected the photos from LIFE's archives and wrote the captions.
Six years after opening his office in New York in 1927, Loewy created this pencil sharpener, which looks as if it might have been designed using a wind tunnel. The pointed shape nicely conveys the purpose of the machine, while still offering a bit of mystery, and even adventure, to anyone brave enough to introduce a pencil into its jet-black lacuna. The warm wooden crank, meanwhile, invites users to interact with a device that, in all other respects, appears to be alien technology.
A lovely video of Chris Piascik at work. "Chris explains that these doodles start with him randomly scribbling out a loopy pattern and then filling it in."
Boing Boing Video proudly debuts a new piece from the "great god almighty could it get any more awesome?" N.A.S.A. music project, this one from two personal music heroes: Tom Waits, and Kool Keith. The track is called Spacious Thoughts, and you can pick it up on the project's debut album, Spirit of Apollo (Amazon link.)
NASA, short for "North America South America," is a music collaboration project assembled by Squeak E. Clean (aka Sam Spiegel, brother of film director Spike Jonze) and DJ Zegon (Ze Gonzales, professional skateboarder).
The music video embedded above was created by Montreal-based Fluorescent Hill, and I asked collaborators Mark Lomond and Johanne Ste-Marie a few questions about how all that crazy magic came together. Below, and after the jump, are their replies.
BB: Tell me a little about Fluorescent Hill? Who are you guys, where are
you, what do you do?
Fluorescent Hill: Well, we're a very small collective of artists, basically myself (mark
lomond) and johanne ste-marie.
we started working together while in school here in Montreal, along with
some other friends. So we've
been together for almost eight years. We do design, illustration,
animation, live action,
basically anything artistic, but with a primary focus on film.
BB: How did the NASA video project come together, and what were your first
thoughts when you learned what track and what
musical artists would be involved?
Fluorescent Hill: We got an email one day describing the entire
NASA project, the musicians involved the visual
artists involved and it just blew our minds. As soon as I saw the list of
musicians, deep in my brain I already was hoping
to work on the Kool Keith and Tom Waits collab. They're two artists that I
go way back to my early tape buying days with. So when we finally got on the phone, and they said it was this track
"Spacious Thoughts" a small peice of my brain exploded.
Then when they sent the track I was absolutely just ecstatic.
Artist Shepard Fairey and photographer Glen E. Friedman collaborated on the image above, adapted from a photograph Friedman took of legendary skateboarder Jim Muir. The poster goes on sale for $80 on November 19, in a limited edition of 450, signed and numbered by the artists and by Muir. A portion of proceeds will be used to pay Muir's medical bills -- he was badly injured in a surfing accident earlier this year.
Visualizing empires decline by Pedro M Cruz, who explains: "The data refers to the evolution of the top 4 maritime empires of the XIX and XX centuries by extent. The visual emphasis is on their decline." Here's more on the data and methodology. (via @visualthinkmap)
Marilyn sez, "To kick off Geography Awareness Week, National Geographic asked all the senators in Congress to draw their home states freehand. Some of the results are pretty funny!"
(Shown here: Al Franken's cartographically masterful Minnesota rendering)
Prankster/artist Jason Eppink threw "Print After Parties" inside newspaper boxes in honor of the the death of print. Very clever. From Eppink's project description:
Abandoned by floundering media conglomerates, thousands of neglected newsracks command valuable real estate on busy street corners across New York City, remnants of diminishing demand and a disintegrating economy. Many have already been reclaimed and transformed by urban alchemists, whether as canvases for stickers and paint or clever conceptual works that turn the once important vessels of information into repositories for garbage.
The Print After Parties continue this line of collaboration with blinking LEDs, disco balls, cut-out silhouettes, and handheld radios. When the last vestiges of a collapsed empire litter the landscape, there's only one thing to do: throw a bumpin' party and dance on the ruins.
This is the new Valley Lodge video for their song "All of My Loving." It's the story of a man tormented by his apartment furniture. Kind of like a naked Ethan Allen shoving his bait & tackle in your face all day long when all you really want is a hot girl in cute panties.
Oh, and there's a bear.
The video was produced with a company called Mekanism. Mr. Hill is doing standup shows this week at LA's UCB Theater, go check him out if you're in town.
Parisian artist Clémentine Henrion created these Helium Eternal Balloons. They're made from fabric. I think the effect is rather lovely. From Henrion's etsy shop:
This “illusion” of an helium balloon is entirely made of precious or fancy fabric.
There is no helium in this Helium Eternal balloon : it is stuffed with kapok, like a soft pillow.
A tiny flap fixed at the top of the balloon helps hanging it to your interior’s ceiling, hook it to a curtain rod, the top of a wall etc.
The key thing is to hang it up as high as possible, in order to recreate the magic illusion of a real flying helium balloon!
The most beautiful effect is obtained in setting a bunch of several balloons together, forming a “balloons bouquet”.
The Mandelbulb is an attempt to extrude the classic Mandelbrot Set fractal into three dimensions. I'm not enough of a mathematician to say whether it accomplishes this feat, but it is utterly arresting.
Dan sez, "Where the Wild Things Are was my favorite book as a child. It was the first book I gave to my five year olf daughter India and my 6 month old son Aldous has a fresh copy waiting for him.
So as a moving-in present to ourselves we commissioned our friend Simon Ings my favourite scene in stone. But Max was replaced by Aldous and India was carved in alongside. My wife and I get to be the wild things!
As a kid, I dreamt of making mischief and sailing off to be crowned king of the wild forest. Now I get to swing from the trees with the whole family."
I've been wearing Vans slip-ons since I was a teenager. In recent years, Vans has made shoes featuring designs from pioneering underground artists I really dig like Robt. Williams and Rick Griffin. I was thrilled to find out that they recently added a series of shoes featuring the art of comix pioneer R. Crumb! Seen above are slip-ons emblazoned with Crumb's Fritz the Cat. They're $50. (Mr. Natural appears on a pair of high-tops.)
Davesbit made his own globe using maps from the Generic Mapping Tools project; he used a beachball for a mold and cast the sphere with fiberglass and foam.
here is the plastic beach ball covered in paint for
the inside of the sphere-half mold...
the stand was made from scraps of red oak from a
computer table i built...
Ape Lad sez, "I've taken the shape of the default twitter avatar and adapted it to some non-bird characters. I still haven't figured out how to fit Galactus into that shape."
For survivors-to-be whose healing arsenal includes attitude. I dedicate this post, on this particular day, to Gloria Rosa Linda, who is going to beat the living shit out of breast cancer. Sewing kits range from $12 to $20, depending on what materials you'd like to include. Julie Jackson is the crafter behind them. See also these bracelets, too (those are not for sale) (subversivecrossstitch.com, via Fuzzy Gerdes)
Over at the Imaginary Foundation blog, amazingly surreal photos by French artist Frédéric Lebain who superimposes his photographs on top of the real world.
BB's favorite robot painter, er rather... painter of robots Brian Despain has a show of new paintings opening tonight, November 13, at Seattle's Roq La Rue Gallery. Above, "The Prodigal Son" (oil on panel, 15" x 19").Also showing is John Brophy, whose paintings mixes up iconography from various cultures and religions in a bowl of consumer culture. The full show is viewable online. Brian Despain and John Brophy
A cool website called Sketch Theatre (which features time lapse videos of artists at work) posted their video of the Babytattooville 2009 Art Jam painting session, which ran for about two days and nights.
The early fall brought a spectacular event called Baby Tattooville. It’s organized annually by the publisher of Baby Tattoo books, Bob Self. One weekend and a countless assortment of top talent from the local art scene. This year brought a congregation of James Gurney, Michael Hussar, Audrey Kawasaki, Travis Louie, Molly Crabapple, Elizabeth McGrath, Miss Mindy, Johnny “KMNDZ” Rodriguez, KRK Ryden, Tara McPherson, Gris Grimly, Tim Biskup, Gary Baseman, Yoskay Yamamoto , Nate Frizzell, Luke Chueh, Jeff Soto, Lithium Picnic, and many more.
A number of these artists participated in the Art Jam (a 4 x 5 foot canvas, brushes, acrylics, and 24 hours of to collaboratively cover it in their signature styles) this year for the first time this process was captured by the cameras of Sketch Theatre, and you can see the results here!
My friend T.Bias, a composer and experimental media artist who also happens to have spectacular hair, says,
I flipped my dreadlocks in front of an exceptional high-speed camera shooting on the low end of its abilities; a mere 6,800fps.
k0re happened to be there to record the event in realtime which is great for comparison.
I edited it to my song, "Rag Tag Flag", from my Hooks'n'Heels project.
This crazy-looking dress, created by two designers in London for the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, is made of silk chiffon and 24,000 full color LEDs. It's called the Galaxy Dress. It runs on tiny iPod batteries woven into the fabric so no one part becomes extra-bulky or heavy. The catch: it uses as much electricity as two light bulbs and will only stay lit for up to an hour.
Albanian artist Saimir Strati used 233,000 paintbrushes on end to create this portrait of Michael Jackson. I don't think it looks too much like Jacko, but it's still an interesting artwork and it earned him a Guinness World Record for the largest paintbrush mosaic: 10m x 2.6m mosaic. It was part of Guinness World Records Day where hundreds of thousands of people tried to break a variety of unusual records. You'll be thrilled to learn that Jim Lyngvild now holds the record for the fastest time to peel and eat three lemons: 28.5 seconds. See a gallery of images from the day at The Guardian. Guinness World Records Day(Thanks, Mathias Crawford!)
DesignMartus's portfolio has some beautiful metalwork on display, around a motif of hands and fists. This wonderful fist sledgehammer would be a fine addition to any toolkit.
Joe Broers makes Cthulhu Mythos sculptures, which come with "fictitious 'documentation' that helps provide a feeling of verisimilitude to the project."
Michæl.Paukner's "The ancient Hebrew Conception of the Universe to illustrate the account of creation and the flood." Flickr link, but you really have to see it at the largest possible size.
The big GAMA-GO caravan of savings heads down to Los Angeles on Saturday, November 14! Stop by the Bigfoot Lodge and say hi to our Yeti-lovin' pals. GAMA-GO: LA Holiday Sale
The product designers over at MintPass have created these concept designs for real life calculators that look just like the calculators that pop up on a Windows or Mac OS screen.
A man runs. He falls down. He struggles back onto his feet and he runs some more. It's a simple narrative. Even without much detail, you can understand what's going on. Pause the video, though, and the scene isn't nearly as clear. Movement makes up for the lack of other visual information. Your brain can read and understand a video at much lower resolution than it would need to make equal sense of a still frame.
Meet Jim Campbell, a former Silicon Valley engineer turned visual artist. Inspired by early Bell Labs experiments with pixelated images, and by his own engineering work with digital filters, Campbell makes art that toys with the human brain.
Here's a great look at Pop Up Lunch: NYC, a work-in-progress from Ali Pulver, a grad student at Pratt. The idea is to create a bunch of portable, temporary eating surfaces that hungry New Yorkers can chow down from after buying street food from a wagon or cart.
Those of us who love eating street food, but hate taking lunch back to our desks, have a common problem. Where should we eat? There are a number of indoor pavilions and outdoor seating areas scattered across Midtown, but sometimes I just wish there was a place right next to the carts to just saddle up and tuck in. Well thanks to Pratt Grad Student Ali Pulver, now there is. For her thesis she is developing a couple of tools to make it easier for us to eat on the street. And after testing out the "Lunch Shelf" and the "Hydrantable" last week, I've got to say these could represent the greatest advancements in street food technology since the invention of chicken and lamb over rice!
Somebody has made the dreamy floating wonderworld from the Oscar-nominated Hayao Miyazaki film Howl's Moving Castle out of Lego. The details are quite impressive, and blogging about this is making me want to watch the movie again.
"According to Radio 4 this morning, this specific claim was only made in one ex-policeman's evidence and was short on substantiation. So, although it has grabbed the headlines, it should probably be treated with some scepticism.
I mention this in the interests of accuracy, not as an apologist for the government's policy on DNA data collection, which I regard as misguided and hazardous to civil liberty...."
"My father, who went to snow-ridden Dartmouth in pre-plowing/salting days, says the campus dogs were generally the first ones out on snowy mornings, and thus broke trail and determined the courses of winter paths...."
"This case is a great example of how an ignorant (conservative) public can be duped by not having or understanding all of the information.
To consider one of the emails, from Michael Mann, it references a Soon & Balunias paper that is skeptical of climate change and which was published in Climate Research. (Mann suggests that Climate Research's peer review process has been compromised because of this paper.)
If you follow the trail, you find that the paper in question was funded by the American Petroleum..."
"I said that those characters were "potentially female". The vast majority of them would also fall under the "potentially male" list.
The point was that the "potentially female" list is a lot larger than 3 or 4 characters.
Authorial intentionality has no business anywhere but in the author's own house and dinner parties...."
"I find it very intriguing that the lines aren't always straight, but instead seem to meander and arc from one sidewalk to another. I see them as more of paths of laziness than paths of desire, when the pre-existing paths that aren't that far from the created paths.
It could also be a product of the abandonment of properties, if no one lives there, no one is going to yell at you for crossing their lawn...."
""I'm a huge audiobook nut" and so am I!! And a huge fan of Cory's work - but... :)
Here in Australia it is quite hard to get your works Cory so I have always mostly relied on your CC downloads and then of course your own excellent podcast readings. I was a donator and importer of a couple of Little Brothers and will also be sending a couple more Makers to worthy schools, but...
HOW CAN I (legally) get a copy of Makers as an audiobook?? I quite methodically went through every link on Random House's site and..."
"I wish the media would just ignore Palin. Despite the fact she rails against them, she needs them. If they ignored her, she'd fade away faster than daylight in December in Alaska...."
"Well, I got my sackboy tattoo more than a year ago, so I guess I can be considerd a fan either way. :)
It's an amazing game - doesn't get boring, ever. And so delighted to see some of the storyboarding!..."
"I recall an anecdote from a friend of mine that when Michigan was designing their campus they didn't pour sidewalks right away, but waited until the students made their own paths and just poured the sidewalks based on that...."
I rather like the look of 
For survivors-to-be whose healing arsenal includes attitude. I dedicate this post, on this particular day, to Gloria Rosa Linda, who is going to beat the living shit out of breast cancer. .jpg)
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