Sic itur ad astra = Latin for "thus you shall go to the stars". Yet another beautiful work from artist Michæl Paukner. "I used some scans of old astronomy maps from the 17th century," he says. You can buy prints of his work now! I want the Aztec Calendar print so bad. And Luna, too. I want every single one he's selling, but then I'll need to buy some more wall space, too.

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.

I looked at all 100 photos. Here's the creepiest room. Here's the most cluttered room. Here's the tidiest room. Here's the most spartan room.

Michael Wolf 100 x 100 (Thanks, Lookforthewoman!)

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.

Empty Los Angeles

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!

Papa's Boxes

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.

Raymond Loewy - The Man Who Designed America

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."

Watch Chris Piascik draw

In this video, Michelle Phan shows you how to apply make-up to look like Sailor Moon.

Watch video: Download MP4, YouTube, subtitles at Dotsub.

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.

Jim Muir Print (Obey Giant)

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)

(Shown here: Al Franken's cartographically masterful Minnesota rendering)

Senators: Can You Draw Your State? (Thanks, Marilyn!)

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.

Funnyman Dave Hill, who stars and performs in the music video embedded above, says,

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.

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”.

Mandelbulb: The Unravelling of the Real 3D Mandelbrot Fractal: (via /.)

Where the Wild Things Are in stone (Thanks, Dan!)

R. Crumb Slip-On Vans (Amazon)

[image above: Dan Hillier. Cory and Alice gave me this print for Christmas a few years back, and it hangs in my office!]

♦ dan hillier
♦ kaitlin beckett
♦ chad hagen
♦ peter jansen
♦ zimoun
♦ steve lambert
♦ josh gosfield

Permalink for this edition. Web Zen is created and curated by Frank Davis, and re-posted here on Boing Boing with his kind permission. Web Zen Home and Archives, Store, Twitter.

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."

Twitter Avatars (Thanks, Adam!)

Image link. Devin McGrath. (via galadarling via Susannah Breslin)

In my spam: boner pill fantasy art. This is a real image that adorned a spam email message from a Chinese meds site.

Vegetables are all your body needs (via Street Anatomy)

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.

Designer duo create a dress with 24,000 LEDS

The last day on earth (via JWZ)

Early Tools (via Make)

Here's a photo-essay from True Slant by P.J. Tobia on the houses that opium poppies built in Afghanistan. Here's a related video feature in Monocle magazine. Here's a related AFP item about poppy palaces and widespread corruption in Karzai's Afghanistan, and here's an item about the neologism in the NYT blog "Schott's Vocab." (Image: P.J. Tobia / via Kristie Lu Stout of CNN)

Joe Broers makes Cthulhu Mythos sculptures, which come with "fictitious 'documentation' that helps provide a feeling of verisimilitude to the project."

Miskatonic Valley Fine Art (Via Superpunch)

This is not a book. It's a fabulous little clutch purse that looks like a book cover made by Olympia LeTan.

via Kottke.org

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.

This funny soap dispenser promises to wash away all sins.

Undergrowth Design via NotCot

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.

via The Raw Feed

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.

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!

Pop Up Lunch: NYC

(via Making Light)

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.

Imagine's Brickzone's Flickr via Japanator

The radio dials shown here "represent only a small portion" of Michael Feldt's dial archive.

Gallery of antique radio tuning dials (Via Draplin Design)

Largest Collection Of Jack-O-Lantern Grapes (Thanks, Thessaly!)

Next year, the UK's Royal Mail will sell 1st class stamps that feature images of 10 famous British album covers. The postal service collaborated with music mag editors and design writers to come up with the list — interestingly, no Beatles albums were chosen, but artists represented include Led Zeppelin, The Clash, Pink Floyd, Coldplay, David Bowie, and The Rolling Stones.

I wish the USPS would do something like this instead of boring us with stamps decorated with bells and reindeers.

Studio Dempsey via Creative Review