Artist Justin "Scrappers" Morrison and Studio Acorn collaborated on this incredible trophy head belt buckle. Only two of them were made. One is holding up Morrison's pants and the other is for an upcoming art show at Giant Robot New York.
Link

The amazing artist Elizabeth McGrath, best known for her creepy-cute faux taxidermy mutants, has a show of watercolor paintings opening tomorrow night, May 10, in Los Angeles. Liz has created more than 50 paintings for this exhibition, titled The Secret Party. It runs until June 4 at the Bill Shire Fine Arts gallery, and all of the work is also viewable online. I'd imagine that this is Liz's last show for a little while as her awesome goth-country band, Miss Derringer, is about to go on tour with Blondie! Above left, "Sailor's Delight" (watercolor on paper, 3" x 2 1/2"). Above right, "Blue Star" (watercolor on paper, 3" x 2 1/2").

Link to online gallery
Link to Elizabeth McGrath's site
Link buy Elizabeth McGrath's monograph, Everything That Creeps
Link to Miss Derringer on MySpace

Previously on BB:
• Liz McGrath, creator of creepy creatures, on BBtv Link
• Liz McGrath show in Los Angeles Link

The Stanford Medical Center is using stereophotography to document gorgeous Italian anatomical waxwork sculptures from the 18th and 19th centuries. Clement Susini (1757-1814) created more than 2,000 of the sculptures to educate medical students. A team from Stanford University Medical Media and Information Technologies (SUMMIT) collaborated with colleagues from the University of Bologna and 3D photographer Bernard Makinson to document the sculptures, currently stored at the Museo delle Cere Anatomiche Luigi Cattaneo. The team has put the first test photos on Flickr as both anaglyphs and "mono" photos. The former are quite spectacular when seen through red-blue glasses. Link to the project page, Link to the anaglyphs, Link to the "mono" photos (Thanks, John Stafford!)

Previously on BB:
• Incredible human dissection photos on Flickr Link

Phil sez, "Dark Roasted Blend has posted a collection of illustrations from early Soviet science fiction, most by Yury Markov. Stunning artistry!" Link

A curator at NY-MOMA had to euthanize a living leather jacket made from human mouse stem-cells -- the art-work had grown out of control and threatened to overflow its containment unit.

One of the central works in the exhibition “Design and the Elastic Mind” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (until 12 May), Victimless Leather, a small jacket made up of embryonic stem cells taken from mice, has died. The artists, Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr, say the work which was fed nutrients by tube, expanded too quickly and clogged its own incubation system just five weeks after the show opened...

Ms Antonelli says the jacket “started growing, growing, growing until it became too big. And [the artists] were back in Australia, so I had to make the decision to kill it. And you know what? I felt I could not make that decision. I’ve always been pro-choice and all of a sudden I’m here not sleeping at night about killing a coat...That thing was never alive before it was grown.”

Link (via Futurismic)

The upcoming Paper Wars exhibit in London's Craze Gallery features giant, elaborate materiel and artillery made from paper, scissors and gluesticks.

...[T]his exhibition, organized by PostlerFerguson, takes their paper AK-47 kit (first published in 2007) as a point of departure and asks participants to respond by altering the object. Featured artists include Ben Wilson, El Ultimo Grito, Oscar and Ewan, Pixelgarten, Hiroko Shiratori, Paul Wysocan, BASE23/DC|DE and more.

Link (via Make!)

Andrew sez, "IEEE Spectrum reporter Josh Romero did a short video piece about the microfiche-to-MIDI machine that I showed at the Bay Area Maker Faire. The machine converts light from a microfiche machine into MIDI signals, which are then played through an old Casio keyboard. The machine is used by the band Microfiche in a few of their songs." Link (Thanks, Andrew!)

Jason Polan has set out to draw every single person in New York -- sounds crazy, but then, this is the guy who drew every work of art in the MOMA:

I am trying to draw every person in New York. I will be drawing people everyday and posting as frequently as I can. It is possible that I will draw you without you knowing it. I draw in Subway stations and museums and restaurants and on street corners. I try not to be in the way when I am drawing or be too noticeable. Whenever I have a new batch of drawings I will post them on this blog. If you would like to increase the chances of a portrait of YOU appearing on this blog please email me (art@jasonpolan.com) a street corner or other public place that you will be standing at for a duration of two minutes (I will be on the corner of 14th street and 8th avenue on the North-east corner of the street from 2:42-2:44pm this Thursday wearing a bright yellow jacket and navy rubber boots, for example).

Link (via Kottke)

Artist Henk Hofstra installed sunny-side up egg sculptures in Leeuwarden, Netherlands. The "Art Eggcident" will remain in the city square for the next six months. Link

Seattle's Roq La Rue Gallery is holding an exhibition of new phantasmagoric paintings by Esao Andrews and Fuco Ueda. The show opens this Friday, May 9, and runs until June 7. Above left, Ueda's "Gumball" (acrylic and shell powder on canvas, 10" x 14"). Above right, Andrews's "Virile Influenza" (oil on wood panel, 18" x 24"). Link to exhibition page, Link to Ueda online gallery, Link to Andrews online gallery

We are pleased to introduce the latest manifestation of the Boing Boing/GAMA-GO mindmeld: the Jackhammer Deathbot tee. Featuring artist Tim Biskup's unholy splicing of our friendly mascot Jackhammer Jill with GAMA-GO's dastardly Deathbot, this new t-shirt is made from 100% combed organic cotton. It's available for $28 in men's sizes small through XXL. Dig it! Link

Chris Tackett of Treehugger.com says: "I recall you doing this post on Isabella Rossellini's bug porn. The videos [called "Green Porno"] are now viewable, so we did a post about that." Link

Today on Boing Boing tv, a classic animated work from Syd Garon: "SNEAK ATTACK" by DJ Q-Bert. Music video by Eric Henry and Syd Garon.

Next, an animation based on work by illustrator Jon Burgerman for his forthcoming book Pens are my Friends, produced by Jason Arber and Wyld Stallyons.

Link to BBtv episode with discussion and downloadable video.

Related Boing Boing tv episodes:

Syd and Eric: music videos for Dan The Automator and Buckethead

Jack Chick, animated: "Somebody Goofed," by Syd and Rodney

Leif says: "Bradley J. Gake has put a set of absolutely incredible 50/60s Los Angeles Press Photographers Annuals on Flickr." Link

Gord says: "Cory's blogged about Ranjit Bhatnagar before ('Crazy' performance). Here's his latest artbot. I *love* the way this guy's mind works!"

Simple automatic instruments are constructed from local materials and objects on site. The system learns the sounds it can make by trying out its instruments, and then uses its range of sounds to try to reproduce the rhythmic and melodic qualities of sounds such as the voices of visitors. It then loops and alters these imitative sequences into improvised compositions. (That last part's not done yet, so you won't see it in the video.)

In this example, the source audio is a bit of the soundtrack from the movie Citizen Kane, and the noisemakers are a set of found object percussion machines and an electromagnetically fretted electric guitar. Link

In today's episode of Boing Boing tv, Xeni visits with John Gaeta, the Academy Award-winning Visual Effects supervisor of the Matrix trilogy, to learn more about his digital craft in the new film Speed Racer. This latest Wachowski brothers project reinterprets the classic 1960s Japanese anime series of the same name, and opens in theaters nationwide on May 9.

Gaeta explains how he used VR "bubbles" and a mysterious team known as the "world unit" to create the film's "poptimistic photo-anime" feel. The live action Speed Racer is saturated in a candy-colored palette so rich, audiences may just leave the theater with a contact sugar high.

Link to Boing Boing tv episode with discussion and downloadable video.

And Gaeta adds a special message for Boing Boing tv viewers, who are already well accustomed to all things digital -- "For optimal viewing experience, see Speed Racer at a digital cinema or IMAX theater." He's not kidding, with a feature like this, analog projection just doesn't do the work justice.

View interactive samples of the digital building blocks behind the movie in a related online feature in VRMAG, "Speed Racer Uncovered."

(Special thanks: John Gaeta; Andy and Larry Wachowski; and David Pescovitz)

Max Knight built this working, rideable "Walking Bike" for a magazine shoot -- don't miss the video of the bike in action. Link (via Make)

Adam Savage is at Maker Faire this year and he brought some of his incredible creations, including a Maltese Falcon, an Indiana Jones whip, and this beautiful recreation of a Dodo bird skeleton.

(Click on thumbnails for enlargement)

Droog Design's Do Hit Chair is a cube made from .04" steel. It's shipped with a sledgehammer for you to customize it's shape yourself. Created by Marjin van der Poll, it's available from Unica Home for $6718 for one that he pre-hammered. A smash-your-own model is $5924.
Link (via Paper Magazine)

UPDATE: Here is a video of the chair being customized. Link

Who knew eBay was such a repository of avant garde art criticism? Steven (known to previous fine art collectors, or, bidders, whatever as an "A+++ Ebayer") writes about his, erm, nut:

I don't know why I stopped at this particular cashew as I was eating my Trader Joe's sweet, savory & tart trail mix, but as an artist the unexplainable happens often. My body is a vessel of creation and expression in tune with everything around me, including what you would see as "just another cashew"

No, something about the shape of this particular cashew reflects the shape of our society. As the artist, I have split and re-glued the cashew as an expression of the “cracks” that have been “glued” in modern life. It is a complete work of art in every way. Famed art critic Richard Barokavov had this to say about the piece:

“Steven’s ‘Trader Joe’s Cashew #4’ is such a complete and absolute brutally dissecting view of the industrial conflict between capitalism and modernism that is is hard for even the most verbose of critics to add too. Regardless of Steven’s relation to me as a colleague and studiomate, the intense complexity I feel for this work is also complete and absolute.”

Again, I don’t expect most to fully understand the complexity of the form but as you can see it is quite powerful.

Link, he wants like half a mil for it. (via Sean Bonner)

These two happy indiviuals are featured in the Kaibo Zonshinzu anatomy scrolls from 1819. Pink Tentacle has more on the scrolls, painted by a physician named Yasukazu Minagaki. Link

Here's a video of Gary Panter (wiki), the artist who created the character Jimbo and was the designer of the set for Pee Wee's Playhouse, talking about his new art monograph. Link (Thanks, Coop!)

Today on Boing Boing tv, a sneak peek inside TOKYOLOGY, a new documentary exploring contemporary Japanese pop-culture hosted by Carrie Ann Inaba. Oh, what adventures await: sneak behind the scenes at a Japanese Rock TV show that pretends it's shot in Los Angeles, cruise Harajuku, go clubbing with goth girls in Shinjuku, shop for shoes with Lolitas, experience the madness of the Tokyo Anime Fair, visit a video game company, browse the streets of Akihabara, and meet anime creator Yoshitoshi Abe.

Link to Boing Boing tv post with discussion and downloadable video.

DVDs are available in retail stores and online, tokyology.tv has details. (Special thanks to Tokyology co-producers Felix and Julian Mack of Nightjar.)

Here are some photos of giant sculptures being set up for Maker Faire, taking place this weekend in San Mateo. (Click on thumbnails for enlargement) Link

A friend at Fleshbot writes...

Prague's Big Sister internet-enabled brothel has long been high on our list of travel destinations ever since our globetrotting siblings at Gridskipper first bought it to our attention a couple of years ago. (But only from a sociological perspective, you understand, not because we want to boink our way to international notoriety via the dozens of video cameras set up throughout the establishment which broadcast the goings-on to tens of thousands of the site's subscribers.) Short of going to Prague or coughing up a $40 monthly membership to join the website, the best way to see what Big Sister is all about is photographer Hana Jakrlova's Big Sister photodocumentary project...

Link to Fleshbot post (nsfw). Shown here, the, ah, polar bear theme room inside the Big Sister brothel.

Google just launched a bunch of custom artist themes for iGoogle, and they were kind enough to invite me to design a theme for it. I called it "Adventure in Lollypop Land." The scene changes throughout the day.

I donated my fee to the wonderful SOVA Community Food & Resource Program, run by Jewish Family Service of Los Angeles.

Link

A redemption tale by the prolific religious comic book artist Jack Chick is born again through animation, in a classic short film by Syd Garon and Rodney Ascher.

Link to Boing Boing tv episode with discussion and downloadable video.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Chick, born in 1924, is the most published comic book author in the world. Over decades, his publishing company has released some 500 million fundamentalist evangelical "Chick tracts" warning of the eternal consequences of a life lived without salvation.

One of these cautionary cartoon gospels, "Somebody Goofed," attracted the attention of animator-directors Syd and Rodney a decade ago -- and they transformed it into the mixed media pastiche Boing Boing tv presents to you, dear viewer, today.

This 8 minute film debuted at the DFILM Digital Film Festival in San Francisco on November 7, 1997. DFILM founder Bart Cheever tells Boing Boing tv:

We showed it all over the world. No other film came close to provoking the kind of intense, gut-level reaction that we saw with Goofed -- people really loved it or really, really hated it. Religious people called it blasphemous and threatened to organize boycotts of our shows. Anti-religious people called it religious propaganda and wrote angry letters to theater owners where we screened the festival.

To me, Goofed was the Birth of a Nation of After Effects films, and was really the aesthetic blueprint for much of what you see on TV today. So many people have copied their cool 2D photo-animations, and their style is used so heavily today on VH1, E, MTV, and so on -- it's easy to forget how groundbreaking the film was. No one had ever really done anything like it before.

I loved the way Goofed is this rich moving collage of newsprint religious tracts, album covers (can you spot Paul's Boutique?), clips from 70's gangster films, cigarette ads from old magazines etc. To me, Goofed represented a whole new way of collaging various forms of media.

UPDATE: We reached out to the filmmakers for some thoughts on this amazing piece of work, 10 years after its creation -- Rodney Ascher tells us...

Making Somebody Goofed was 50% art experiment and 50% self-designed AfterEffects tutorial. It was the first digitally animated project for both of us (I think...). It took at least 6 months to make the thing, maybe close to a year. I was running a Powermac 7500 (Syd's always had a model 1 or 2 levels faster than mine so he was probably behind the wheel of an 8500) and we got a gasp during a Q and A when we explained that rendering some of the QuickTimes took more than a day or two and transporting the uncompressed files demanded about 12 Jaz cartridges!

It was designed to be something of a Rorschach test: we followed the original comic as rigorously as we could, resisted any temptation to change things around (for pacing, content, whatever) and allowed the audience to interpret however they liked. During its premiere at DFilm, the audience was mostly quiet and thoughtful but at a screening at the SFMoMA it played pretty much as a spoof with a lot of appreciative laughter. On the other hand, when it was shown at a screening for the Television Commercial Industry, the awkward, confused, slightly hostile silence was deafening. Happily enough, we've gotten very nice responses from both Chick Publications and The Suicide Girls.

Related posts on Boing Boing:

Photo Fictions: bizarre narrative photo show in L.A.

Rodney Ascher's short film about a freefalling parachutist

Syd and Rodney's "Jack Chick's Titanic" video

Galactus meets Jack Chick

Jack Chick's own Passion

Jack Chick profile

Parody of Jack Chick tract warns against tiki worship.

Hallowe'en, Jack Chick style

(Special thanks to Pesco, and to Syd Garon)

The gem sweater bedazzlements and lyrical besnazzlements of "internet ceWEBrity" Leslie Hall have graced Boing Boing tv before -- but in today's episode, Ms. Hall submits an exclusive tour diary for BBtv viewers, a veritable world exclusive. "With these shoulderpads I have the strength to destroy, villages, homes, and crops," she warns. Her ladyfire is mighty, as all ye who gaze upon this video shall witness.

Ms. Hall was among the internet personalities who participated in the recent ROFLcon gathering in Cambridge, Mass. Her presence there among fellow internet memesters is documented in this Wired gallery, and in a photo set from Scott Beale of Laughing Squid. See also his short video of the Tron Guy talking about geek women. Which brings us back to the 26-year-old Ms. Hall, straight outta Iowa, believed by her many followers to be the fiercest gold-lame-wrapped geek woman on the planet.

Link to Boing Boing tv post with discussion and downloadable video.

Related Boing Boing tv items:
* Leslie Hall: ceWEBrity, gem sweater diva, jammer of jams.
* Leslie Hall iPhone snaps, "Blame the Booty" remix - Boing Boing