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Artists Katja Kublitz and Ronnie Yarisal built Anger Release Machine, a vending machine stocked with breakable items like glass plates, porcelain statues, etc. When you put some coins in, the machine dispenses an item, sending it crashing against the bottom of the machine. Then, you feel better. I love the concept, but the implementation leaves something to be desired. Here’s a video of the machine in “action”:
(via bb)
The Illustrated Book of Poultry by Lewis Wright, first published in 1870 and revised several times in the decades following, was “regarded as the most desirable of the English poultry books”. Poultry was very popular in Victorian England and the book housed a tremendous amount of practical poultry knowledge. From a Harvard Library blog post:
“Hen Fever”, as it became known during the Victorian Age, was an unprecedented obsession with owning, breeding, and showing the finest chickens in the world. The genesis of the poultry fancier owes much to Queen Victoria and her royal menagerie. In 1842, she acquired exotic chickens from China, and whatever the Queen did, the public would soon try to imitate and incorporate at home. The Illustrated London News reported “Her Majesty’s collection of fowls is very considerable, occupying half-a-dozen very extensive yards, several small fields, and numerous feeding-houses, laying-sheds, hospitals, winter courts, &c.”. From this point forward, poultry was no longer viewed as common farmyard critters, but valued and appreciated throughout the classes of Victorian Britain. The import and breeding of poultry was not just a leisurely hobby, but a profitable endeavor with sky rocketing price tags for the finest examples.
But the books also contained many wonderful illustrations of the finest examples of chickens and other poultry in the style of Audubon. The different breeds have amazing names like Buff Orpingtons, Plymouth Rocks, Dark Dorkingtons, and Gold Pencilled Hamburghs.
I pulled the images above from a 1911 edition of the book. (via @john_overholt)
Update: I removed a link to a reproduction of the book on Amazon because a reader reported that the quality was not great. (thx, alex)
Gluten Free Museum takes works of art (high and low) and removes all of the gluten from them. A one-trick pony, but a particularly entertaining one. (via tmn)
In an episode of Doctor Who from 2010, the Doctor and his companion Amy take Vincent van Gogh, who was not a commercially successful artist in his own lifetime, to the Musée d’Orsay to see an entire room filled with his paintings. The resulting scene is unexpectedly touching.
This is an hour-long documentary on the Louvre’s recent restoration of Leonardo da Vinci’s The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne.
The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne is one of the most beautiful paintings in the world. It is also one of the most mysterious. Disfigured and even jeopardised by “repairs” and by the successive layers of varnish applied to it over the centuries, it was also in very bad condition. To save the painting, it had to be restored.
The spectacular operation, the likes of which occurs only once a century, took over three years to complete. The complex and outstanding restoration process provided a unique opportunity to get as close as possible to the painting, to how it was originally painted, and to better understand the complex relationship Leonardo da Vinci had with one of his finest masterpieces.
Restorations are fascinating. I only had time today for the first five minutes, but it hooked me enough that I’m going to go back to it tonight. (via @BoleTzar)
Since 1963, Jerry Gretzinger has been working on a map of a world that doesn’t exist. The map is never finished. In the morning, when Gretzinger draws a card out of the deck that sets his task for the day, sometimes that card says “scan”. That means a portion of the map is scanned and archived, and the copy is reworked to “upgrade” that part of the map. And that’s not even the half of it…just watch the whole thing to see how the map has evolved over the years.
It now comprises over 3200 individual eight by ten inch panels. Its execution, in acrylic, marker, colored pencil, ink, collage, and inkjet print on heavy paper, is dictated by the interplay between an elaborate set of rules and randomly generated instructions.
Portions of the map have been shown in Florence, Paris, and New York and it’ll be shown at an upcoming exhibition in Japan. (But where he really wants to display it is in MoMA’s huge atrium.) Prints and original panels are available on Gretzinger’s eBay store. (via @lukaskulas)
For a project called Tag Clouds, street artist Mathieu Tremblin paints over graffiti tags and makes them more legible.
The result looks like when Word says that the Hardkaze and Aerosol fonts are used in the document you’re trying to open but are missing from your computer and you click OK to replace them with whatever’s available. I think the font above is Arial, which is perfect. I also like this faux-watermark piece he did:
Designer Tina Gorjanc plans to create a collection of leather goods made from skin grown from human DNA, specifically the DNA of fashion designer Alexander McQueen. McQueen died in 2010, but he sewed his own hair into the items in his first collection, which is where Gorjanc is sourcing the genetic material for her leather.
The Pure Human project was designed as a critical design project that aims to address shortcomings concerning the protection of biological information and move the debate forward using current legal structure.
Furthermore, the project explores the ability of the technology to shift the perception of the production system for luxury goods as we know it and project its implementation in our current commercial system.
In other words, should we be able to make handbags from of Alexander McQueen’s DNA without his (or his estate’s) permission? Dezeen has more details on the project. BTW, the handbag pictured above is a mockup created from pigskin, onto which freckles have been applied. Other mockups include replicas of McQueen’s tattoos, which, you know, wow. (via @claytoncubitt)
This is cool. StyLit is a patent-pending program for tranferring the style of an artist’s drawing to a 3D rendering in realtime. (via subtraction)
Wes Anderson’s films are chock full of bad fathers and father figures. Bad Dads, the third book in the Wes Anderson Collection, showcases some of the art from the annual Bad Dads art show (prints!) at the Spoke Art Gallery in San Francisco.
Scenes from van Gogh paintings, modified with a fake tilt-shift effect. (via colossal)
The Floating Piers is a new art installant from Christo and Jeanne-Claude consisting of massive floating bridges and docks covered in yellow fabric that connects a pair of islands to the mainland in Italy’s Lake Iseo. The video above offers an aerial view of the installation.
Visitors can experience this work of art by walking on it from Sulzano to Monte Isola and to the island of San Paolo, which is framed by The Floating Piers. The mountains surrounding the lake offer a bird’s-eye view of The Floating Piers, exposing unnoticed angles and altering perspectives. Lake Iseo is located 100 kilometers east of Milan and 200 kilometers west of Venice.
“Like all of our projects, The Floating Piers is absolutely free and accessible 24 hours a day, weather permitting,” said Christo. “There are no tickets, no openings, no reservations and no owners. The Floating Piers are an extension of the street and belong to everyone.”
This is very reminiscent of The Gates, which is one of my favorite pieces of art. (via tksst)
Bhautik Joshi took 2001: A Space Odyssey and ran it through a “deep neural networks based style transfer” with the paintings of Pablo Picasso.
See also Blade Runner in the style of van Gogh’s Starry Night and Alice in a Neural Networks Wonderland.
In the same vein as these renderings of bicycles drawn from memory, here are celebrities photoshopped to look like fan art drawings. A simple example of dancing the flip flop.
Velocipedia is a collection of drawings of bicycles paired with realistic renderings of what the real-life bikes would look like. Some of the sketches, drawn from memory, are not that accurate and result in hilariously non-functional bikes.
From Austrian street artist Nychos, previews of a Dissection of Darth Vader’s Head piece and a “Barbie meltdown” piece from an upcoming show at Jonathan LeVine Gallery in June. You can see more of his work on his Tumblr and Instagram.
It’s impossible to tell someone how to interpret paintings by Picasso in only 8 minutes, but Evan Puschak provides a quick and dirty framework for how to begin evaluating the great master’s work by considering your first reaction, the content, form, the historical context, and Picasso’s own personal context.
On the 500th anniversary of his death, the Dutch public broadcasting service has created an interactive version of Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights.
Tobias Gremmler used motion capture to transform kung-fu moves into a variety of digital sculptures. (via colossal)
The Misplaced Series removes notable New York buildings from their surroundings and “misplaces” them in desolate landscapes around the world. Concrete behemoths and steel-and-glass towers rise from sand dunes and rocky cliffs, inviting viewers to see them as if for the first time. Out of context, architectural forms become more pronounced and easily understood.
See all 10 buildings in their new surroundings at Misplaced New York.
Nasa Funahara makes art out of colorful masking tape, including recreations of famous artworks.
Angélica Dass’ Humanæ project matches photos of volunteer participants with the Pantone colors of their skin tones.
Update: Turns out this really cool blog you guys should be reading covered this project almost 4 years ago. (thx, @djacobs)
The Popquotery Instagram account mixes fine art with pop culture quotations, mostly from movies. Here for instance, is Degas + Ferris Bueller:
And Waterhouse + Back to the Future:
How about Gowy + Top Gun:
A group of organizations, including Microsoft and the Rembrandthuis museum, have collaborated to produce a new painting by Rembrandt. Or rather, “by” Rembrandt. The team wrote software that analyzed the Dutch master’s entire catalog of paintings and used the data to create a 3D-printed Rembrandt-esque painting.
We now had a digital file true to Rembrandt’s style in content, shapes, and lighting. But paintings aren’t just 2D — they have a remarkable three-dimensionality that comes from brushstrokes and layers of paint. To recreate this texture, we had to study 3D scans of Rembrandt’s paintings and analyze the intricate layers on top of the canvas.
I’d say they did pretty well:
I wonder though, to what extent is this an averaged Rembrandt? According to the program, is there one canonical Rembrandt-esque eye and that’s it? Or can the program paint dozens of variations? After all, because he was (presumably) working with actual people, Rembrandt himself had hundreds or thousands of ways to paint, it wasn’t just the same sort of mouth over and over.
See also Loving Vincent and Alice in a Neural Networks Wonderland. (thx, lucas)
Update: Peter Schjeldahl, art critic for the New Yorker, weighs in on The Next Rembrandt.
In truth, the portrait wobbles at a second glance and crashes at a third. The sitter has a sparkle of personality but utterly lacks the personhood — the being-ness — that never eluded Rembrandt. He is an actor, acting.
He also calls it “fan fiction”.
For the Captured project, prison inmates drew pictures of people they felt should be in jail instead, “the CEOs of companies destroying our environment, economy, and society”. All 1000 books have sold out with the proceeds going to Bernie Sanders’ campaign.
This fantastic short video from Anthony Cerniello shows a person imperceptibly aging from youth to old age.
The idea was that something is happening but you can’t see it but you can feel it, like aging itself.
I would love to know how this was done. Benjamin Button-esque FX, I would imagine.
Update: Oh hey, luckily for me, this blogger named Jason Kottke posted this video more than two years ago and noted how the video was made.
Anthony Cerniello took photos of similar-looking family members at a reunion, from the youngest to the oldest, and edited them together in a video to create a nearly seamless portrait of a person aging in only a few minutes.
I think I’ll have to subscribe to this fella’s site. (via @jniemasik)
Loving Vincent is an upcoming feature-length film about Vincent van Gogh that is animated in an unusual way: using 12 oil paintings per second. They’ve trained dozens of painters — and are looking for more if you’re interested — in the style of van Gogh to illustrate every instant of the film. Here are some of the painters working on the movie:
Update: A full trailer is out:
(via colossal)
Henry Darger is perhaps the most famous outsider artist in the world. This is a short documentary about his life (not much is known) and art (which now fetches tens of thousands of dollars).
Spanish artist Mar Cerdà uses watercolor and paper to create amazingly detailed dioramas, including those made from scenes in Wes Anderson movies. So far, he’s done scenes from The Grand Budapest Hotel, The Darjeeling Limited, and The Royal Tenenbaums. (via designboom)
The Neues Museum in Berlin is the current home of the bust of Queen Nefertiti, a singular piece of ancient Egyptian sculpture. A pair of artists went to the museum, did a 360° scan of the bust without the museum’s permission, and have made the resulting high-resolution 3D model available to all.
In lieu of the contested original, a 3D-printed copy of the bust made from the model is now on display in Egypt at the American University of Cairo. (via hyperallergic)
Update: There’s cause to be skeptical about how the 3D scan of Nefertiti was accomplished and the artists are being a little vague as to how they did it. The video shows the artists using a Kinect Xbox controller but a Kinect scan can’t deliver the resolution level of the 3D model. Perhaps it was stitched together using a bunch of photos? Or maybe they hacked into the museum’s files and took their model?
The last possibility and reigning theory is that Ms. Badri and Mr. Nelles elusive hacker partners are literally real hackers who stole a copy of the high resolution scan from the Museum’s servers. A high resolution scan must exist as a high res 3D printed replica is already available for sale online.
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