Boing Boing » art

Fabergé Fractals

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 21 May 2013 23:00:32 +0000

Here's a mesmerizing gallery of "Fabrege Fractals" created by Tom Beddard, whose site also features a 2011 video of Fabrege-inspired fractal landscapes that must be seen to be believed. They're all made with Fractal Lab, a WebGL-based renderer Beddard created.

Fabergé Fractals by Tom Beddard, using his WebGL-based fractal engine, Fractal Lab. (via Colossal)

Scotty Albrecht: new art show in Brooklyn with Damian Silver

David Pescovitz — Tue, 21 May 2013 18:02:37 +0000

Designer/woodworker/typographer Scotty Albrecht has a new show of wood and paper works opening at Brooklyn's Colab Projects this Saturday, May 25. The show, titled "Wood & Pulp," is a two person exhibition that pairs Albrecht with Damion Silver. Both artists are inspired by handcrafting techniques and masterfully employ found objects in their work. I'm fortunate to have two of Albrecht's pieces in my home, including the wood heart/hands seen here, and they bring me great joy every day. Above, wood (left) and paper (right) pieces by Albrecht; at right, a wood mandala by Silver. Wood & Pulp runs until June 23. "Wood & Pulp: New Works By Damion Silver and Scotty Albrecht"

Canvas print of a couch doubles as a couch

David Pescovitz — Mon, 20 May 2013 18:29:12 +0000

Japanese design firm YOY created this print of a sofa that can be used as a sofa. The image is printed on a very elastic fabric on a wood and aluminum frame. When it's leaned against a wall, you can sit in it. They also made a stool and armchair. CANVAS (via Laughing Squid)

Amanda Visell's Ren & Stimpy carved wood figurines

David Pescovitz — Mon, 20 May 2013 17:22:15 +0000

Amanda Visell hand-carved an excellent collection of Ren & Stimpy sculptures. To give you a sense of the scale, Ren is 2" x 8" x 3". The set of five is $2,200 from iam8bit.

Pixel art from obscure video games

Rob Beschizza — Mon, 20 May 2013 16:14:12 +0000

Obscure Video Games collects splendid character art and workmanship from weird, unsuccessful or foreign-only titles of the 8- and 16-bit eras.

Draw freehand fractal art with Doodal

Rob Beschizza — Fri, 17 May 2013 19:14:03 +0000

As delightful and intuitive as it is, the creator explains how it works. [Pishtaco]

Deflated giant duck

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 16 May 2013 19:19:58 +0000

You'll have seen the pictures of a giant rubber duck floating down the world's iconic waterways, from the Thames to Victoria Harbour in Hong Kong -- it's Florentijn Hofman's brainchild. What you may not have seen is what the duck looks like after it's been deflated, and that's even better -- a kind of puddle of duck, which has a Beatrix Potter-y ring to it until you see it and then it has nothing at all about it that suggests Ms Potter's works.

florentijn hofman's giant rubber duck: the aftermath (via Making Light)

Public Knowledge seeks an artist-in-residence

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 16 May 2013 17:54:00 +0000

Michael sez, "Public Knowledge works to promote great technology like 3D printing and open source hardware, while advocating on behalf of the public on important issues like net neutrality and copyright reform. Now we are looking for someone to use all of that technology to help people understand our important issues."

Spacegoing Earth: a painting by Angus McKie

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 16 May 2013 15:09:35 +0000

When I first saw this Angus McKie illustration, I had a moment when I thought it depicted the Earth being encased in a huge, space-going shell and I flashed back to Damon Knight's spectacular novel Why Do Birds?, a straight-faced yet comic novel about a man who puts the whole human race in a box. Then I realized that the picture depicted a hollow, space-going sphere being fitted with an armored cover and my mind spun into a deep future from which it hasn't entirely returned. Beautiful work. Here's the official McKie site, but it appears to be down.

Angus McKie

Robot made from recycled scrap

Rob Beschizza — Thu, 16 May 2013 12:17:23 +0000

Chinese inventor Tao Xiangli tinkers with a hand-made robot at his house in Beijing, May 15, 2013. Tao, 37, spent ¥150,000 ($24,400) to build it out of recycled scrap metal and electric wires found at second-hand markets. The robot, which took a year to complete, is 7ft tall and weighs about a quarter of a ton. [Photo: REUTERS/Suzie Wong]

Hellishly complex, gorgeous assemblage about endless work

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 16 May 2013 04:56:51 +0000

"Quaestus" is the latest assemblage from sculptor Jud Turner. He sez,

“Quaestus” is a latin word meaning “gain or profit extracted from work”, a concept darkly represented in my latest sculpture: 5 tiny employees are trapped in an endless task inside a gigantic machine, toiling to keep up with the conveyor belts they are walking on. Each work station has a 2 digit counter which seems to be keeping some kind of score. If the employees don't keep up with the machine, they will fall off the ends of their conveyor belts and be fed to the machine.. The employees actually power this machine, but are unaware and unable to stop moving forward for fear of falling behind.

It's an amazing piece. Click through for hi-rez and details.

"Quaestus"

Artist finds the faces lurking in maps

Cory Doctorow — Wed, 15 May 2013 22:00:53 +0000

Artist Ed Fairburn selective colors in maps, revealing faces lurking in potentia in their many lines, contours and shapes. He sells prints. These are gorgeous. Shown here: Paris.

Ed Fairburn (via Neatorama)

Canberra Skywhale: fanciful, breast-studded lighter-than-air cetacean

Cory Doctorow — Wed, 15 May 2013 03:00:19 +0000

Here's a beautiful gallery of publicity shots of the Canberra Skywhale, a lighter-than-air sculpture created by Patricia Piccinini to celebrate the centenary of the capital city of Australia. The Skywhale is a fanciful, breast-studded creature from a contrafactual alternate history:

"My question is what if evolution went a different way and instead of going back into the sea, from which they came originally, they went into the air and we evolved a nature that could fly instead of swim. In fact coming from a place like Canberra where it's a planned city that's really tried to integrate and blend in with the natural environment, it makes a lot of sense to make this sort of huge, gigantic, but artificial and natural-looking creature".[8]

The Centenary of Canberra Skywhale (via JWZ)

"Poohenge" - Unusual inflatable sculpture graces Hong Kong park

Rob Beschizza — Tue, 14 May 2013 21:55:23 +0000

"Complex Pile", an inflatable sculpture by American artist Paul McCarthy, is displayed at the exhibition "Inflation!" on the grounds of a new park in Hong Kong. "The Park", as it will be called, will cover 14 hectares of landscaped public space devoted to the arts and culture. [Bobby Yip/Reuters]

David LaFerriere's sandwich bag art

Mark Frauenfelder — Mon, 13 May 2013 21:19:20 +0000

David LaFerriere has drawn a picture on almost every one of his kids' lunch bags since 2008. He uses colored Sharpies to draw on the plastic bags. See all of them (over 1,100!) on his Flickr stream. (Via Colossal; Thanks, Sally!)

For sale: "Rocking Machine" phallic sculpture from A Clockwork Orange

David Pescovitz — Mon, 13 May 2013 20:58:46 +0000

Japanese designer toy firm Medicom worked with Herman Makkink to recreate an edition of his iconic sculpture "The Rocking Machine," famously seen in the film A Clockwork Orange. It's almost three feet long and more than a foot wide. You can have one one of your very own for $1600 or so. "The Rocking Machine" (via Death Waltz Recording Company)

Phenomenal styrofoam cup art

David Pescovitz — Mon, 13 May 2013 18:32:54 +0000

This exquisitely-illustrated styrofoam cup is reportedly the work of an artist named William Hersey. More photos. (via Reddit)

Merman from whale tooth

David Pescovitz — Mon, 13 May 2013 18:11:19 +0000

German sculptor Martin Bässler carved this lovely merman from a sperm whale tooth. (via Propnomicon)

Dazzle-paint bar

Cory Doctorow — Mon, 13 May 2013 17:42:34 +0000

The basement of the Hôtel Americano in Chelsea, NYC has been done over in dazzle-paint reminiscent of the cubist battleship paint used to confound the enemy in WWI (and dazzle makeup used to fake out face-recognition systems). The work is by German artist Tobias Rehberger, who describes it as a re-creation of Frankfurt's Bar Oppenheimer.

The space, which opens May 10 and will remain open until July 14, dazzles the senses with its salonlike atmosphere, tight dimensions and prismatic black-and-white stripes; it’s also a functional bar where anyone can stop in for a drink during the life of the project.

By Design | A Bar That’s Also a Piece of Art [Rocky Casale/New York Times Magazine]

(via JWZ)

(Image: downsized, cropped thumbnail of a larger photo by Matthew Cianfrani, viewable here)

Ghosts in the Machine: the tiny people who live inside your computers

Cory Doctorow — Sun, 12 May 2013 02:54:58 +0000

Mark Crummett sez, "For several years now, I've been working on a series of photos featuring miniature figures living and working in our computers and consumer electronics. These are the people who Make Things Work. I'm happy to say that wired.com is featuring my 'Ghosts in the Machine' at their rawfile photo blog. Shows many pictures, plus a look behind the scenes!"

Computer Guts Become Eerie Landscapes in Ghosts in the Machine (Thanks, Mark!)

Do readers judge female characters more harshly?

Rob Beschizza — Fri, 10 May 2013 12:40:37 +0000

Oh yes, writes Maria Konnikova in The Atlantic: "Work by social psychologists like Susan Fiske and Mina Cikara has repeatedly demonstrated that women are perceived and evaluated on different criteria than men. ... ">Now, even fictional females are feeling the sting."

Nazi-themed opera cancelled

Rob Beschizza — Thu, 09 May 2013 17:42:28 +0000

A Dusseldorf production of Wagner's Tannhauser was cancelled this week after the producer "refused to tone down the staging, set in a concentration camp during the Holocaust." [BBC]

NeoLucida: kickstarting a new version of the Old Masters' favorite drawing gadget

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 09 May 2013 14:13:55 +0000

Pablo Garcia and Golan Levin, two celebrated art profs and dead media specialists, have launched a fantastically successful kickstarter to recreate the Camera Lucida, a gadget much favored by the Old Masters. It uses an optical trick to superimpose the scene in front of you on a sheet of paper that you can trace in order to produce highly realistic drawings. They're producing a limited one-time run of them (a $35 pledge gets you one) (assuming, as with all Kickstarters, that this actually gets made -- caveat emptor!), and then the designs will be released as open source hardware for anyone to make.

The NeoLucida is designed to fit in a purse or bag, and the creators want to create a gallery of art made with it -- each one comes with a postage-paid card for you to send in one of your drawings

NeoLucida - A Portable Camera Lucida for the 21st Century (via Beyond the Beyond)

Chris Shaw re-imagines the Madonna at SFMOMA

Ben Marks — Wed, 08 May 2013 18:21:35 +0000

As the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art prepares to shutter its South of Market location for the next three years, during which it will spend almost half a billion dollars to more than double its size for the Doris and Donald Fisher Collection, the museum’s restaurant on Third Street closes out its more modest exhibition program with nine acrylic-on-canvas paintings by Chris Shaw, on view through June 3, 2013. Admission is free.

Best known locally for his rock posters, Shaw has used his swan-song time slot to present a series of vividly colored Madonnas, each based on Madonnas by such 15th century artists as Bellini, Botticelli, and Ambrogio de Predis. For Shaw, the Madonna is just another propaganda icon, a vessel to be filled up with whatever one is trying to sell. In Shaw’s case, his Madonnas have set aside the Christ Child for a Kalishnikov, a bottle of Colt 45, and an orange squid, whose mantle resembles the Pope’s peaked mitre and groping tentacles suggest a fallen priest’s restless reach.

While the Madonna with the Kalashnikov, to say nothing of the one wearing a suicide bomb vest, are the most obvious eyebrow raisers, Shaw’s most subversive paintings are probably his Madonnas of Science. One holds a magnet, another peers through a microscope, and another cradles an armillary sphere, Shaw’s representation of what we think we might know about dark matter. And of course there’s a Madonna containing a Higgs-Boson particle, replacing the son of God with the newly discovered God particle. Chris Shaw at the SFMOMA

Camille Rose Garcia's Snow White

David Pescovitz — Wed, 08 May 2013 18:04:43 +0000

At last night's opening for Camille Rose Garcia's breathtaking "Down The Rabbit Hole" painting exhibition at the Walt Disney Family Museum in San Francisco, I bought a copy of Camille's illustrated edition of Snow White. This is not Disney's delightful Snow White story though, but rather the darker, creepier tale collected by the Brothers Grimm in 1812. Camille's goth-inspired, phantasmagoric fine art bring the classic story to life once again. Snow White by the Brothers Grimm and Camille Rose Garcia (Amazon)

Dictionary of Surrealism and the Graphic Image

David Pescovitz — Wed, 08 May 2013 17:27:08 +0000

BB contributor Mark Dery says:

Rick Poynor, an unapproachably brilliant writer on design and visual culture, has generously posted at Design Observer the glossary of Surrealist concepts from his catalog to an exhibition of Czech Surrealist works. BB readers should print this out and keep it within handy reach on the night table, to be repurposed as a road atlas for dreaming.

"A Dictionary of Surrealism and the Graphic Image"

Camille Rose Garcia "Alice in Wonderland" exhibit in San Francisco

David Pescovitz — Tue, 07 May 2013 19:57:56 +0000

Opening at San Francisco's Walt Disney Family Museum on Thursday is "Down the Rabbit Hole," a show of Camille Rose Garcia's magnificent, dark, and dreamy paintings created for her illustrated edition of Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Forty of Garcia's paintings will hang alongside ten Alice in Wonderland concept paintings from 1951 by legendary Disney artist Mary Blair. Garcia will be at the museum this Saturday giving a painting workshop and also an artist's talk. This major exhibit will run until November 3.

Camille Rose Garcia: Down the Rabbit Hole

A train hopper's photos

David Pescovitz — Tue, 07 May 2013 17:30:38 +0000

When Mike Brodie was 17, he hopped his first train and instantly fell in love with the freedom of riding the rails, sans ticket. Shortly thereafter, in 2004, he came upon an old instant camera and quickly earned his nickname of The Polaroid Kidd. Eventually, he "upgraded" to a 1980s camera and 35 millimeter film but continued to ride the rails and document what he saw. The result is a raw, gritty, beautiful, and often inspiring collection of snapshots now compiled into a book, A Period of Juvenile Prosperity.

You can also see a selection of these photographs at Mike Brodie Photography. (via So Bad So Good, thanks Dave Gill!)

Molly Crabapple's SHELL GAME, free and CC

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 02 May 2013 20:39:21 +0000

Robbo sez, "Molly Crabapple's first major solo show, SHELL GAME, closed last Tuesday. Yesterday she released hi-res versions of the works under Creative Commons Share-Alike Non-Commercial. In her words:

"Without the support of hundreds of people online, Shell Game would never have happened. The internet believed in me, believed in the promise of my art, and showed that in concrete ways.
The internet gave me Shell Game.
I want to give them something back.
Today is May Day. The day of workers, immigrants, beautiful young girls, and rebellion. I'm releasing all the art from SHELL GAME on Creative Commons. Share. Remix. Make art. Wheatpaste the world."

Shell Game: CreativeCommons release (Thanks, Robbo)

Keith Haring documentary by Maripol

David Pescovitz — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 20:33:08 +0000

French artist and fashion designer Maripol directed a new Web documentary about her friend Keith Haring. There are currently three Haring exhibitions in Paris right now, taking place at the Museé D'Art Moderne, 104, and Colette.