Cory Doctorow at 9:56 pm • 
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"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"
Cory Doctorow at 3:00 pm • •
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)
Cory Doctorow at 8:00 pm • •
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)
Rob Beschizza at 2:55 pm • •
"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]
Mark Frauenfelder at 2:19 pm • •
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!)
David Pescovitz at 1:58 pm • •
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)
David Pescovitz at 11:32 am • •
This exquisitely-illustrated styrofoam cup is reportedly the work of an artist named William Hersey. More photos. (via Reddit)
David Pescovitz at 11:11 am • •
Cory Doctorow at 10:42 am • •
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)
Cory Doctorow at 7:54 pm • •
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!)
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."
— Rob
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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]
— Rob
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Cory Doctorow at 7:13 am • •
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)
Ben Marks at 11:21 am • •
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. Read the rest
David Pescovitz at 11:04 am • •
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)
