Liartown, USA is Sean Tejaratchi's (previously) incredible, longrunning visual surreal satire site, and it is the latest casualty of parent company Verizon's decision to purge the site of all NSFW content effective Dec 17. Read the rest
For just £2 you could own this remote-controlled boat sculpture that was once featured at Banksy's Dismaland. That is, if you guess its weight correctly. Banksy has donated the coin-op artwork to go into a raffle to benefit Choose Love, a store where you can buy gifts for refugees. An entry into the raffle is a £2 donation.
Here are the rules:
Your guess should be to the nearest gram (for example a guess of about 5 kilos could be 4800g). You can even specify milligrams if you're feeling confident. Closest guess wins the boat (the wooden plinth is not included in the weight guessing).
Competition closes 8pm GMT December 22nd 2018. At which time the boat will be weighed by specialist students from Kings College London. The winner will be notified by email. In the event of more than one correct guess the winner will be drawn by lot.
Guesses not limited per person. All money donated goes directly to supporting refugees and displaced people. The organisers reserve the right to small print etc.
Need a clue? The boat is constructed from a shop bought fibre glass hull customised with quick-cast resin figures which are foam filled and hand spray painted. Although the prize includes battery pack, that is not currently in the boat.
Boat dimensions: 90cm x 38cm x 42cm.
Enter here.
In 1998 I profiled artist/inventor Chuck Hoberman for Wired (read it here). It was a fun article to write because Chuck is brilliant, and very nice. You have probably seen two of his most famous expanding/transforming/unfolding creations, the Hoberman Sphere and the Hoberman Switch Pitch. Recently, Wired made this video profile of Chuck. A video is a better way than an article to understand what he does. Read the rest
LA's John of Beans makes shells with teeth! Choose from the Smooth Shell With Lowers and the Snail with Molars (both $90) or a Mussel and Barnacle with Molars ($35) (via Creepbay) Read the rest
On January 15th, Google will disappear all Youtube annotations, which have lots of structural problems (spammy, don't work well on mobile or big screens), but which have been a font of creative inspiration that spawned whole genres of interactive Youtube projects, from games to interactive films to branching narrative adventures to musical experiments, to collaborative art projects to deep context and annotation. Read the rest
Damien Noll sez, "My skulls and bones are all burned (like black line tattoo) using just a magnifying lens and sunshine." Read the rest
My 14-year-old pointed me to the cool work of artist Christian Faur. I see Mark featured his crayon portrait pieces on Boing Boing in the past but not pieces using his more recent medium of soda crackers!
Prior to the midterm elections, he laser-etched all the (then-current) U.S. senators on crackers (Is the medium the message?):
View this post on InstagramHaving fun with stop motion and our U.S. #senators. 73 days until #election2018
View this post on Instagram100 #saltine #crackers with laser etched portraits of each 2018 U.S. #senators.
Thanks, SJ! Read the rest
The Welcome To The Internet tracksuit [Getonfleek.com] features a classic image so thoroughly buried in sedimentary layers of meme and merch that it's no longer easy to locate the original through the usual means: the cover of a Scholastic book from 1999 [Amazon].
The illustrator is Donald Grant, whose page on Behance has contact info if you're looking to commission a sequel. Read the rest
Japanese specialist paper manufacturer Hidaka Washi Ltd makes the world's thinnest paper using 1,000-year-old methods.
The paper is then sent to museums and libraries around the world—including the British Museum and the Library of Congress—and is used to restore and protect books and works of art.
This past year at Burning Man, 600 drones light up the sky -- accompanied by live piano music -- one evening in a beautiful "flying sculpture" called "Franchise Freedom." This is the recently-released film of the piece made by its artists at Studio Drift.
As dusk fell over Black Rock City, 600 luminous drones rose into a hypnotic display of technological choreography, accompanied by the poignant keys of Joep Beving. The drones were guided by a specially made algorithm that simultaneously allows both individual choice and movement as a group. The innovative technology made it possible to create a 3d image in the sky that could be viewed from multiple angles.
Thanks, Cheryl! Read the rest
Carbo pareidolia. Read the rest
The Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna started a program in 2012 that opened its doors for "remarkable creative individuals" to select pieces from their massive historical collection to present in an exhibition. Filmmaker Wes Anderson and his partner Juman Malouf are the most recent curators in this program. So, for the last two years, they have been putting together their offbeat Spitzmaus Mummy in a Coffin and other Treasures.
Artnet describes the exhibit as "a totally quirky presentation of affectionate misfits":
Perhaps the duo’s penchant for the collection’s oddball items also stems from their own awareness of being outsiders in a prestigious establishment replete with trained art historians, curators, and conservators.
One senior curator said that some of museum staff were skeptical of the project at first. “We would get an email from Wes asking, ‘Do you have a list of green objects? Could you send us a list of everything you have that is yellow?’ Our data system does not have these categories.”
Because of this, the curators and conservators had to manually search their storage, an often painstaking process due climate controls and the condition checks needed, neither of which Anderson or Malouf were aware of.
The extra labor required was taxing, but the duo’s alternative criteria had a welcome side effect: It leveled the usual hierarchies. Several staff members said it resulted in new revelations. They just had to “learn to unlearn” their ways of working.
The exhibit opened November 6 and will be on view through April 28, 2019. Read the rest
Pegged on the massive new Andy Warhol retrospective opening today at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the New York Times asked the likes of Fran Lebowitz, Mary Woronov, Joe Dallesandro, Viva, and many other of his friends, collaborators, and party guests to reminisce about their experiences of The Factory, in all three of its incarnations. A few bits from the New York Times feature:
Read the restAndré Leon Talley, 69, fashion journalist. Receptionist at the Union Square Factory, 1975.
The Factory was very much a creative playpen, but there were still rules. You had to show up every day, or you would be fired. Andy was always walking around being very vague about everything. But you had to be enthusiastic. There was a seriousness about the place, a decorum and deportment.
Mary Woronov (star of "Chelsea Girls")
One day a drug dealer came up. He shot up this girl, and she for some reason passed out. It was in the bathtub. She went under water. We thought she was dead. We panicked because she was not waking up. Finally someone said, “We should send her down the mail chute.” We wrote little notes on her body and puts stamps on her forehead. Then we realized she wasn’t dead. I don’t think she would have fit in the mail chute. But we would have tried.
In those days the Factory was like a medieval court of lunatics. You pledged allegiance to the king — King Warhol. Yet there was oddly no hierarchy. Warhol was also one of us.
Oh boy, I think I have a new hobby. I've just learned that you can combine puzzles, that have the same die cut, to make really awesome pieces of art. It had never occurred to me that manufacturers of mass-produced puzzles cut different puzzles of theirs in the same way, making the pieces interchangeable. It makes complete sense, of course, but my mind is still blown!
I learned about the art of "puzzle montage" from one of the readers of my inbox zine, Marcia Wiley (she's the gal in Seattle who's fixing up that cool old Checker Cab). She was visiting the Bay Area and we met up for the first time this past Friday. That's when she told me about her friend Tim Klein, who makes incredible puzzle montages. I'm excited to share his work with you.
In an email exchange, Tim told me that he learned about puzzle montages from the man who first made them, art professor Mel Andringa of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, "As far as I know, he and I are the only artists ever to pursue it seriously. And I think he's moved on to other things nowadays, so I may be the sole surviving practitioner."
And this is what Tim shared with me about his process:
Read the rest...By selecting pieces from two or more compatible puzzles, I assemble a single "puzzle mashup" with surreal imagery that the publisher never imagined.
Sometimes the results are merely chuckle-making, such as my combination of King Tut's burial mask with the front of a truck, which I call "King of the Road".
GIF: John Keats, 1785-1921.
Enjoy this beautiful, creepy, ethereal short ambient ambient video loop by Bill Domonkos, a filmmaker, GIF maker and stereoscopist. Read the rest
Chacalall Orozco is a graphic designer from Mexico. Read the rest
To exhibit his photography at large scale, Chris Engman builds rooms with interiors wrapped with his stunning photos of forests, deserts, and other landscapes. They beckon the viewer inside where, of course, the perspectives warp and shift. From Colossal:
Engman explains that once one enters the work its believability as a singular landscape becomes penetrated. Each step deeper inside the work makes the photographed landscape appear increasingly warped and unreal.
“Even so,” says Engman, “compared to a singular framed photograph the experience of this installation for the viewer is much more physical and immersive. The structure is a room, not an image of a room. The photograph is an object, in addition to being an illusion. It has weight, and volume, and changes as you walk around it. Making this installation has been a thrilling process, and this new way of working seems to afford many new possibilities.”
(photos by Tony Walsh, courtesy of the artist, and Luis De Jesus Los Angeles) Read the rest
