Take as much money as you want, at $7.25 an hour (current Fed minimum wage). All you have to do is turn the crank, which dispenses one penny every 4.97 seconds. Easy money, right?

This brilliant art piece by Blake Fall-Conroy provides a visceral demonstration of just how little $7.25 an hour really is. If cranking this handle starts to quickly feel not worth the effort, imagine doing an actual job and making this little. Nearly two million Americans know the feeling daily.

Details here.

Image: Used by permission of the artist Read the rest

Artist and scholar on DIY culture and technology, Garnet Hertz, has a new piece opening up at York University, Gales Gallery, Toronto tonight. The piece, entitled "Experiments in Surveillance Capitalism: Device for Calling the Department of Homeland Security" is part of the exhibition "Disruptive Design & Digital Fabrication."

This system uses custom electronics to programmatically speak search terms into a seance-like ring of a dozen Google Home smart speakers. The system searches for controversial search terms that the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security are reported to monitor. The idea is that these "red flag" keyword Google searches will attract the attention of the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, or CSIS. This system plays with the fear that individuals have about privacy with contemporary smart devices. Related to this, in Canada there have been recent concerns about Huawei's ties to the Chinese government in regard to 5G network infrastructure — but it is worth also considering how companies like Google collect, synthesize, and sell our private information.

Here is the concept art for a larger version of the piece. The image above is of the scaled-down version which is part of the Gales Gallery show opening tonight.

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As part of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts' "Edward Hopper and the American Hotel" exhibition, the curators have created a brilliant installation and visitor experience that's seemingly made for Instagram. They built a physical version of Hopper's above painting "Western Hotel" (1957) and offered overnight stays inside the artwork. The overnight packages sold out very quickly. The New York Times' Margot Boyer-Dry was one of the first guests:

Every detail here was inspired by Edward Hopper’s 1957 painting “Western Motel,” which has been brought to vibrant, three-dimensional life. The only thing missing is the mysterious woman whose burgundy dress matches the bedspread. But that’s where the museum guest comes in.

I was the second person to stay in the museum’s Hopper hotel room, essentially becoming its subject for a night. (Before it sold out through February, the room cost anywhere from $150 a night to $500 for a package, including dinner, mini golf and a tour with the curator.) My time there was short — a standard stay runs from 9 p.m. to 8 a.m. — and awkward. I had traveled all day to reach Richmond, and these pristinely basic quarters were the main event. Ultimately, it reminded me of every other hotel room I’ve ever stayed in...

Ellen Chapman, a Richmond resident who stayed the night before I did, was more focused on the novelty of an art overnight. “I’ve always had that childhood fantasy of spending the night in a museum,” she said. “The remarkable part for me was waking up, drinking my coffee and looking at this amazing exhibit right next to me.”

Juxtaposing bright spray-painted mesh with the ocean vista of a 400-year-old Greek ruin, artistic duo Quintessenz created Kagkatikas Secret. Read the rest

Turkish media artist Refik Anadol has created Archive Dreaming, a new installation that makes viewers feel submerged within a massive electronic archive. Read the rest

Spanish artist David Moreno draws, 3D renders, and even sculpts thin wire-like material into striking floating cities, sculptures that have an architectual feel. Read the rest

Hyperallergic reports that a prankster festooned a Guggenheim Museum toilet with gold yarn, an apparent response to the 2016 gold toilet installation at the same museum (above). Read the rest

Installation artist Jihan Zencirli, also known artistically as Geronimo, created an ambitious massive balloon installation at Lincoln Center for the New York City Ballet. Read the rest

Digital Vegetables is an installation by PARTY that was part of the 2017 Tokyo Midtown Design Touch event. Read the rest

"The Mechanics of History" by Yoann Bourgeois is a marvellously simple idea perfectly executed: acrobats climb stairs around a revolving trampoline, falling languidly from the stairs in rhythm.

Here it is in daylight:

Below is an earlier exploration of the theme titled "Fugue/Trampoline":

Accompanied by Philip Glass’s moody “Metamorphosis Two” performed by Brisa on the harp, “Fugue/Trampoline” and its iterations, is perhaps what Bourgeois is most famous for. Using a nine-step staircase and a trampoline, Bourgeois resists and submits to gravity, creating a breathtaking, balletic spectacle. Beginning with a limp, careless-looking slump of his body onto the trampoline, Bourgeois’ body bounds back up to the wooden platform with the softest elegance. He repeats the exercise, embracing gravity with different strokes, hurtling, spinning or curling into a fall. When returning to the platform or a step, he always lands on his feet, more often than not regaining his vertical balance with a single foot, or just his toes. At BAM he wore an unzipped cardigan which spiraled around his body, tracing the centrifugal motion and amplifying the visual sense of flight.

• Yoann Bourgeois "La mécanique de l'histoire" (Energie) - Le Panthéon Paris (YouTube / a music lover in Paris) Read the rest

Earlier this year, Tate Modern's Switch House extension included a wonderful installation of fog art by Fujiko Nakaya. Read the rest

Australian-born artist Flynn Talbot is currently exhibiting Reflection Room, a large installation with cool and warm lights meant to evoke the sun setting on the ocean in his hometown of Perth. Read the rest

The grounds of the architectural biennial in Lyon France included Aire D’attente, an artistic revitalization of an abandoned lot that grew flax, barley, and hemp for making hempcrete. Cops destroyed it after deciding the art was a pot farm. Read the rest

Smoke-filled bubbles fall like fruits from an otherworldly tree in this beautiful installation titled New Spring. Read the rest

Hansel & Gretel opened this month in New York. The collaboration between artist Ai Weiwei and architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron is a noisy dystopian nightmare projected back to visitors and broadcast live to the internet. Read the rest

Choi + Shine Architects created these beautiful knitted sea urchin sculptures for an outdoor installation in Singapore. Read the rest

Float4 shot this cool footage of their light installation at Meraas City Walk in Dubai, which "merges LED, video mapping, water-screen projection, digital canopy and sound experience." Read the rest