Strandbeest: Theo Jansen's Amazing Artificial Life

This is the wiki on Theo Jansen.
Theo Jansen is a Dutch artist and kinetic sculptor. He builds large works which resemble skeletons of animals and are able to walk using the wind on the beaches of the Netherlands. His animated works are a fusion of art and engineering; and in a BMW TV commercial, Jansen says, "The walls between art and engineering exist only in our minds." Jansen is dedicated to creating artificial life through the use of genetic algorithms, which simulate evolution inside their code". The video below shows the marvelous Strandbeest(beach beast)in a BMW commercial. This stuff is really incredible!





Strandbeest

Ray Caesar's Fantastically Surreal (and Slightly Creepy) Children

Ray Caesar (b. October 26, 1958) is a visual surreal artist and digital painter residing in Toronto, Canada. Caesar's art redefines possibility and pushes the boundaries of digital art, moving away from multiples to create completely innovative digital artworks.

Caesar experiments with new techniques and materials on a larger scale, applying each one-of-a-kind digital ultrachrome and acrylic medium print on wood panel with varnish. Combining themes of hope, birth, and victory of the human soul, Caesar parlays the spiritual nature of his art in fantastic, grimly hopeful and gravely whimsical images of wizened children who radiate an enigmatic serenity. Sprouting bio-mechanical limbs and appendages, the figures are otherworldly, a melding of sci fi fantasy and lush landscapes.

Money Shots of Celebrities - Its Not What You Think

There is a celebrity version of the viral phenomenon known as Money Shots. Money shots are made of folded banknotes matched to a portion of a person’s face to create very interesting, and really fun mergers. These are Money Shots of famous people such as the late Heath Ledger, Brad Pitt, Morgan Freeman, Mel Gibson and many others. Can you identify all the celebs?

Desiree Palmen Incredible Camouflage Photography

Rotterdam-based Dutch artist Desiree Palmen work revolves around the concept of camouflage. She merges her models with their surroundings to the point where they appear to become one with them. Palmen has been exploring this visual deception theme over a number of years in a series of works which include: Old City Suits/Surveillance Camera Project, Camouflage, and Streetwise /Surveillance Camera Project.

The Mysterious Stranger - A Banned TV Cartoon

This aesthetically beautiful but dark cartoon is from The Adventures of Mark Twain." This one is based on an unfinished work by Twain, called "The Mysterious Stranger". Reportedly, this cartoon got banned from TV as it is pretty intense and it is definitely not for children.

I personally see allegorical references to the Bible. Specifically to Genesis and the old testament.

Mark Twain, whose likeness we see in this cartoon, wrote in his "The Mysterious Stranger": "It is true, that which I have revealed to you; there is no God, no universe, no human race, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell. It is all a dream - a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but you. And you are but a thought - a vagrant thought, a useless thought, a homeless thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities."

Brian Dettmer's Book Autopsies

Brian Dettmer is an American contemporary artist. He is known for his alteration of preexisting media -- such as old books, maps, record albums, and cassette tapes -- to create new, transformed works of visual fine art.Using surgical tools, Brian Dettmer removes paper from books like an archeologist releasing a fossil from layers of sediment, thereby unveiling connections between words and images hundreds of pages away from each other.

Blood Car - A Car that Runs on Human Blood

In the future gas prices are $30 a gallon and one man invents a car that runs on human blood. This is the premise of a low budget movie called Blood Car . The trailer is pretty funny.

The Coca Cola Happiness Factory - The Movie

Coca-Cola: Happiness Factory - The Movie! This is a really beautiful short animation ad for Coca-Cola.

The whole thing started with an animated spot made by Psyop for Coke and agency Wieden+Kennedy. Since launching in 2006, the original "Happiness Factory" has gone on to become the highest rated global spot The Coca-Cola Company has ever tested. The ad has won several awards including a "Silver Lion" at the 2007 Cannes advertising awards, the "Grand Prix Gold Prize" at the 2006 Epica Awards and most recently a nomination for a prime time commercial "Emmy" in the United States. This is the latest installment of the Happiness Factory

The Manga Bible

Manga is the Japanese word for comics (sometimes called komikku) and print cartoons.
According to Wikipedia:In Japan, manga are widely read by people of all ages,so that a broad range of subjects and topics occur in manga, including action-adventure, romance, sports and games, historical drama, comedy, science fiction and fantasy, mystery, horror, sexuality, and business and commerce, among others .

Ajinbayo Akinsiku is a manga artist who wrote and illustrated The Manga Bible: From Genesis to Revelation.

Mr.Akinsiku wants the world to know Jesus Christ, just not the gentle, blue-eyed Christ of old Hollywood movies and illustrated Bibles. Mr. Akinsiku, who goes by the pen name of Siku, grew up in England and Nigeria. He says his Son of God is “a samurai stranger who’s come to town, in silhouette,” here to shake things up in a new, much-abridged version of the Bible rooted in manga.The author of “The Manga Bible: From Genesis to Revelation says that “Christ is a hard guy, seeking revolution and revolt, a tough guy.”

Digitalized Moving Images from the Mid 1800's to Early 1900's

Using gif animation trickery, Joshua Heineman has been adding an extra dimensions to old pictures from the New York Public Library. I really love these images from the mid 1800's to the early 1900's USA. I've had a long and simmering love affair with history and archeology and I find these images from a younger United States during the Industrial Revolution really engaging.

1. Photographer 18 stories above Fifth Avenue, New York City, 1906
2. Broadway, New York City, circa 1860
3.“Powder monkey” on the Pawnee, American civil war, circa 1863
4.Vine-covered structure in Central Park, New York City, circa 1882
5.Cooking classes at Proximity Cotton Mill, North Carolina, 1909
6.Chinatown opium den, San Francisco, circa 1884
7.Chinatown, San Francisco, circa 1884

via cursive buildings

Robots, Extreme Football and Superheroes for Euro 2008

The Spanish TV channel Cuatro commissioned creative agency Kotoc to make a project for the design and creation of promotional pieces for the UEFA European Football Championship 2008 presently being played in Austria and Switzerland. The team created Cuatrobots which are 4 small 15 second sequences borrowing very heavily from science fiction movie blockbusters such as the Transformers and Iron Man to create a very entertaining amalgam of robots, extreme football and superheroes. The video I'm showing here merges all 4 sequences and it is kinda low res but it is still very entertaining. The second video shows the creative process in motion and it is also very good.

The making of Cuatrobots

Time Stands Still for Heroes

The popular American science fiction TV series Heroes is going to be shown in New Zealand and in preparation for that event, an ingenious guerrilla campaign has been launched where Hiro Nakamura one of the main characters, uses his powers to stop time. Sixty people were used for this ad who, a la Improv Anywhere, froze in a standstill for a few minutes as if time had in fact stopped. The campaign involves out-of-home adverts such as the sidewalk stencil shown here and TV spots.

For those who are not familiar with this NBC TV series, Wikipedia says:"Heroes is an American science fiction serial drama television series created by Tim Kring, which premiered on NBC on September 25, 2006. The series tells the stories of ordinary individuals who discover that they have superhuman abilities, and also explores how these people adapt to the changes these abilities bring, and their roles in preventing catastrophes and saving humanity.”

The ad was created by Colenso BBDO of New Zealand.

3D Illusion Drawings - The Incredible Art of Kurt Wenner

Kurt Wenner

Musical Instruments Made out of Car Parts

With the purpose of promoting its 2008 Ford Focus model, the Ford Company created a very interesting campaign where a Focus car is dismantled and the parts are transformed into musical instruments-string, brass, wind, percussion- which are played by real musicians. The music is excellent.

Pranksters Hijack a Subway Car and Turn it into a Living Room

A group of Improv Everywhere-inspired pranksters based in Prague turned a subway car into a living room.

On a Friday afternoon, the commuters of a train were rather surprised when a young woman got on board and proceeded to spread out a rug on the floor. At the next station, two guys brought in a large armchair, a coat rack, table, a classical antique telephone, a pair of slippers, and a flower in a vase.

Once everything was set up, at Jinonice station, some six stops from where everything started, a dressed-up man came in, put his coat and umbrella at the rack, sat down in the armchair and proceeded to make himself comfortable by loosening his tie, removing his shoes and putting on a pair of slippers. The man then picked up a magazine and started reading while the commuters looked on in disbelief.

For me, what makes these stunts really entertaining is the look of collective astonishment on the unsuspecting public. And in that regard, I think they should have included more shots of the passengers’ reactions while the whole thing was going down. But other than that, I think the stunt was well executed and it has its funny moments.

Bubblegum Portraits

Jason Kronenwald makes portraits of blonde-haired public figures using a very unusual medium: chewed bubblegum. The malleable portraits are manipulated onto a plywood surface, and sealed with an epoxy resin for protection and preservation. Jason has made portraits of pop culture icons such as Britney Spears, the (alleged) tennis-player-turned model Anna Kournikova, Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan. Recently, Jason included the former first lady Hillary Clinton, Madonna, and Princess Diana in his gummy collection.

Kronenwald will open an exhibit called A Fresh Pack of Gum Blondes at LE Gallery in Toronto that will run from June 13th to June 29th.

500 Years of Female Portraits in Western Art

500 years of female portraits in Western art- All these painters are represented but they are not in any particular order.

Leonardo Da Vinci, Raphael - Raffaello, Titian - Tiziano Vecellio , Sandro Botticelli Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio, Albrecht Dürer, Lucas Cranach the Elder, Antonello da Messina, Pietro Perugino, Hans Memling, El Greco, Hans Holbein, Fyodor Stepanovich Rokotov , Peter Paul Rubens, Gobert, Caspar Netscher, Pierre Mignard, Jean-Marc Nattier, Élisabeth-Louise Vigée-Le Brun, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Franz Xaver Winterhalter, Alexei Vasilievich Tyranov, Vladimir Lukich Borovikovsky, Alexey Gavrilovich Venetsianov, Antoine-Jean Gros, Orest Adamovich Kiprensky, Amalie, Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot, Édouard Manet, Flatour, Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, William Clark Wontner, William-Adolphe Bouguereau, Comerre, Leighton, Blaas, Renoir, Millias, Duveneck, Cassat, Weir, Zorn, Alphonse Mucha, Paul Gaugan, Henri Matisse, Picabia, Gustav Klimt, Hawkins, Magritte, Salvador Dali, Malevich, Merrild, Modigliani, Pablo Picasso

Vienna Museum's "Bad Painting - Good Art" Exhibition

Ever go to a museum or to one of those ultra hip "art galleries" and find yourself saying, "WTF is this crap? This isn't art. This is total garbage. I can do better with a match and some gasoline". Now a museum in Austria has opened an exhibit called Bad Painting-Good Art devoted solely to the kinds of ghastly, putrid, ugly paintings that make us want to throw ourselves out the nearest window in protest.

Vienna's Museum of Modern Art (MUMOK) is celebrating a phenomenon that it says began in the 1920s --construing bad paintings as good art. Examples of these include pictures of a man with pipes protruding from his face and a seemingly severed and bloody foot.

In the museums own words:
In an eye-opening exhibition the MUMOK draws attention to the phenomenon of ‘bad painting’ which, up till now, has been given too little consideration. Twenty-one painterly positions will be shown that, in accordance with the concept’s spectrum of meaning, manifest their ‘badness’ in various strategies of bad, ugly or malicious painting and thus contain elements of irony, protest,trash, kitsch and shock.

I feel your pain. The exhibit opened on June 5th and will run until December 10th, 2008.


Coño! This shit is indeed mad ugly!

CLICK HERE TO SEE AMAZING BUBBLEGUM PORTRAITS

3D Living Wallpaper - The Fantastic Work of Emma Hack

I'm sorry if I seem to be posting too much body art stuff but I stumbled into this work and I fell in love instantly. You will understand once you've taken a look at these designs.

Emma Hack, who lives in Australia, creates really gorgeous designs utilizing female models that she successfully blends in with their surroundings. The effect is beautifully crisp, vibrant, living three dimensional wallpaper designs. Do you understand now why I just HAD to post this?























Check out these amazing painted skin shoes here

Marilyn Monroe, Adolf Hitler, Bruce Lee and Pam Anderson in their Old Age

Polish born photographer Andrzej Dragan has created these unique photographs showing well-known dead public figures aged according to what the photographer thinks they might look like had they lived to old age. Check out Bruce Lee, Adolf Hitler and Marilyn Monroe.

Ben Stiller, Robert Downey Jr. and Jack Black in a Hilarious Video

Actor Ben Stiller knows the tremendous power of viral videos so he set out to create one to promote his new movie Tropic Thunder. With the collaboration of Iron Man's protagonist Robert Downey Jr. and Kung Fu Panda star Jack Black and Stiller's internet savvy teenaged nephew, the actor created a juvenile but hilarious funny video that has Downey Jr. squabbling with Stiller's nephew and repeatedly crotch-kicking Jack Black etc among other things.

Amazingly Realistic Body Paint

John Vargas is an Ecuadorian painter and photographer who does body painting on models and by looking at his work, I can tell that he's very good at what he does. Take a look at the images and see for yourself. More pictures below.

Obama-Lincoln Fusion Portrait

Ron English who is a New York-based counter culture billboard artist, created this Barack Obama-Abraham Lincoln fusion portrait that is likely to spark some very lively discussions. The image was created as part of an effort to promote the junior senator from Illinois in his bid to become the Democratic presidential nominee.

Abraham Lincoln, the 16th president of the United States who was assassinated in 1865, is considered by many to be an iconic American hero and this image is bound to stir controversy. This print will be available for sale exclusively via the internet.

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Beautiful Magnetic Fields Made Visible

Magnetic fields are usually invisible but scientists from NASA's Space Sciences Laboratory have successfully made them visible. Nasa's short film appropriately called Magnetic Movie shows magnetic fields of different colors moving and dancing around in an amazing and really pretty "show" of science/special effects.