Shared posts
The Art of the Dollar: Meticulous Currency Collages by Mark Wagner
Brooklyn-based artist Mark Wagner (previously) has been referred to as “the greatest living collage artist” and even “the Michael Jordan of glue”. The artist has a wide variety of artistic pursuits from writing and artist bookmaking to drawing and assemblage, though he is probably best known for his intricately cut and assembled currency collages using the one dollar bill. From his artist statement:
The one dollar bill is the most ubiquitous piece of paper in America. Collage asks the question: what might be done to make it something else? It is a ripe material: intaglio printed on sturdy linen stock, covered in decorative filigree, and steeped in symbolism and concept. Blade and glue transform it-reproducing the effects of tapestries, paints, engravings, mosaics, and computers—striving for something bizarre, beautiful, or unbelievable… the foreign in the familiar.
Wagner had a solo show late last year at Western Exhibitions here in Chicago and is currently preparing for a large exhibition at Pavel Zoubok Gallery in NYC that opens September 6th. (via Faith is Torment)
Incredible Dynamic Target Tracking Camera Perfectly Follows Moving Objects
Currently under development at the Ishikawa Oku Lab at the University of Tokyo, the Dynamic Target Tracking Camera System can track a fast moving object while keeping it perfectly centered in the middle of a screen. The device consists of two mirrors for pan and tilt, and a group of lenses that move at extremely high speeds to track and film objects at a rate of one image every 1/1000th of a second. Not only can the camera film them but it can also dynamically project images onto them as demonstrated in the video. Slow motion playback in sports will never be the same. (via booooooom)
The Atlas Human-Powered Helicopter Wins the AHS Sikorsky Prize
The Igor I. Sikorsky Human Powered Helicopter Competition was established in 1980 by the American Helicopter Society to help foster the creation of the first human-powered helicopter. To win the prize a team of engineers would have to build a helicopter powered solely by a human that would achieve a flight duration of 60 seconds, reach an altitude of 3 meters (9.8 ft), while remaining in a 10 meter (32.8 ft) square. The first attempt wouldn’t even leave the ground until 1989 when the Da Vinci III built by students Cal Poly San Luis Obispo flew for 7.1 seconds.
Over 33 years have passed since the creation of the AHS Sikorsky Prize and dozens teams have tried to win it. Finally, on June 13th of this year the AeroVelo team from the University Of Toronto managed to fly their Atlas Human-Powered Helicopter for 64.1 seconds, reaching an altitude of 11 feet (3.3 meters). The Atlas is a mammoth four rotor helicopter that despite measuring 154 feet (47 meters) across weighs only 119 pounds. The results were just verified this morning and the AeroVelo team was officially declared the winners of the $250,000 award. Watch the record-breaking flight above and read more over on the Huffington Post. Surely Da Vinci is fist-pumping in his grave.
Flow
We already introduced ‘Aérial’ by Baptiste Debombourg some time ago. His latest artwork called ‘Flow’ is a sign of resurrection, rebellion, the sudden mirror of our mass consumption society that kills its own producers. Debombourg used hundreds of cracked windshield arranged in such a way that they resemble a catastrophic flood of polluted water rushing inside the gallery. It almost feels like ignored vomit being spewed out from on high. The installation criticizes consumption in which neither human beings nor – even less – objects are respected. As stated in the official press release: ‘We do not swim in a sea of windscreens, we remain under the glass, suffocating as if under ice, devoured by our own creations.’
All images © Baptiste Debombourg
Hypnotic Wind-powered Kinetic Sculptures by Anthony Howe
In Cloud Light. Stainless steel. 224″h x 104″w x 52″d. Linked stainless disks rotating around a circular axis. Spins in ultralight winds but overbuilt to withstand strong.
Octo. Stainless steel. 204″h x 48″w x 20″d. Linked stainless shapes rotating around a circular axis. Spins in ultralight winds but overbuilt to withstand strong.
In-Out Quotient. Stainless steel, 64 sealed stainless bearings. 16’6″h x 6’4″w x 3′d. Sixty linked arms on circular axis, spins in ultralight winds.
About Face. Copper and stainless steel. 88″h x 62″w x 60″d. 100 individually balanced and weighted copper panels moving in the wind, some free swinging and others articulated by spinning stainless cups.
Kinetic sculptor Anthony Howe lives and works in a rural area in Eastsound, Washington surrounded by little more than trees, wind, and other natural elements that inspire his incredible kinetic sculptures. Howe works primarily with stainless steel which he welds to create carefully engineered objects powered by the slightest breeze. Watching the motion of each piece in the videos above is totally mesmerizing and it hardly seems possible that such an object could be constructed. Many of his original works are available for sale on his website, and you can see many more videos on his YouTube channel. (thnx, justin!)
Google's Project Loon
David Letterman really really likes drums
Are those your drums? The Late Show host likes drums so much that when musical guests finish up their sets on the show, Letterman often asks the drummer about them.
(via @hodgman)
Tags: David Letterman music videoBike maniac Tim Knoll
Here's an unfortunately short bit of circus riding by Tim Knoll. You often see a lot of the same tricks in bike videos, so Knoll's style mix of flatland, street, and circus riding is refreshing. I do get nervous when he stands on his handlebars or plays limbo with a row for semi-trucks. Be careful, Tim Knoll!
(thx, alex)
Tags: cycling Tim Knoll videoSince these mysteries are beyond us, let us pretend to have devised them
FORMANTA RHYTHM FRET NECK SOVIET USSR GUITAR KEYTAR
via this auction
Note this is a controller and does not produce sound. It's also NOT a MIDI controller. It uses a soviet 5DIN plug and is meant to be used the Formanta UDS & MARSH UDS drum sets.
"The unit has one connection plug - Soviet 5DIN. It's used as an addition to FORMANTA UDS and MARSH UDS drum sets. MINT condition, comes in original packing with shoulder stripe and connection cable. It has 7 buttons on the front side and 2 on the back. According to manual while tapping the "SPHERIC THING" the unit sends trigger commands to the control module. Probably it can trigger any drum machine or kinda. The unit has a velocity-sensitive piezo trigger pad under sphere and nine red knobs: seven on the front for choosing which drum sound you wanted to trigger from the synth and two back knobs for switching "preset" or "synth" sound mode on the synthesizer."
Unknown mathematician hits a home run
Yitang Zhang, an unknown mathematician who worked at Subway while trying to find an academic position earlier in his career, has written a paper that makes significant progress towards understanding the twin prime conjecture, "one of mathematics' oldest problems".
Editors of prominent mathematics journals are used to fielding grandiose claims from obscure authors, but this paper was different. Written with crystalline clarity and a total command of the topic's current state of the art, it was evidently a serious piece of work, and the Annals editors decided to put it on the fast track.
Just three weeks later -- a blink of an eye compared to the usual pace of mathematics journals -- Zhang received the referee report on his paper.
"The main results are of the first rank," one of the referees wrote. The author had proved "a landmark theorem in the distribution of prime numbers."
Rumors swept through the mathematics community that a great advance had been made by a researcher no one seemed to know -- someone whose talents had been so overlooked after he earned his doctorate in 1992 that he had found it difficult to get an academic job, working for several years as an accountant and even in a Subway sandwich shop.
"Basically, no one knows him," said Andrew Granville, a number theorist at the Universite de Montreal. "Now, suddenly, he has proved one of the great results in the history of number theory."
Reminds me of a certain patent clerk and his theories about time and space. History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme. (via @daveg)
Tags: mathematics prime numbers Yitang Zhang