A. Kachmar

[ By Steph in Art & Photography & Video. ]

The art of superimposition alters the way we see real-life environments, substituting cut-outs or figurines for 3D elements in the scene and capturing the resulting image on film. This technique can blur the lines between past and present, bring fictional characters to vivid life or otherwise mash up imagery that you wouldn’t normally see together.

We’ve seen striking war imagery juxtaposed with the same locations in the present day, monuments seemingly miniaturized, and Star Wars characters invading urban Paris. Now, Brazilian artist Lorenzo Castellini brings fine art to the streets of her home city of São Paulo by superimposing cut-outs of masterpieces onto real human figures and settings.

A Shell gas station logo becomes the shell from which Botticelli’s Venus springs. A man on the street holding a bottle of Coke turns into Albrecht Dürer. Dali’s melting clocks appear on rocks in the park, and a woman from Picasso’s ‘Les Demoiselles d’Avignon’ casually makes her way down a sidewalk.

Similar projects have brought classical paintings to modern contexts, like a fun Photoshop series by Alexey Kondakov that blends religious imagery with unexpected urban settings – putting the Virgin Mary and baby Jesus on the subway, for example, with violin-playing angels as buskers.

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[ By Steph in Art & Photography & Video. ]

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The opening of the exhibition American Perspectives: From Classic to Contemporary presents the hand-drawn worlds of prominent American architects and architectural draftsmen. The art of architectural representation in the USA, particularly at the beginning of the 20th century, reached heights of originality and perfection, which still stands out today. On show will be works by Frank Lloyed Wright, Richard Neutra, Lebbeus Woods and Achilles Rizzoli.

Title: American Perspectives: From Classic to Contemporary
Website: http://www.tchoban-foundation.de/
Organizers: Tchoban Foundation Museum for Architectural Drawing
From: Sat, 20 Jun 2015 19:00
Until: Sun, 20 Sep 2015 22:00
Venue: Christinenstraße 18A, 10119 Berlin, Germany, Tchoban Foundation Museum for Architectural Drawing
Address: Christinenstraße 18A, 10119 Berlin, Germany

Did you know that you’ve been toasting bread wrong all this time? Well, maybe not wrong, but vastly inferior to how Balmuda’s new humidifying toaster oven can do it. The intelligent appliance ensures your toast comes out not only perfectly browned on both sides, but also still soft and fluffy on the inside.

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Almost every time we have a look, Saturn seems to become even more incredible. Space rain falls from icy rings into the gas giant’s atmosphere. Two of its moons, Titan and Enceladus , are among the best candidates in our solar system for finding alien life.

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The Fisco "Big T" measuring tape resembles Mr T. "I pity the rule." (more…)

YouTube user TAOFLEDERMAUS pours a can of Coke over a pan of molten lead to create an odd-looking metal pancake.

What happens when you pour Coca Cola into a pan of molten lead? Obviously, ART occurs! I actually was hoping the Coke would boil off, and the syrup left behind would auto-ignite. However, a big surprise happened that even an art lover like me didn’t expect! Working with molten lead IS DANGEROUS! Pouring water, Coke, etc. into lead can actually make a big steam explosion, showering you with hot lead. I was able to mitigate that danger because the lead was shallow, and the Coke instantly quenched (solidified) the molten lead. I can only advise you to NOT try this yourself.

via Digg

Jeff Wysaski of Obvious Plant recently visited a local store and added clever new fake names to ordinary paint colors. Purple is switched out to appropriately become “Barney‘s Blood”, the color black turns into “The Eternal Darkness That Will One Day Consume Us All”, and more. The entire series of images are available to view on the Obvious Plant blog.

photos via Obvious Plant

Creeping vines and other flora have enveloped a small, formerly inhabited fishing village on Shengshan Island roughly 40 miles east of Shanghai, which is part of the Shengsi Islands, a chain of islands in China’s Zhejiang province.

The village along the northern bay of Shengshan Island was abandoned after its residents, mostly fishermen, left in the early 1990s. Take a look below to see what remains of this lush, green ghost town.

Have something to add to this story? Share it in the comments. Read more...

More about China, Earth, Nature, Pics, and Photo Stories

Photo: Alien Cat Matilda

Is that an adorable cat or our new alien overlord so cute that she's out of this world?

Meet Matilda, a regular terrestrial tabby with a mysterious condition that caused her eyes to grow into large, dark alien-like orbs. Matilda's owners adopted the cat from a rescue group that removed her from a hoarder's home as a kitten. Back then, her eyes were normal.

One day, her right eye went black. "The regular vets were for the most part stumped," Matilda's owner, who wishes to remain anonymous, told PEOPLE, "After she saw a specialist we learned that it is a spontaneous lens luxation, which means that the lens detached from the rest of the eye for no known reason. This is the mysterious part of the problem since she is an otherwise healthy cat."

Eventually, Matilda's other eye also developed the same condition, and both of her eyes grew larger, giving the cat her distinct alien look.

"Unfortunately for Matilda ... she is developing glaucoma and will inevitably have to have surgery despite the difficult healing process," the cat's owner added.

Read more about Matilda' story over at her website and Instagram.

Details: The Merkur chandelier, designed by Czech artist Rony Plesl for Preciosa, has articulated metal arms with lights at the end that extend outwards and upwards so that they can be positioned either vertically or horizontally depending on the need.

Says Preciosa, “Merkur, inspired by the male form, is firm, vigorous and confident in design”.

Source: Via MOCO Submit.

Japanese retailer Parco has expanded their line of sushi-themed suitcase covers to include new types of sushi: tako (octopus), ikura (salmon roe), and saba (mackerel). Each suitcase cover slips over a suitcase and leaves openings for the handle and wheels. When luggage is sent through the conveyor belt in baggage claim, the sushi suitcase looks adorably like a sushi-go-round found at Japanese fast-food retaurants.

images via Parco

via Entabe, RocketNews24

Dragon Mask Pattern

Dallas, Texas-based doctoral student Matthew of TetraVariations has created a collection of papercraft mask patterns portraying dinosaurs, Cthulhu, skulls, dragons, video game characters, and more. They are all available to purchase online from his Etsy store.

Cthulhu or Ood Mask Pattern

Skull Mask Pattern

Dinosaur Mask Patterns

Metroid Mask Pattern

Elephant Mask Pattern

images via TetraVariations

via Fashionably Geek

Melissa is an adorably petite Scottish Fold cat with an incredibly long tongue that she likes to stick out most of the time. Melissa lives in Russia with her photographer human Alina Esther, who is able to capture the wonderful expressions of this silly little cat–including the now-famous shot that earned Melissa the nickname “Einstein Cat“.

images via Melissa Scottish

via Bored Panda

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls — A warm welcome to the shake-it-if-ya-got-it Friday open thread. Please give a wiggle, a jiggle, a shimmy, or a twist on your way in and don’t hold back, we’re not judging you today.

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dvdp:

150612

One of my new favorite Tumblrs to follow is Un gif dans ta gueule… (roughly ‘A gif in the mouth…’) run by French photographer and animator Nicolas Monterrat who brings his surreal sense of humor to historical photos, paintings, and other borrowed imagery by creating bizarre and humorous animations. Collected here is just a sampling, do yourself and dive into his archive, you won’t regret it. (via Lustik)

[Image: A laser scan of the Pantheon, courtesy ScanLAB Projects and the BBC; view larger!].

ScanLAB Projects, focus of a long article on Wired last month, are back in the news with a BBC documentary exploring the infrastructure of ancient Rome.

The show "explores Roman infrastructure and ingenuity, all below ground level":

We journeyed via the icy, crystal clear waters of subterranean aqueducts that feed the Trevi fountain and two thousand year old sewers which still function beneath the Roman Forum today, to decadent, labyrinthine catacombs. Our laser scans map these hidden treasures, revealing for the first time the complex network of tunnels, chambers and passageways without which Rome could not have survived as a city of a million people.

The results, as usual, are both breathtaking and bizarre.

[Image: Courtesy ScanLAB Projects and the BBC].

The surface of the city is scraped away, a kind of archaeological dermabrasion, to reveal sprawling networks of knotted masonry and old corridors spliced together in a translucent labyrinth less below than somehow in the city.

[Image: Courtesy ScanLAB Projects and the BBC].

One of the most interesting points made in Mary-Ann Ray's excellent Pamphlet Architecture installment—1997's Seven Partly Underground Rooms and Buildings for Water, Ice, and Midgets—is when she describes her use of composite photography as a way to experiment with new forms of archaeological documentation.

Indeed, the pamphlet itself is as much architecture as it is archaeology—perhaps even suggesting a new series of historical site documents someone should produce called Pamphlet Archaeology—looking at wells, baths, cisterns, and spherical refrigeration chambers, in various states of ruin.

All of these are representationally difficult spaces, Ray explains, either curving away from the viewer in a manner that is nearly impossible to photograph or presenting constrictions of perspective that make even wide-angle photographs inadequate.

[Image: Courtesy ScanLAB Projects and the BBC].

Ray writes that the spatial complexity of the buildings, quarries, basements, and other excavations that she explores are, in a sense, an entirely different kind of space: knotty, interconnected, unstable. "They were also spaces," she writes, "which seemed to have the ability to 'flip-flop' in and out of multiple spatial or constructional readings."

What appears to be near is revealed to be far; what seems far away is suddenly adjacent.

[Image: Courtesy ScanLAB Projects and the BBC; view larger!].

Ray uses the metaphor of a "hyper-camera" here in order to draw comparisons between her composite photography and what she calls "a kind of cubist multiple view," one where "the frame might succumb to the taper of perspective into deep space, or it may counter it, or build it into something else altogether."

"In these composite views," she adds, "the photograph can record the enactment of space as one maneuvers or roams through it with the eye or body."

While Ray's photographic approach is technologically, materially, and even visually very different from the work of ScanLAB, the two projects share a great deal, conceptually and methodologically. In fact, if many of the above quotations were applied, instead, to the images seen in the present post, they would seem to be the appropriate descriptions.

[Image: In the ruined basements of architectural simultaneity; ScanLAB Projects and the BBC].

ScanLAB's laser work seems to fulfill many of the promises of Ray's composite photography, offering multiple, overlapping perspectives simultaneously whilst also eliminating the problem of the horizon or ground plane: you can thus look straight-on into the basement of an ancient structure without losing sight of the upper floors or chambers.

The city is split in two, made into an architectural section of itself that is then animated, made volumetric, turned into Ray's "enactment of space as one maneuvers or roams through it with the eye or body."

The show airs tonight on the BBC. Check out ScanLAB's website for more info, and definitely consider picking up a copy of Mary-Ann Ray's book; it remains one of my favorites and has actually become more, not less, topical since its original publication.

you-want-this-url-huh:

nickxdee:

THIS IS NEVER NOT FUNNY

i really thought they were talking about colons at first

Anti-pollution projection, China

Reptile Eye

Italian architect Stefano Prina departed from his studied profession to create an incredible line of eerily beautiful “Monster Eyes“, sculptures crafted from acrylic resin inside a wooden shell that realistically portray the ocular orbs of all sorts of animals, both real and imaginary.

For a number of years, inspired by the extraordinary expressive eye of my adored dog, Luchino, my research brought me on the trail of the creation of eyes. …I believe that the idea at the foundation of all this has to do with the magic and wonder that one feels observing the shape and forms of life through the real and true marvel of evolution that is the eye, the organ that absorbs light and allows our perception of the world. In any case, apart from any explanation, I would like my eyes to be a single, joyous moment of wonder for those who observe them.

The sculptures and accompanying jewelry are available via Prima’s site.

Assortment of Eyes

Goat Eye

Owl Eye

Violet Eye – Small Ring

The Artist and the Monoculus

images via Stefano Prima

via Faith Is Torment

Exhibited as part of the Boston Design Biennial in 2013, Matter Design‘s Helix is a concrete spiral staircase that is full of surprises. Chief among these is its size – the stair was built at half-size to address the practical issues of weight, liability and access – but more important are the details of its assembly. While the steps of most spiral staircases are supported from either the stair’s perimeter or a central column, Helix transfers loads directly through the steps below to its base which, rather than resting on the floor as it appears, is in fact suspended from a beam in the ceiling.

This unconventional structural system was inspired by the material in question: as unreinforced concrete has poor tensile strength, it is unsuitable for use in a cantilevered system as used in many spiral stairs, prompting the development of a stacked system. Each step hooks around the central threaded steel bar, and is clamped to the step below, with interlocking elements to prevent the steps from slipping. The central threaded bar, in turn, connects to the ceiling above to support the entire assembly and keep the stair steady.

The project was inspired by Matter Design‘s attempts to define a contemporary interpretation of stone architecture, and their “pre-occupation with the translation of ancient and often lost methods into contemporary culture and practice,” say Matter Design founders Brandon Clifford and Wes McGee. The rounded, plastic appearance of the stairs is designed to reference the original, fluid form of the concrete, while the organic form is juxtaposed with the precise interlocking structural system of the steps.

However, casting the steps in concrete while maintaining the precision required for the interlocking elements was no mean feat. Developed in collaboration with Matthew Johnson of engineers Simpson Gumpertz & Heger, the solution required a custom-built mold comprising rubber inner molds, with a wooden “mother-mold” to clamp the entire assembly together. As the concrete was poured, the entire mold was vibrated, and the entire assembly was steam-cured for 12 hours to ensure a high-quality finish on each step.

Design: Brandon Clifford & Wes McGee (Matter Design)
Structural: Matthew Johnson (Simpson Gumpertz & Heger)
Project Team: Aaron Willette, Austin Smith, Christopher Miller, Daniel Clark, Edrie Ortega, Elizabeth Galvez, Enas AlKuhdairy, Johanna Lobdell, Justin Gallagher, Lina Kara’in, Luisel Zayas, Matthew Sherman, Patrick Little, Rebecca Priebe, Sixto Cordero
Fabrication support: University of Michigan TCAUP FABLab and Simpson Gumpertz & Heger
Material donations: Boston Sand and Gravel (Aggregate and Additives), Lehigh Northeast Cement Company (Type III Cement), and Headwaters Resources, Inc. (Fly Ash)

Deception was imperative during WWII, and sometimes to the trickery got very surreal. In order to distract the enemy, militaries would create fake vehicles, weaponry, soldiers, and even entire towns. And they were pretty convincing — if you didn’t look too close.

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With a keen sense of humor and superb control of a spray can, Swiss artist Remo Lienhard (aka Wes21) covers both walls and canvases with his playful sythesis of science fiction and the natural world. The artist imagines a hybrid spaceship ladybug as it blasts into the sky and pair of airborne lighthouses are revealed to be the bodies of ominous looking squid. Lienhard works in a variety of mediums from smaller acrylic and spray pieces on canvas to larger murals that often make use of surrounding objects.

Lienhard is a member of a collective of graffiti artists and illustrators called Schwarzmaler and is represented by SOON, and you can see more recent work on his Facebook.

Wes21 & ONUR

Wes21 & ONUR

by Heck If I Know