Vladimir Gvozdeff's illustration series Mechanisms depicts a wonderful bestiary of armored, mechanical creatures in steampunk style, surrounded by the detritus of contrafactual Victorian inventorship. Some of my favorites after the jump:
владимир гвоздев & gvozdariki (via Pipe Dream Dragon) 
    
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Artist Dennis Hlynsky uses a digital process to make the flight paths of birds visible in his mesmerizing video project, “small brains on mass.” The process, which Hlynsky calls “extruded time,” involves stacking frames in a sequence and adding the darkest pixels together. The effect is a long trail that shows the past few moments of a bird’s flight path as it flies. Large flocks become dense clouds of paths that continually form and disappear. Hlynsky has more extruded time videos on Vimeo.
videos by Dennis Hlynsky, GIF via Colossal
via Colossal
A. KachmarA giant cat scratcher
Montreal-based artist Marie José Gustave has created Hypnotic, a piece of wall art made from rolled cardboard.
About the artist
Marie José Gustave has been combining artistic research and lifestyle to create functional art pieces out of recycled cardboard for more than ten years. Her work, influenced by her Caribbean origins, lies between industrial design and contemporary craft.
Pushing the limits of an under-appreciated material, Marie José creates innovative and decorative home objects that maintain a raw, natural quality. Concerned with craftsmanship, texture, and volume, she makes each one of her objects by hand. Marie is a member of Le Conseil des Métiers d’arts du Québec, and received SIDIM’s (Montreal design show) Excellence Award 2010 for her lamps.
Hypnotic cardboard wall art is made with a thin type of cardboard rolled together giving an hypnotic effect.
Read the rest of Bernhard Lang’s Staggering Aerial Photos Show Our Impact on the World
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Post tags: aerial photography, aerial photos, aerial views, Art, bernhard lang, container photos, containers, eco-art, green art, Photography, port, port of bremerhaven, shipping containers
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Dogs and cats are obviously very different creatures and that fact is easily demonstrated in this amusing video posted by srwacr. While the dog subscribes to the observational learning process, the cat prefers to go with the experiential school of thought.
via reddit
A. KachmarDescriptive geometry at its finest
Nautilus
Caracol
Double Conic Spiral, process
Double Conic Spiral. Ink, acrylic/canvas.
Morpho
Calculation (Sequence) #2. Acrylic, china ink/canvas.
In the midst of our daily binge of emailing, Tweeting, Facebooking, app downloading and photoshopping it’s almost hard to imagine how anything was done without the help of a computer. For Venezuelan artist Rafael Araujo, it’s a time he relishes. At a technology-free drafting table he deftly renders the motion and subtle mathematical brilliance of nature with a pencil, ruler and protractor. Araujo creates complex fields of three dimensional space where butterflies take flight and the logarithmic spirals of shells swirl into existence. He calls the series of work Calculation, and many of his drawings seem to channel the look and feel of illustrations found in Da Vinci’s sketchbooks. In an age when 3D programs can render a digital version of something like this in just minutes, it makes you appreciate Araujo’s remarkable skill. You can see much more here. (via ArchitectureAtlas)
Why do birds fly in a "V" formation? Scientists at the UK's Royal Veterinary College attached sensors to endangered ibises migrating from Austria to Tuscany. What they confirmed is that the aerodynamics of V flocking helps the birds conserve energy and that they optimize this by careful positioning and timing their wing flaps. "Precision formation flight astounds scientists" (Nature) 
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Chris from Betabrand sez, "While humanity waits for the space industry to hurry the hell up and allow it to freely travel through the cosmos, the fashion industry is already prepared. Today, Betabrand released the Space Jacket by Steven B. Wheeler -- a Tyvek and silver nylon masterpiece that's inspired by astronaut EVA suits and satellite insulation."
This is one of Betabrand's "think-tank" designs, suggested by the public, refined by Betabrand's designers, and then crowdfunded through production. Early backers get a substantial discount. It's an innovative way of making clothes, and it's how I got my lovely hunter's jacket. It produces some real surprises!
Space Jacket (Thanks, Chris!) 
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Here's a brain-meltingly cool proof of the bizarre mathematical truth that the sum of all positive integers (1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5....) is -1/12. This is not only provably true, it's also foundational to certain testable elements of physics. In other words: not just a logical curiosity, but also the bedrock of real-world, useful stuff.
ASTOUNDING: 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 + ... = -1/12 (via Kottke) 
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Sure, everyone knows that smoking causes lung cancer, heart disease, emphysema, and stankness. But that's not all!
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Her full, firm fanny has made her an Instagram sensation, with nearly two million followers to her name.
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Retail analysts say more data breaches like the hits on Target and Neiman Marcus are coming. A new report details how hackers "with ties to the former Soviet Union" stay ahead with "innovation and a high degree of skill."
Dozens of classic paintings are subtly animated in the short video “Beauty” by Italian animator Rino Stefano Tagliafierro. You can see the full list of paintings here.
via Boing Boing
Istanbul-based artist Selçuk Yilmaz has created a majestic sculpture called “Aslan” — the Turkish word for lion — made from nearly 4,000 pieces of metal. According to Colossal, each piece of metal in the 550-pound sculpture was individually hand-cut and hammered, and the whole piece took nearly a year to complete.
via Colossal
Artist Randall Rosenthal carves and paints solid blocks of wood into astonishingly realistic sculptures of newspapers, cash, and other paper objects. His sculptures can be purchased through the Bernaducci Meisel Gallery in New York City.
photos via Randall Rosenthal
via Colossal
Gov. Jerry Brown is urging Californians to cut their water use by 20 percent, and he's telling state agencies to conserve water – and to hire more firefighters.
A. KachmarFantastic
A bandsaw is the go-to shop fixture if you're cutting an intricate shape out of wood. But there's a size limit as to what you can get up onto the bed and maneuver with your hands, in a manner that's safe for both you and the machine. Imagine if you had to cut a 16-foot beam or a log for a log cabin, for instance.
To get around this, Italian production-tool manufacturer MD Dario has come up with an ingenious solution: Mount an entire bandsaw on a two-section arm with ball-bearing joints at all three connection points.
By taking this moutain-comes-to-Mohammed approach, a single operator can quickly and accurately move the saw around while the workpiece remains mobile. In the video below, fast-forward to 1:07 to get to the good part:
(more...)From hazy Pre-Raphaelite beauty to shadowy baroque allegory, this short film weaves hundreds of years of art history into an amazing and unsettling narrative of human beauty. Directed and animated by Rino Stefano Tagliafierro (previously at BB), it is "a path of sighs through the emotions of life, a tribute to the art and her disarming beauty."
Tagliafierro also has an awesome tumblr full of GIFs.
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Some of you will not know what this headline means. Others will have stuck your hand (or your whole body) under a shower and felt as though you were in an ice bath for a millisecond before you realized you've scalded yourself. For some people, sufficiently hot water will, for a moment, feel ice cold.
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This ain’t your grandmother’s cross-stitched bible verses. Contemporary artists exploit, subvert and otherwise manipulate the traditional craft of embroidery with hyperealistic portraits, surreal seemingly LSD-induced additions to old photos or pretty flowers added to actual x-rays. Some even use bread – or their own skin – as the canvas for their threaded creations.
Combining visual and performance art, David Cata sews portraits of his family members into the palm of his own hand, poking the thread through the topmost layer of skin. The series symbolizes people who have ‘left their mark’ on the artist’s life, just as the portraits leave their mark on his skin. “Their lives have been interwoven with mine to build my history, every moment lived stays in the memory to finally be forgotten. Somehow, this fact is painful, since there are only material things and traces that people leave behind.”
Flickr user NanaAkua shares photos of the 500-odd, incredibly intricate temari spheres embroidered by her 88-year-old grandmother. Temari balls are a form of Japanese folk art (of Chinese origin), often made from the thread of old kimonos and given as gifts to children on New Year’s Day.
Bears are seemingly turned inside-out with embroidery of their anatomy in stunning lifelike sculpture by Deborah Simon. Measuring about two feet square, the sculptures reveal internal organs, musculature, skeletons and nerves. The series highlights how human desire for their pelts puts these majestic creatures in danger. “Bears are the ultimate stuffed animals; both the iconic plush toy and the prized taxidermy specimen for hunters,” says Simon. “Most of the sculptures deal with vulnerability; the vulnerability that the animals face from environmental degradation, conflicts with people, suburban sprawl and poaching. I particularly find the dichotomy between the defanged, declawed childhood toy and the fierce reality of a top predator fascinating.”
David Cata isn’t the only artist using the thick, relatively bloodless skin of his palms as a surface for embroidery. Eliza Bennet uses a similar method, but her work invokes more of a visceral reaction of disgust for its visual mimicry of wounds. The idea is to highlight the idea of embroidery being women’s work, and women’s work being ‘easy.’ Bennet notes that many low-paid jobs typically aligned with women, like cleaning, caring and catering, can be difficult and labor-intensive. “Through a personally charged perception, I explore a range of issues relating to the formlessness of both individual and social reality,” she says.
Traditional embroidery is juxtaposed with plastic x-ray film in this series by Matthew Cox, superimposing images of vivid life on top of the stark white-bones-on-black. Fleshy hands hold flowers, or reach up toward the sky.
Move over Cronut, there’s a new kid in town. Scot Rossillo of The Bagel Store in Williamsburg, Brooklyn has created the “Cragel“, a croissant-bagel hybrid.
The Bagel Store proudly reintroduces “The Cragel”© – a delicate, flaky, buttery croissant baked into a flavorful tasty bagel. Introduced by “The Bagel Store ” to the New York City market in September, 2013. It is 50% croissant, 50 % bagel and 100% delicious – all of the characteristics of a bagel with the delicate flaky taste and texture of a croissant.
The Cragel comes in only one flavor and are $2.95 a piece and The Bagel Store will ship the Cragel and/or any other bagels anywhere within the United States.
images via The Bagel Store, Gothamist
via Gothamist
DVELAS is a Spain-based initiative that finds new uses for old and deteriorated sails from sailboats, who we’ve featured previously. They not only share the knowledge they’ve acquired about the sail material itself and make the material available to third parties, they design and manufacture limited edition pieces of furniture, like the Barlovento & Sotavento Chair. We especially love this chair because of its inspiration.
The frame might look like your average frame until you see the sketches above that show the inspiration behind it!
The chair is made from an aluminum frame that’s wrapped with sail fabric. The frame of the chair allows it to work two ways – as a lounger chair or an easy chair, depending on which way it’s placed on the floor.
