Sofía Henao

In this video from the Washington Post, several members of the Washington Ballet demonstrate their most challenging moves. The points of peak action were shot with a high speed camera resulting in some impressive slow motion footage as each dancer seems to completely defy physics. (via Laughing Squid, The Kid Should See This)

What happens when you apply of love of small things to an art form that’s already all about small things? In recent years Bonsai—Japan’s art form of growing miniature trees in miniature planters—has undergone a miniaturization trend. Industry experts consider bonsai plants less than 3 cm (about 1 inch) to be particularly difficult, but artists have taken on the challenge, creating tiny plants and tiny planters that, literally, are at your fingertips. It’s given rise to a new category, known as cho-mini bonsai, or ultra-small bonsai.

It’s no secret that the Japanese excel at making things smaller, whether it’s automobiles, electronics or food. In fact, Japan’s love of small things can be found in literature dating back over a 1,000 years. When it comes to the land of the rising sun, it’s clear that beauty comes in small packages. (via Archie McPhee, RocketNews24)

Here are more apocalypses.

And a reminder to Vancouver folks: I’ll be at the Carded! art show tomorrow night. You should go too – it looks like fun!

Jana & JS are a street art duo currently based in Austria who specialize in detailed stencil work, frequently depicting people with cameras or couples sharing intimate moments. Shown here are a few pieces from recent stops in the German countryside and Brookyln, see much more on their website and on Facebook. (via Hi-Fructose, StreetArtNews)

La Llareta (up to 3,000 years old; Atacama Desert, Chile)

Spruce Gran Picea #0909 – 11A07 (9,550 years old; Fulufjället, Sweden)

Welwitschia Mirabilis #0707-22411 (2,000 years old; Namib-Naukluft Desert, Namibia)

Antarctic Moss #0212-7B33 (5,500 years old; Elephant Island, Antarctica)

Jōmon Sugi, Japanese Cedar #0704-002 (2,180-7,000 years old; Yakushima, Japan

Underground Forest #0707-10333 (13,000 years old; Pretoria South Africa) DECEASED

Since 2004, Brooklyn-based contemporary artist Rachel Sussman has researched, collaborated with biologists, and braved some of the world’s harshest climates from Antarctica to the Mojave Desert in order to photograph the oldest continuously living organisms on Earth. This includes plants like Pando, the “Trembling Giant,” a colony of aspens in Utah with a massive underground root system estimated to be around 80,000 years old. Or the dense Llareta plants in South America that grow 1.5 centimeters anually and live over 3,000 years. This is the realm of life where time is measured in millennia, and where despite such astonishing longevity, ecosystems are now threatened due to climate change and human encroachment.

Sussman’s photographs have now been gathered together for the first time in The Oldest Living Things in the World, a new book published by the University of Chicago Press. Sitting at the intersection of art, science, and travelogue, the book details her adventures in tracking down each subject and relays the valuable scientific work done by scientists to understand them. It includes 124 photographs, 30 essays, infographics and forewords by Hans-Ulrich Obrist and Carl Zimmer.

You can learn more about Sussman’s project in her 2010 TED Talk. (via Hyperallergic)

Update: Rachel Sussman was just named a 2014 Guggenheim Fellow.

More bananas.

Photographer Alberto Seveso (previously) just released a new series of ink plumes photographed underwater against a black background titled Blackground. The Italian photographer and illustrator now lives and works in Bristol, UK where he does commercial work for digital brands, magazines, and album covers. Seveso was also kind enough to let us use an image from Blackground as part of small Colossal design refresh for the next few months.

via http://thisisnthappiness.com/page/3

Just when you think you’ve mastered every filter and editing technique when making a video of your kid chewing on Legos and pulling the cat’s tail, DreamWorks special effects artist Daniel Hashimoto arrives to trump us all. On his YouTube channel Action Movie Kid Hashmito bestows his son James with superhuman abilities and gives him gadgets of every child’s wildest imagination. Here are five of my favorites but you can see more here. (thnx, Jess!)

In this fun series of photos from the streets of Milan and Paris, artist Etienne Lavie imagines what the world might be like if invasive street advertisements were replaced with classical paintings. If instead of waiting for the bus next to a back-lit ad for a new car, you were given the opportunity to stare at Marco d’ Oggiono’s The Three Archangels. Lavie has shared very little about the tongue-in-cheek project titled “OMG who stole my ads?,” but art triumphing over consumerism in an urban utopia is pretty clear message. You can see much more of the series here. (via Colossal Submissions)

photos courtesy Joey Morris and LACE

After 7 long months of obsessively scribbling away on a large wall, artist Sean Sullivan “threw in the towel,” in part because he had exceeded his allotted time period by 4 months! The resulting mural was “Grand Pale Maw,” an expansive wall drawing that encompassed the entire rear corridor space of LACE in LA. Grand Pale Maw—Sullivan’s first large scale mural—was on display only through January 2012 but thanks to these photos documenting the process we can still ogle over them. (via Lost at E Minor)

More PROD3000.

All photos courtesy S. Morita

Japan is a country full of amazing art. Some of it is housed within museums and galleries while others are right underneath our feet. I’m talking, of course, about Japan’s peculiar obsession with manhole covers. Just about anywhere in the country you can find stylized manhole covers, each more beautiful and intricate than the next. For the past several years photographer S. Morita has traveled around Japan photographing artistic manhole covers.

As to why this phenomenon developed, signs point to a high-ranking bureaucrat in the construction ministry who, in 1985, came up with the idea of allowing municipalities to design their own manhole covers. His objective was to raise awareness for costly sewage projects and make them more palatable for taxpayers.

Thanks to a few design contests and subsequent publications, the manhole craze took off and municipalities were soon competing with each other to see who could come up with the best designs. According to the Japan Society of Manhole Covers (yes, that’s a thing) today there are almost 6000 artistic manhole covers throughout Japan. And according to their latest findings, the largest single category are trees, followed by landscapes, floral designs and birds – all symbols that could, and surely did, boost local appeal.

You can see hundreds more of Morita’s photos right here. (via A Green Thought in a Green Shade)

Update: Remo Camerota has an entire book on the design of Japanese manhole covers, aptly titled Drainspotting.

perched on the shore's dunes, the timber clad structure exists in harmony with its surroundings, blending into the landscape.

The post timber hut on sleds by crosson clarke carnachan architects appeared first on designboom | architecture & design magazine.

The Cyclist’s Empire is the latest cycling-inspired print from the folks over at 100 Copies who print (as you might have guessed) only 100 copies of all their posters. This particular design was created using 7 different kinds of bicycle tracks that were rolled onto paper to mimic the structure of the Empire State Building. There’s only 75 left and these will be gone almost instantly so get one while you can.

Momentum is a project by artist Alejandro Guijarro who spent three years traveling to the quantum mechanics departments of Cambridge, Stanford, Berkeley, Oxford and elsewhere to shoot large format photographs of blackboards just after lectures. Completely removed from the context of a classroom or laboratory and displayed in a gallery, the cryptic equations from one of the most formidable branches of physics become abstract patterns of line and color. Via the artist’s statement:

Before he walks into a lecture hall Guijarro has no idea what he will find. He begins by recording the blackboard with the minimum of interference. No detail of the lecture hall is included, the blackboard frame is removed and we are left with a surface charged with abstract equations. At this stage they are documents. However, once removed from their institutional beginnings the meaning evolves. The viewer begins to appreciate the equations for their line and form. Colour comes into play and the waves created by the blackboard eraser suggest a vast landscape or galactic setting. The formulas appear to illustrate the worlds of Quantum Mechanics. What began as a precise lecture, a description of the physicist’s thought process, is transformed into a canvas open to any number of possibilities.

Guijarro graduated from the Royal College of Art in 2010 with a MA in fine art and now lives
and works in both London and Madrid. He’ll have work later this year at PhotoEspaña. (via Not Shaking the Grass)

offering a secret space that one can retreat to, the intimate shelter was influenced by the client's passion for children's literature and mythologies.

The post WSD architecture inserts writer’s shed into UK back garden appeared first on designboom | architecture & design magazine.

First: extreme vertigo warning. When this video begins it seems as though you’re about to witness a fairly typical gymnastic routine on a pair of swinging rings, but then something unexpected happens as the camera begins to move with the gymnast. The twist: there are actually two individuals performing a synchronized routine. The video isn’t a reflection, but rather the camera is mounted to the other performer who perfectly mimics his partners moves.

The video was shot in 2012 by photographer and filmmaker Thomas Hubener (who I believe is the performer with the camera mounted to him) while filming Raphaël Schulé. (via Reddit)