Andreidignart

Hello again. I am a friend of Julia’s and I used to pop up from time to time. I’m happy to be a regular contributor to BBIC, especially since I now have a new niece and nephew. I consider it my personal mission to add weirdness to their lives, and this project is the perfect way to screen books that will introduce them to good design, offbeat creativity, and a preference for cats. These are my stories:

Bear Despair has been my favorite ever since it joined the growing stack of books to be reviewed over a year ago. I think I first came across it at the MoMA store.  It immediately won me over with the title – which could easily be the title of some Edward Gorey educational app about rhyming if only he were still around.

Allow me to summarize the story for you. Once upon a time a fox comes along and steals a teddy bear from a big blue bear.

So he eats him.

I won’t give away the ending but I can assure you it is appropriate for children. I sometimes kind of feel that wordless books are a cop-out but this one doesn’t disappoint.

I spent a long time pondering why it is so delightful, I think it is the amazing way Gaëtan Dorémus captures gesture and expression. So much adorable bear rage. And a fantastic art style and color palette. The moral of the story: Don’t steal things from anyone big enough to eat you. Get a copy here.

The post Bear Despair appeared first on Book By Its Cover.

Louis CK announced on The Tonight Show that he will be personally selling his previously unreleased 1998 film Tomorrow Night on his website. The film premiered at Sundance but never got proper distribution. It features a pre-fame Steve Carell and Amy Poehler.

As I've posted earlier here, I am a admirer of CK's short films which feature a Woody Allen mindset filtered through a David Lynch surreality (It's no accident Lynch was a prominent guest star on the comic's FX show. Louis CK clearly worships him). I hope the performance of this new film encourages CK to return to feature directing. He is an essential voice and the natural heir to Woody's New York auteur throne.

Acrylic on paper, 
spread.

A collection of images of African-American men together, from the Civil War to the present, challenges modern discomfort with male intimacy, sexual or otherwise.

© Dennis Church

The super-saturated color photographs by Dennis Church were one of our most pleasant discoveries this year — even though some of them date back to the 1970s. These photographs capture color, light and an emotional vibration of American life from the 1970s to the present. Each image compresses a lot of visual information into a flattened plane. The more time you spend with any of these pictures, you may be surprised at the tiny details that break through the clutter to make each photograph especially delightful. See lots more in LensCulture.

'I was up all night drinking vodka. When I saw this view in the morning, all I had to do was press the button'

• Pentti Sammallahti: a lyrical world in black and white images

It was -20C when I took this picture. The fog you see is actually ice fog: lots of tiny ice particles suspended in the air. This happens when it's very cold but the sea has not frozen. It was February 1992 and I was in the northwest of Russia, on an island called Solovets in the White Sea.

I used to travel to Russia a lot, especially after glasnost when it became possible to visit the countryside. At the time, many people in the White Sea area spoke Karelian Finnish, so I was able to converse with them. It was like going back to my childhood: life there had not changed much over the years. Finland and Russia have a complex relationship. We fought each other in the second world war and there have been all kinds of troubles, but they are our neighbours and I think it is better to keep good relations. I like the country, the people, everything there.

Travelling round that part of Russia is quite easy because people follow an old byzantine tradition that says they have to be kind and polite to strangers. I have heard it said that this is because they believe every foreigner could be the next Christ. They are very poor but will always find you somewhere to stay: even if their home is small and crowded, there will be room for your sleeping bag.

The night before I took this, I stayed up until the early morning talking, playing chess and drinking vodka with a Finnish film-maker. I eventually fell asleep, but he roused me and said: "Get up, Pentti. If you don't get good pictures now, then you are a duffer!" He was right. It honestly felt like I could have photographed anything. In fact, anyone could have been working the camera – the circumstances were so perfect. It was around nine in the morning, just after sunrise and, although it was cold, the light was enchanting. The man in the picture might be going off to work, I don't know. He had his dog with him. It ran back and forth, always waiting up ahead. The dog is small, but it is important.

I feel like I received this photograph, I didn't take it. If you're in the right place at the right time, then all you have to do is push a button. Being a photographer doesn't come into it.

Another evening, I was sitting on some steps with my friend. We were drinking vodka and talking about how sorry we were about the situation in Russia, how it felt like everything had collapsed. We were almost crying about how sad everything seemed. Then we looked round and saw a group of dogs running around and having fun. My friend said: "Pentti, don't worry – this country is a paradise for dogs." I thought: "That is the point of view I will adopt when I photograph here."

So when I put the shots together for my Russian Way landscape series, I only chose ones that had dogs and a road in them. When I photograph dogs, I always have something to feed them – some sausage or sardines. They are quite easy to befriend. Give them something twice and they'll be your friend for life.

CV

Born: Helsinki, Finland, 1950.

Studied: Self-taught.

Influences: "My grandmother, the photographer Hildur Larsson; Kristoffer Albrecht; Paul Strand; André Kertész and Josef Koudelka."

Top tip: "Get a book of great photographs and spend a week studying each shot. Every day, think about a different aspect: subject, composition, tonal range, the moment when the image was taken and how the photograph was made."

• Work by Pentti Sammallahti can be seen at the Photographers' Gallery, London, W1.

Landscape with a ruin near Mödling, Jakob Matthias Schmutzer

Brown and grey ink, black chalk. In the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Hi-res version here (1.7mb).

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As usual, Ware nails it.

All Together Now

Where did Dungeons & Dragons creator Gary Gygax find inspiration for his magical monsters like the Bulette, Rust Monster, and Owlbear? Apparently inside a bag of crappy plastic "Prehistoric Animals" sold at variety stores in the early 1970s! Tony DiTerlizzi has more: "Owlbears, Rust Monsters, and Bulettes, Oh My!" (via Laughing Squid)

The Antarctic Heritage Trust of New Zealand announced (PDF) that it had discovered a century-old box of photographic negatives from Captain Scott's last expedition base at Cape Evans, depicting Ernest Shackleton's 1914-1917 Ross Sea Party. The mouldy cellulose nitrate negs were among 10,000 artifacts recovered from Scott's Cape Evans hut, and were "clumped together." The negs were painstakingly restored and the photos have been published. They're damaged but remarkable, and no one knows who took them. (via /.)

The best of Story Time Jesus.

Cool story Jesus!

[via]

The Internet Archive announced 'Console Living Room,' a collection of games for the Atari 2600, ColecoVision and a number of other great consoles of the day! No Pitfall, however.

Internet Archive's Console Living Room

Iron Maiden hired a BitTorrent analytics company called Musicmetric to determine where piracy of their music was highest, then scheduled tours of those countries. They made millions touring Central and South America. Iron Maiden LLP has outperformed the UK music sector as a whole and was named one of the "1000 Companies That Inspire Britain" by the London Stock Exchange.

"Having an accurate real time snapshop of key data streams is all about helping inform people's decision making. If you know what drives engagement you can maximize the value of your fan base. Artists could say ‘we're getting pirated here, let's do something about it’, or ‘we're popular here, let's play a show’," said Gregory Mead, CEO and co-founder of the London-based firm.

In the case of Iron Maiden, still a top-drawing band in the U.S. and Europe after thirty years, it noted a surge in traffic in South America. Also, it saw that Brazil, Venezuela, Mexico, Columbia, and Chile were among the top 10 countries with the most Iron Maiden Twitter followers. There was also a huge amount of BitTorrent traffic in South America, particularly in Brazil.

Rather than send in the lawyers, Maiden sent itself in. The band has focused extensively on South American tours in recent years, one of which was filmed for the documentary "Flight 666." After all, fans can't download a concert or t-shirts. The result was massive sellouts. The São Paolo show alone grossed £1.58 million (US$2.58 million) alone.

How Iron Maiden found its worst music pirates -- then went and played for them [Andy Patrizio/Cite World]

(Image: Estadio Saprissa Iron Maiden, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from adels's photostream)

It was a fantastic year for art, design and creative expression here on Colossal. Artists and creatives from a wide range of backgrounds and ages seemed to capture the creative spirit we love to celebrate here, from a nonagenarian graphic designer who began a new artistic career with an old copy of Microsoft Paint to a slick digital family tree timelapse that gave us chills. And of course there were photos of goofy dogs. Here’s a quick wrap-up of the 15 most viewed posts here on Colossal this year. You can see more popular posts from previous years right here.

1. Graphic Designer Dad Illustrates His Kids’ Lunch Bags Almost Every Day Since 2008

Some of us might have been lucky enough to get a quick “Have a great day” note from mom or dad tucked inside our school lunchbox, but the sons of graphic designer David LaFerriere seriously lucked out. The artistically inclined father has been drawing illustrations on their lunch bags since 2008, totalling an estimated 1,082 doodles and counting. Lucky for us LaFerriere carefully documented almost every single drawing and has uploaded the body of work on Flickr. You can also see a video where he talks about this ongoing labor of love on the Weekly Flickr.

2. Secret Fore-Edge Paintings Revealed in Early 19th Century Books at the University of Iowa

Autumn by Robert Mudie / Special Collections & University Archives at the University of Iowa

Autumn by Robert Mudie / Special Collections & University Archives at the University of Iowa

This amazing collection of fore-edge book paintings was documented online for the first time by Colleen Theisen from the Special Collections & University Archives at the University of Iowa. Examples of similar secret paintings date all the back to the 1650s and are apparently just as interesting nearly 360 years later.

3. The Pixel Painter: A 97-Year-Old Man Who Draws Using Microsoft Paint from Windows 95

Meet Hal Lasko, a 97-year-old man who uses Microsoft Paint from Windows 95 to create artwork that has been described as “a collision of pointillism and 8-Bit art.” Approaching a century in age, Lasko is now having his work shown for the first time in an art exhibition and also has prints for sale online.

4. The World’s First 3D Printing Pen that Lets you Draw Sculptures

This new 3D Printing called the 3Doodler stormed the creative spirit of the internet earlier this year with a Kickstarter campaign that raised $2.3 million dollars. The miraculous little device utilizes a special plastic which is heated and instantly cooled to form solid structures as you draw.

5. Shake: Hilarious High-Speed Photographs of Dogs Shaking by Carli Davidson

Dax / Boxer / Courtesy Carli Davidson & Harper Collins

Shake is a new book of photos from Portland-based photographer Carli Davidson who used a high speed camera to capture hilarious freeze-frame shots of various dogs mid-shake. The amusing portraits seem to transform ordinary pets into strangely distorted animals right out of a cartoon.

6. Man Spends 7 Years Drawing Incredibly Intricate Maze

Almost 30 years ago a Japanese custodian sat in front of a large A1 size sheet of white paper, whipped out a pen and started drawing a diabolically complex maze. It was the beginning of a hobby that would consume his spare time for upward of 7 years when the final labyrinth was rolled up and almost forgotten. Miraculously, his daughter accidentally discovered the drawing when going through her father’s things and shared the masterpiece with the world. FYI: Prints now available in the Spoon & Tamago shop.

7. The Life and Times of an Aging Superhero Captured in Oil Paintings by Andreas Englund

In his ongoing series of photorealistic oil paintings called the Aging Superhero, Swedish artist Andreas Englund takes us into the candidly humorous life of an anonymous superhero who has probably seen better days. Though he still puts up a tough fight, the wear and tear of battling crime has taken its toll on this elderly action figure.

8. This is What Happens When You Run Water Through a 24hz Sine Wave

One of the coolest audio/visual experiments we saw this year, Brusspup demonstrates what happens when you run water through a 24hz sine wave and capture it with a camera filming at a rate of 24 fps. Hover water!

9. Timelapse of the Imperceptible Effects of Aging Created from Family Portraits by Anthony Cerniello

Watch the whole thing. With sound. Don’t skip around. Just let it play, or else you’re missing out.

10. Alive Without Breath: Three Dimensional Animals Painted in Layers of Resin by Keng Lye

Singapore-based artist Keng Lye wowed us with his amazing three dimensional animals painted in layers of resin, some of which even protrude the surface to create incredibly lifelike forms.

11. Banksy Has Unannounced Art Sale with Genuine Signed Canvases in Central Park, Sells Almost Nothing

In one his most ingenious stunts as part of his “Better Out than In Residency” in New York this fall, Banksy had an unannounced art sale in central park. Oblivious passersby had no idea the artworks that on any other day would have been unlicensed replicas, were actually the real deal.

12. Lucid Stead: A Transparent Cabin Built of Wood and Mirrors by Phillip K Smith III

Part architectural intervention and part optical illusion, Lucid Stead is a recently unveiled installation by artist Phillip K Smith III in Joshua Tree, California. The artist modified an existing 70-year-old homesteader shack by introducing mirrors to create the illusion of transparency, as the structure now takes on the lighting characteristics of anything around it.

13. Giant Chrome T-Rex Installed on the Seine River in Paris by Philippe Pasqua

Artist Philippe Pasqua recently completed installation of an impressive Tyrannosaurus Rex skeleton that now stands watch over the Seine river in Paris. The structure is made from 350 chrome molded bones and measures a full 21′ x 12′ (3m by 6m).

14. 9,000 Fallen Soldiers Etched into the Sand on Normandy Beach to Commemorate Peace Day

British artists Jamie Wardley and Andy Moss accompanied by numerous volunteers, took to the beaches of Normandy with rakes and stencils in hand to etch 9,000 silhouettes representing fallen people into the sand. Titled The Fallen 9000, the was meant as a stark visual reminder of the civilians, Germans and allied forces who died during the D-Day beach landings at Arromanches on June 6th, 1944 during WWII.

15. The Bizarre, Flexible Paper Sculptures of Li Hongbo

What at first look like delicate works of carved porcelain are actually thousands of layers of soft white paper, carved into busts, skulls, and human forms by Beijing artist Li Hongbo. A book editor and designer, the artist became fascinated by traditional Chinese toys and festive decorations known as paper gourds made from glued layers of thin paper which can be stored flat but then opened to reveal a flower or other shape. He applied the same honeycomb-like paper structure to much larger human forms resulting in these highly flexible sculptures.

In 1959, geologist Paul Walker put this note into a bottle and left it buried inside a pile of rocks in a remote part of the Arctic. More than just a "GEOLOGY WUZ HERE" sort of message, though, the note requested that whoever found it measure the distance between the cairn that contained the bottle and a nearby glacier and send the measurement to him. The goal: To document whether the glacier was advancing or retreating.

A group of scientists discovered the message this summer and followed its instructions. What they found is probably unsurprising to anybody who has been paying attention to the state of Arctic ice over the last couple decades. In 1959, the cairn and the glacier were 168.3 feet apart. Today, there is 333 feet between them.

Doge teacher

[via]

firedoge. so update!

[via]

Clique na imagem para ver em tamanho grande. | Carta anterior.

Installation View: Buildings Made of Sky © Peter Wegner

“There are two Manhattans. One is a city of tall buildings; the other is a city of no buildings. This city begins where the architecture leaves off. It’s a city cast in the die of Manhattan, a perfect complement to the built city, a kind of anti-Manhattan. This parallel city has an architecture all its own. It is the architecture of air, the space defined by the edges of everything else, its map redrawn by pigeons and pedestrians, barricades and scaffolding, cranes, trucks, taxis. It’s the city we assume but cannot name. In this city, the buildings are made of sky. It’s the Manhattan that isn’t – without which there could be no Manhattan.” — Peter Wegner

See and read more in LensCulture.

Detail View: Buildings Made of Sky © Peter Wegner

  

We’re proud to welcome the British Library to The Commons. The British Library is the national library of the United Kingdom and one of the world’s greatest libraries. It holds over 13 million books, 920,000 journal and newspaper titles, 57 million patents, 3 million sound recordings, and much, much more.

The British Library’s collections offers access to millions of public domain images, which the Library encourages you to explore and re-use. The release of these collections into the public domain represent the Library’s desire to improve knowledge of and about them, to enable novel and unexpected ways of using them, and to begin working with researchers to explore and interpret large scale digital collections.

The first set Highlights from the Mechanical Curator comes from a British Library Labs project dubbed the Mechanical Curator, which located more than a million images from within the Library’s digitised collection of over 65,000 books from the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. The images are a random selection that is meant to help you start discovering this amazing collection and help the British Library improve their knowledge of the images.

The images currently have very little metadata associated with them (though they do link back to the original digitised books), and we want to invite you to discover the content in the library’s photostream and add your knowledge to it by commenting and adding meaningful tags to the images to help develop the more than 1 million photos currently available on Flickr. The library will be leveraging our Flickr API in order to build crowdsourcing activities to improve the image descriptions over time and gain a greater understanding of what resides within.

Photos from the British Library.