A predominantly black church in Oakland, California, was warned it would be fined more than $3,500 this week. The crime? Hosting choir practices too loud for some of its neighbors’ liking. The church has been there for 65 years, so what changed? Gentrification.
The Retina display on your MacBook or MacBook Pro is supposed to look gorgeous. However, some owners have encountered just the opposite -- the screen's anti-reflective coating is wearing out quickly due to pressure or stains, leaving them with an u...
Wow! BAHFest west is already sold out. Sorry to those of you who didn't make it in time, but we should have some tickets held at the door on show day. Also, there are still some tickets for Discovery News, which is right after us, in the same building!
Precariously resting atop a pedestal, these wave-like glass vessels by Scottish artist Graham Muir seem to defy gravity as if frozen in a moment before crashing into the ocean. Using techniques perfected over the last decade, Muir achieves delicate shapes that seem almost chiseled or fractured, but are in fact accomplished when working while the glass is still hot. He shares via his artist statement:
Such work speaks quietly of the harmony between maker or makers and the medium. It is often the result of a path that involves many failed attempts but results in a piece all the stronger for that, where nothing needs neither added nor taken away.
I find glass to be a material that does not respond well to being dominated by the artist. For me the concept of the work is just the starting point for a conversation between the artist’s idea and the material. The artist flags up the idea, the medium responds and the discussion begins. However the material must not dominate proceedings either and hot glass, as most who work in it know, can be very persuasive in having its own way.
Muir most recently had pieces on view as part of an exhibition of Scottish makers through Gallery TEN at Saatchi Gallery during Collect in London earlier this year. You can see more of his waves on his website. (via My Modern Met)
German conceptual artist HA Schult (b. 1939) has often worked in the realm of other people’s trash, creating large scale-works that force art into everyday life and call attention to the massive consumption of Western society. In Schult’s installation “Trash People,” he built hundreds of human-sized figures with cans, license plates, and soda bottles—a trash army built from garbage dumps that has been traveling the world for the last 19 years.
For his 2001 piece “Love Letters Building,” Schult used purposeful documentation instead of unwanted detritus to cover the facade of a former Berlin post office. Schult sent out a call for love letters—a gesture highlighting modern German romanticism, and a not-so-subtle reminder of the age before quick exchange email. The response to his public request was overwhelming. The resulting 150,000 letters ranged from heartfelt to humorous, subjects ranging between lovers, relatives, and even an owner and a pet.
A letter from the latter read, “I can’t live without you. The loss feels deeper by the day.” Then ends with the words, “It is a pity you’re a cat.”
About 35,000 of the collected letters were used to plaster the outside of the building in a colorful mass of whites, reds, oranges, and blues, while about 115,000 more were found inside. (via RIKA
An anonymous reader writes: Wikileaks has released the finalized Intellectual Property text of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), which international negotiators agreed upon a few days ago. Unfortunately, it contains many of the consumer-hostile provisions that so many organizations spoke out against beforehand. This includes the extension of the copyright term to life plus 70 years, and a ban on the circumvention of DRM. The EFF says, "If you dig deeper, you'll notice that all of the provisions that recognize the rights of the public are non-binding, whereas almost everything that benefits rightsholders is binding. That paragraph on the public domain, for example, used to be much stronger in the first leaked draft, with specific obligations to identify, preserve and promote access to public domain material. All of that has now been lost in favor of a feeble, feel-good platitude that imposes no concrete obligations on the TPP parties whatsoever." The EFF walks us through all the other awful provisions as well — it's quite a lengthy analysis.
The state of California passed the "Leno bill" that would keep your private digital info, well, private from law enforcement in June, and governor Jerry Brown has signed it into law. The California Electronic Communications Privacy Act, co-authored...
Horrible browser plugins used to offer extended multimedia features for website, often at the cost of a much worse overall experience -- thankfully, they're going the way of the dodo. Chrome recently banished plugins like Java and Silverlight (and...
Rahm Emanuel, former Chief of Staff for the Obama administration and current mayor of Chicago, has called on the president to institute computer coding competency as a national requirement to graduate high school. "Just make it a requirement," Emanue...
Terrence Wise is a 36-year-old, 2nd-generation fast-food worker. He’s been in the industry for nearly two decades and works two jobs. He makes only $8 per hour.
His fiancé is a home health care worker. She’s been in the industry for 12 years. She makes just $10 per hour.
no one — no one — who works full time (and in many cases more than 40 hours at multiple jobs) should have to worry about their next meal or where they’ll sleep.
if your business plan cannot support a living wage, you do not have a business plan.
Artist David Oliveira (previously) works with wire in an unconventional way by cutting and twisting the material into sculptures that could be mistaken for 2D sketches. Despite the apparent difficulty of shaping wire into a recognizable form, Oliveira manages to achieve uncanny proportions of his animal subjects in this series of sculptures from 2014. Viewed from one angle the pieces could be mistaken for a chaotic jumble, but a shift in perspective reveals the squinting eyes of lions, or the spread wings of a pelican. The Lisbon-based artist also creates vast interior installations of birds and thoughtful examinations of the human form. You can scroll through an archive of his work over on Facebook. (via Cross Connect)
In April MakerBot laid off 20 percent of its workforce. Roughly six months later, it's doing it again, trimming another fifth of its payroll as it struggles to meet lofty ambitions and expectations set by its parent company Stratasys. In a blog pos...
Current methods for detecting the antibodies that indicate HIV infection are agonizingly slow and cumbersome. However a new DNA nanomachine developed by an international team of researchers (and funded, in part, by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foun...
The Retina display on your MacBook or MacBook Pro is supposed to look gorgeous. However, some owners have encountered just the opposite -- the screen's anti-reflective coating is wearing out quickly due to pressure or stains, leaving them with an u...
The state of California passed the "Leno bill" that would keep your private digital info, well, private from law enforcement in June, and governor Jerry Brown has signed it into law. The California Electronic Communications Privacy Act, co-authored...
Horrible browser plugins used to offer extended multimedia features for website, often at the cost of a much worse overall experience -- thankfully, they're going the way of the dodo. Chrome recently banished plugins like Java and Silverlight (and...
Rahm Emanuel, former Chief of Staff for the Obama administration and current mayor of Chicago, has called on the president to institute computer coding competency as a national requirement to graduate high school. "Just make it a requirement," Emanue...
In April MakerBot laid off 20 percent of its workforce. Roughly six months later, it's doing it again, trimming another fifth of its payroll as it struggles to meet lofty ambitions and expectations set by its parent company Stratasys. In a blog pos...
Current methods for detecting the antibodies that indicate HIV infection are agonizingly slow and cumbersome. However a new DNA nanomachine developed by an international team of researchers (and funded, in part, by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foun...
