Kazuaki Horitomo is a gifted tattoo artist who also loves cats. A Japanese native currently making his home in California, Horitomo has chosen to make cat tattoos his specialty—not just tattoos of cats but images of cats with tattoos and also cats giving each other tattoos. They’re kind of awesome. (I...
Christmas traditions vary from country to country and – often even more radically – from household to household, with people creating strict rules surrounding when the presents are opened, when the turkey is sliced, if there even is a turkey and so on. Unsurprisingly Christmas decorations are just as rooted in tradition and values and today we’ve fixed upon the single theme of Folk Art to explore how a variety of cultures have expressed one broad aesthetic in quite different ways. The most evocative stories and finds come from the snowy places that excel in making Christmas look good. Lets begin in Scandinavia…
Something of symbol of Sweden, the Dala horse hails from the 17th century when little wooden horses were sold at markets in Dalarna, central Sweden. A century later and men working in forests would carve their own wooden horses during the long winter evenings, later bringing their creations home for their children to play with. This quickly evolved as makers painted the simple carved toys in bright colours and floral patterns inspired by the furniture from the same region. Dala horses became an important source of income for poor families and their young children were even roped into learning the craft after school. It’s alleged that children from one family started their own small business selling Dala horses in 1928 and that their ancestors are still producing the Dala horse to this day from a small village in Dalarna.
Nisse and Tomte figures – from Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Finland
A (Norwegian or Danish) Nisse or Tomte in Swedish (Tonttu in Finnish) is a domestic sprite from Scandinavian folklore that’s associated with the winter solstice and Christmas. Similar to a garden gnome and about three feet tall in height, the mythological creature was originally responsible for protecting the farmstead. We found a whole long tale surrounding their need for respect from their employer, including a bowl of julegrøt (Christmas porridge) with butter on Christmas Eve – without which they’ll quit their job and the farmer will fall into poverty. Not the jolliest of Christmas messages doing the rounds, but the long and short of it is respect your fellow human. The sprite has been toyed with since this story as you can see above, from the 1980’s ski-ing Tromte and one of the many Santas out there.
Matryoshka dolls – or Russian nesting doll
Snowmen, Santas – a modern and Christmassy take on the nest doll
Before we continue, the snowmen above hail from contemporary design studio COMPANY in Finland and the Santas are a 1970’s relic from America. But the nesting doll – Matryoshka doll, or Babushka doll (which means grandmother) – does of course hail from Russia where the first set was made in 1890 by Vasily Zvyozdochkin, who worked from a design by folk crafts painter Sergey Malyutin. Traditionally the largest doll is a woman clothed in a Russian peasant dress, then inside is a mix of male and female dolls right down to the smallest figure, a baby made from a single piece of wood. Designs often take their cues from fairytales but also Soviet leaders – more gents and no peasant lady there obviously. As COMPANY proves, there are endless opportunities to explore with the concept and designers frequently do.
Wycinanki – or Polish paper cutting – is a decorating tradition that became popular in the mid 1800’s and involves cutting coloured paper into birds, flowers, trees and figures to create a pattern. The prints can be pasted onto furniture or surfaces of the home – beams, doors, walls – or presented as straightforward cards. The style of designs also vary from region to region – some sticking to one colour and others (like above) multi-coloured. Techniques are passed down through generations and in some parts of Poland there are even wycinanki competitions. Find instructions on how to create your own here.
Wooden Christmas Toys of Germany
Nutcraker tree decorations from Thorsten Van Elten
Ski scene toys made in the Ore Mountains, from Thorsten Van Elten
The Ore Mountains in Germany is an area with a long history of wooden toy production and is also home to a great looking Nutcracker Museum, in the town of Neuhausen. At the centre of the region is Seiffen, the town where the toy industry took off after the recession of ore mining in the area. In 1699 local resident Johann Friedrich Hiemann took Seiffen toys to market at Nuremberg, then a major centre of toy distribution for most of Europe. Seiffen’s toys were both cheaper and of a higher quality than their competitors and so the industry thrived. The above toys are sold by Thorsten Van Elten who’s own travels to Seiffen are detailed in his blog and feature brilliant snaps of supersize wooden toys,
Latest episode from Nat & Lo is a great one, exploring how internet cables are made and distributed in our seabeds connecting the world:
The internet allows us to see videos, photos, and news from anywhere in
the world almost instantaneously. But how?! In this video we learn about
the hundreds of underwater fiber optic cables that connect continents,
cities, and data centers all over the world –– and investigate how these
cables are made, how they’re installed, and more.
Japanese product from Vinclu features Pepper’s Ghost style hologram display for an anime artificial intellegence personal assistant:
Gatebox is the world-first virtual home robot with which you can spend your everyday life with your favorite characters.
The reason why we develop Gatebox is not because we are just pursuing entertainment or convenience. We want the characters be naturally in our daily lives and spend relaxing time with us. “I want to live with my favorite character.” We dreamed of such world and we started this project.
source: all 1-star yelp reviews of laguardia airport
transcript:
the airport is a joke and disgrace and aviation is an outdated piece of shit.
for my job i have to go to baltimore to avoid getting shouted at by someone who knows where i live. now and then i fly into this death trap of a sad disaster. i can truly say that lga is the shittiest nastiest dump of food and stagnant air traffic that there ever has been.
i was delayed for 2 hours because i had endless money and they were pissed off that they didn’t. i couldn’t wait for luggage to arrive in my life and i was so surprised when the pilot informs us there is always a horrendous taxi in the concourse and we would have to make sure we didn’t speak to the car because it was so stupid and ignorant.
we were waiting for bags and it was taking too long. we were hungry for food and then finally we were hungry for people. we had no idea how to get some. the lady in front of me was crying because i was having an affair on jfk’s plane.
i thought oh well at least i haven’t yet experienced what i don’t know about.
my family members forgot to take me to my luggage which is one reason why i hate both of my family members. i think about how awful my family is. by comparison the airport is a complete idiot. the food court is subpar not enough bathrooms and disgusting shithole. i know how to use a restroom and it doesn’t look like what some people in this airport like to do.
this airport was the most depressing place to eat anything but pepsi products yuck. i would rather go straight to the nearest subway station and dirty the floor with my bags of smelly garbage.
if you’re unfortunate enough to be a nightmare i have a nice alternative for you. go to laguardia and have a beer and then have some sedatives and then finally just sit back and wait for the airport to be demolished. if you can avoid it please do not look at my family.
Face of A Nation,
splices up some of the most recognized portraits of select nations’
leaders and stitches together their features to form a composite face
for each country.
“To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.”
- President Theodore Roosevelt
“The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.“
- George Orwell
“Patriotism is supporting your country all the time and the government when it deserves it."
You would end up with 364 gifts by this method, including 140 humans, 184 birds, and 40 gold rings. I guess you'd also have twelve pear trees, so. You could probably keep the humans fed on the birds and pears for a while, and the gold rings may cover some costs. But year, what a f*ing nightmare.
What would really happen if your true love gave you a partridge in a pear tree, and the rest of the gifts from The Twelve Days of Christmas? According to the lead character in Anomaly’s short animated film The 12 Days Of Christmas: A Tale of Avian Misery, “a complete f**ing nightmare”. Written, directed, animated and produced in-house by Anomaly with illustrations by Rob Hunter, the film tells with wry humour the modern day repercussions of receiving 12 drummers drumming, six geese a-laying, etc. and its effects on a relationship.
Thanks to French artist Benedetto Bufalino, you can now dance the night away at a construction site turned night club with the help of his new Diso Ball Cement Mixer.
I don’t know who designed this poster. Very good, though.
“Gay marriage is legal in the United Kingdom, the United States, France, Spain, Canada, Argentina, Belgium, Brazil, Colombia, Denmark, Iceland, Ireland, Luxembourg, Mexico, The Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, South Africa, Sweden, Uruguay, and New Zealand.
“Australia — are we missing something?”
Sadly, Northern Ireland is the only part of the UK where same-sex marriage continues to be blocked by the DUP despite a parliamentary majority in favour.
Ubagabi—the ghost of an old woman that appears as fireball.
There’s an ancient Japanese legend of the one hundred yōkai—monsters, ghosts, apparitions and demons—who parade through the streets on hot summer nights. If anyone is unfortunate...
This is not pyschedelic performance art from the 1960s, this is ballet. Throughout history there are works of art that stand out as somehow atemporal and this choreography created in 1922 for the Theatre of Bauhaus, is one such artwork…
Featuring astonishing brightly coloured, asymmetrical and cumbersome costumes, this ballet broke so far with convention of that one might very well mistake it for an Andy Warhol foray into the world of dance. Known as the Triadische Ballett (Triadic Ballet), it was choreographed by painter, sculptor, designer and dancer Oskar Schlemmer, who saw dance theatre as uniquely unrestricted by what he called “the burden of tradition.”
Imagine trying to do a pirouette in one of those numbers ↑.
Contrary to the form-fitting leotards and diaphanous gowns of the nineteenth-century ballet tradition, Das Triadische Ballett’’s costumes were designed to restrict movement. Schlemmer created the costumes before he had thought of the choreography so the movements of the dancers were designed around the limitations of the works of art they were wearing. As a result, performers moved about the stage in the jerky style of a wind up toy or a marionette.
The dancers’ machinic movements, coupled with the spring, screw, and bolt-inspired costume pieces, created a ballet for the machine age. Shlemmer wondered if in the future “the act of mechanizing life through machines and technology, a trend we cannot ignore, will make us perceive the human machine and the body’s mechanisms with greater awareness.”
Few reproductions of Das Triadische Ballett have been staged since its initial success in the 1920s. The choreography for the costumes was lost long ago and only eight minutes of the original score, written for a “mechanical organ” by Paul Hindemith survive. This is partially do to Schlemmer’s very vague notes and to the fact that that little effort was made to preserve his work after the Nazis stigmatized him as a “degenerate artist” during the Third Reich.
As the name alludes (in English The Triadic Ballet), the ballet is organized into three acts. The first takes place on lemon yellow stage and is a comedic burlesque. The second act, a joyful ode to the pastoral festival, is set to a bubblegum pink backdrop. Finally, the viewer is transported to a transcendent, mystical, and dreamlike realm in the third act which takes place on a stage dressed in jet black.
Left: Schlemmer’s Ballet costume/ Right: Ziggy Stardust jumpsuit by Kansai Yamamoto. Image provided by Into the Fashion
Sadly, Schlemmer fell into a deep depression in the final years of his life and died in a state of social exile in the year 1943. But his legacy lived on, inspiring artists and designers for nearly a century after his creations came to life on the Bauhaus stage. For example, one of Schlemmer’s costumes inspired David Bowie’s famous Ziggy Stardust jumpsuit designed by Kansai Yamamoto in 1973.
An exhibition on Oskar Schlemmer’s works is currently running at the Centre-Pompidou Metz in Lorraine, France. Though no ballet company is currently touring Das Triadische Ballet, you can watch a filmed reproduction of it from 1970 below:
Photo by R. C. McKellar, Royal Saskatchewan Museum. Courtesy National Geographic.
A micro-CT scan reveals the delicate feathers that cover the dinosaur tail. Photo by Lida Xing, courtesy National Geographic.
The first known dinosaur tail preserved in a piece of amber was recently discovered by paleontologist Lida Xing while collection samples in Myanmar last year. Dating back to the mid-Cretaceous Period some 99 million years ago, the roughly apricot-sized piece of amber contains a 1.4-inch appendage of 8 vertebrae unmistakably covered in primitive feathers. Scientists ruled out the possibility of the tail belonging to a bird, and based on its structure believe it came from a juvenile coelurosaur, a group of dinosaurs that includes tyrannosaurs. Via National Geographic:
While individual dinosaur-era feathers have been found in amber, and evidence for feathered dinosaurs is captured in fossil impressions, this is the first time that scientists are able to clearly associate well-preserved feathers with a dinosaur, and in turn gain a better understanding of the evolution and structure of dinosaur feathers.
The findings were first published today in a report co-authored by Ryan McKellar in Current Biology and you can read more on National Geographic.
VR painting by Goro Fujita explores the Infinite Canvas feature of the new Oculus creative tool, Quill; the artwork contains worlds within worlds as you zoom in and out of its details:
Here is another Quill piece I created over the course of 4 days. I call
it “Worlds in Worlds”. When Inigo Quilez created Quill, he claimed that
it would have an infinite canvas….
Now what happens if you give an artist an infinite canvas? Of course he
is going to use it right? I had to put it to the test. What if there was
a world within a world within a world within a world….
By zooming in and out of the worlds I created, I blew my own mind. I
could not comprehend how this was possible. This tool is just limitless!
Again you have to experience this in VR to be able to fully appreciate
it. But here is a little demo video of “Worlds in Worlds”! Enjoy!
