Roslyn

SARK, How To Be An Artist

This was hanging in my middle school art room. Wikipedia:

In 1989 she created a poster, How to be an Artist, which she offered for sale in the catalog of a local metaphysical store. The poster quickly became popular, selling more than 1000 copies within a week. The sudden popularity created a difficulty for Kennedy, because the posters were produced by hand and she lacked facilities for mass production. She completed the posters by devising a system for producing them, and using space in a garage without permission, hiding the posters under a tarp when she heard the owners approaching. The poster’s success led a publishing company to contact Kennedy, who soon published her first book, A Creative Companion, which she wrote in two weeks.

Fun fact: my wife had Succulent Wild Woman on her shelf when we met. :-O

I am a total extrovert but I also appreciate some good alone time. This sign made me chuckle.

2016 has been a good year for Iceland. There was their mighty football performance at Euro 2016 – the country’s population is smaller than that of Edinburgh! – with accompanying and now famous soundtrack, the Viking chant. More impressively, the Institute for Economics and Peace recently revealed its Global Peace Index poll finding Iceland to be the most peaceful country in the world. See if you can find your own country on the map of countries ranked here.

Iceland was already admired for its otherworldly natural beauty, for being the birthplace of Bjork and for having had a (former stand-up-comic) mayor for its capital Reykjavik who would not enter a coalition government with anyone who hadn’t watched The Wire. All more good reasons to explore The Colours of Iceland in greater detail, we felt. Using various tourism sites and two great Instagram accounts, what we’ve found are scenes that live up to the idea of all meanings of the word peace. Here are some of our favourite sights shown alongside some intriguing facts discovered along the way.

Image from The Official Gateway to Iceland

The landscape of Iceland is made up of waterfalls, geysers, volcanoes, black sand beaches, steaming lava fields and ice. Ice only covers just over 11% of the land, but the country still represents the largest glaciers left in Europe. Iceland is one of the youngest landmasses on the planet – formed about 25 million years ago – and is home to some of the world’s most active volcanoes. The island was formed by a volcanic hotspot created by a fissure in the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, where the Eurasian and North American tectonic plates meet. The Silfra Fissure is a crack between these two continents and has some of the clearest water in the world making it one of the coolest – literally – and best scuba diving sites in the world.

Iceland’s highest peak is Hvannadalshnjúkur, which stands 6,852 ft over sea level.

Image from The Official Gateway to Iceland

Icelanders are proud of being connected to nature and being dedicated to preserve the natural beauty of their land through conservation. The 2016 Environmental Performance Index, which ranks countries’ environmental performances put Iceland at number 2 this year (after Finland).

Blue Lagoon, Iceland. Image from The Official Gateway to Iceland

The Blue Lagoon is a famous tourist hot spot in Reykjavik. Were you aware that you can also enrol in How to Avoid Hot Tub Awkwardness classes in Iceland which promise to guide you to become ‘relaxed and wrinkly like a local’? No, us neither.

Image from The Official Gateway to Iceland

With a lack of native trees on the island, grass and turf covered houses have become a popular architectural style – they were originally based on Viking longhouses and can be found dotted around other cold and northerly places in Scandinavia, Greenland, the Faroes and Scottish islands.

Image from Tvisongur

This is Tvisongur, a sound sculpture designed for its site by Berlin artist Lukas Kühne – his work regularly incorporates themes of  space and frequency. Tvisongur is made from five interconnected concrete domes, each one a different size and with its own resonance corresponding to a tone in the Icelandic musical tradition of five-tone harmony. The domes naturally amplify sound. The sculpture, located next to a mountain and overlooking a fjord around 15 minutes walk from the town of Seydisfjordur, encourages visitors to come and sing or play music alone or in harmony, for an audience or not.

Find oodles more information and facts about Iceland at The Official Gateway to Iceland and Inspired by Iceland and lose yourself in these two great Instagram accounts…

Inspired by Iceland Instagram

Endless landscape photos, scenes of nature and snippets of the local architectural style dominate on this Icelandic tourism account, the official instagram for Inspired by Iceland, whose website we’ve already recommended – it’s filled with advice and ideas for how to explore the majestic island.

Visit West Fjords Instagram

Is fresh water swimming your thing? It may become so after ogling the many images of people jumping into pools or standing beneath mighty waterfalls on Visit West Fjords instagram. This focuses on the part of Iceland that is just below the arctic circle – so you’d have to imagine those aforementioned bathers are quite hardy. Find the tourism site’s main website here.

The post Is this what peace looks like? The colours of Iceland… appeared first on The Chromologist.

bigblueboo:

multitasking

These intricately choreographed dances of light and color are at once static but ephemeral, lasting longer than conventional light graffiti but nonetheless made of impermanent light.

Stephen Knapp is a sculptor and muralist who has worked in metal and glass, but his latest array of light paintings turn the latter toward a new and more indirect purpose.

His pieces are not sketched, programmed or otherwise visualized in advanced, but emerge as he begins cutting, polishing, shaping and places pieces of glass on the wall. Unlike many light graffiti artists, the work does not rely on a photographer capturing a fleeting moment, but can be put up on museum walls indefinitely.

“The fun of what I do with light, is that there is nothing in our visual memory that prepares us for what I’m doing,” says Knapp. “The fact that what I create can just be done with light, that there is no paint on these panels, is absolutely astounding to people. What I am trying to do most of all here is challenge any traditional notion of perception. What is it? Is it real? Is it not real? Does it matter?”

His work has been featured in galleries around the world from Boise to Naples and a solo exhibition is currently on display at the Pensacola Museum of Art.

I just drag the way I feel

Patience

Installation by we+ is a series of clocks which tell the time with human faces:

Patience is a clock which uses a human face to represent the passage of time. The eyes work in the same way as an analog clock’s hands, with the right eye indicating hours and the left eye indicating minutes. The mouth opens and closes to represent seconds. 

More Here

Vox: This is Cuba’s Netflix, Hulu, and Spotify – all without the internet

In Cuba there is barely any internet. Anything but the state-run TV channels is prohibited. Publications are limited to the state-approved newspapers and magazines. This is the law. But in typical Cuban fashion, the law doesn’t stop a vast underground system of entertainment and news media distributors and consumers.

“El Paquete Semanal” (the Weekly Package) is a weekly trove of digital content —everything from American movies to PDFs of Spanish newspapers — that is gathered, organized, and transferred by a human web of runners and dealers to the entire country. It is a prodigious and profitable operation.

More info: The Cuban CDN

unexplained-events:

Night Terrors

Night Terrors is an augmented reality horror survival game that is being developed for smart phones. The game scans your surroundings and builds an internal map to determine how best to scare you as you wander around in search of a young girl in need of rescue. The game utilizes your flash and camera while you have your headphones plugged in for the audio.

You will walk around your surroundings while coming face to face with various supernatural or creepy things such as ghosts, clowns, spiders, and demons. We don’t know if the game contains jump scares as of yet since it is still seeking funding on indiegogo.

You can help fund it HERE and watch the trailer HERE

RoboAction

Painting series by Dragan Ilić features abstracted mark-making using an industrial robot, sometimes carrying and guiding the artist himself:

The artist constantly transposes into the third dimension his decade’s long-running conceptual practice based on the usage of pencils as the basic draftsman’s tool, starting primarily with the media of performance art, installation and sculpture in extended field. Gradually, over the years, his expressive and mechanical compositions have become even more advanced with the development of modules, diverse in shape and sizes, devices designed for the task of mounting and holding his drawing tools, which has led ultimately to the construction of an appropriate drawing machine. Construed for non-artistic purposes, these robots have been reshaped into special draftsmanship implements with which the author is capable of processing his ideas at far greater speed and with considerably greater precision. The metamorphosis of the artistic work is positioned at a point where human and machine activity intersects, resulting in an interaction that is essentially based on the need to transcend the limitations of the human body. 

More Here

How an Algorithm Learned to Identify Depressed Individuals by Studying Their Instagram Photos

Today, we get an answer thanks to the work of Andrew Reece at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Chris Danforth at the University of Vermont in Burlington, who have found significant correlations between the colors in photos posted to Instagram and an individual’s mental health. The link is so strong that the pair suggest that it could be used for early detection of mental illness.

The researchers began by sourcing some 500 workers from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service who also had Instagram accounts. They asked these Turkers to complete a series of questionnaires, including a standard clinical depression survey. They then invited the Turkers to share their Instagram posts for the study.

Some 170 Turkers agreed, of whom around 70 were clinically depressed. The survey asked various additional questions about their condition, such as the original date of their diagnosis.

“This isn’t just about housing. The house is merely an arena where different industries can come together.” That’s Kenya Hara, the luminary Japanese designer, talking – 2 years ago – about his ambitious House Vision project. Now he’s picking up where he left off with House Vision 2, a similar initiative to rethink housing by pairing various companies with some of Japan’s top architects and designers. The result is a sprawling installation of homes, now on display for the public, that are all built to real life scale.

Now through August 28, 2016, you can visit all 12 structures nestled together in the temporary House Vision 2 exhibition. It’s located just steps from Aomi Station on the Yurikamome Line in Tokyo (general admission is 1,500 yen). The theme this year is “Co-dividual,” which addresses the question of how we can bring together and re-connect individuals, urban and rural areas, and fragmented technologies.” Here are some of the highlights of the exhibition:

Yoshino-sugi Cedar House (Airbnb x Go Hasegawa)

Perhaps one of the most significant projects is the collaboration between Airbnb and architect Go Hasegawa. Not only does it represent the first foreign company to participate, but it’s also the inaugural project of Airbnb’s new design studio Samara (more on that here). Yoshino-sugi Cedar House is a communal housing project designed to revitalize the small Yoshino town in Nara Prefecture. After the exhibition the structure will actually be trucked away and relocated in the actual town.

Rental Space Tower (Daito Trust Construction x Sou Fujimoto)

Japan is currently seeing a surge in popularity of shared housing where public spaces are not just limited to passageways. Architect Sou Fujimoto, together with one of Japan’s largest real estate companies, redefine rental housing by proposing private and shared areas that “are clearly divided, and then recombined anew to provide a glimpse of a comfortable and relaxing rental housing.”

Tanada Terrace Office (MUJI x Atelier Bow-Wow)

“It is not that rice was cultivated within the Japanese culture, rather it is Japan’s culture that was born from the rice paddies,” says MUJI, Japan’s pre-eminent minimal retailer. The company interacts with small rice-farming villages to try and get millennials who have moved into the city, back out to the farms to help Japan’s aging rice farmers. As an extension to those efforts they designed an office, together with Atelier Bow-Wow, that can be built on or near tanada (terraced rice fields). The idea being to provide workstations where where people can jump on their laptops while taking a break from rice farming.

“Iced Coffee Shop—Sen” (AGF x Go Hasegawa)

Providing some cool relief to exhibition-goers in the summer sun is beverage maker AGF. Architect Go Hasegawa has built them a beautiful wood and linen tent where you can relax in the shade with some ice coffee and mizuyokan (sweet bean treats).

sabotabby:

myhappyhearts:

taphonomy:

visqueuse:

bogleech:

punisher2099:

mrplinkett:

I expected garbage and I got gold

I want more edgy support posts like this tbh. I love them in the same way people find comfort in “you did great today! uwu” posts, which is nice.

please let supportive, understanding edgy skeletons become a widespread thing

This pleases me insurmountably 

These are excellent

humanoidhistory:

TODAY IN HISTORY: Soviet space dogs Belka and Strelka became the first canines to fly in space and return safely to Earth, August 19, 1960.

Swedish architects and 3D artists Anny Wang and Tim Söderström teamed up to create an ongoing series of experimental GIFs that challenge the laws of physics. Titled ‘Physlab‘, the hyperreal pieces were made with 3D software to create worlds that merge physics with dreamy, experimental spaces. In a statement about the project, the duo says: “What we’ve been into lately is to implement physical forces from the real world and play with them in our otherwise quite surreal platform.”

All GIFs © Anny Wang and Tim Söderström

I’m on holiday from my @guardianreview cartoon for the summer. This is a summer/book themed cartoon I made for the New Yorher.

1. Fuck You, There’s a Sale On.

2. New This Week: Cigarettes and Horseshit.

3. Summer Savings That Can’t Save You From Yourself.

4. Reminder: Drink Until You Drown.

5. You’re Gonna Love… Thriving On Solitude.

6. Can’t Miss: What You Never Had.

7. Last Chance: To Make Something of Yourself You Son of a Bitch.

8. Announcement: Fuck or Die.

9. For a Limited Time Only: Your Life.

10. Guess What? Nothing. Absolutely Nothing.

11. How to Become What You’ve Always Hated.

unexplained-events:

Nagoro Village

The Valley of Dolls

The village of Nagor is located in in the hidden valleys of Shikoku, Japan. The village is shrinking due to lack of immigration to the place since there isn’t really anything there. People die and are never replaced.

Over a year ago, Ayano Tsukimi decided to replace the the dead and departed people with dolls. Roughly 350 dolls have taken the place of those people and the people that have since abandoned the place.

The dolls are made with straw, fabric, and old clothes, much like a humble scarecrow, and Tsukimi is constantly making new figures to replace ones that have worn out. The dolls are placed to look as though they are doing certain things that previous villagers once did.

SOURCE

In a great example of just how powerful consumer cameras have become, watch as this Nikon P900 zooms into the night sky, transporting you from a parking lot in Quebec to the surface of the moon. According to DL Cade at PetaPixel, the built-in optical zoom maxes out at 83x but the camera is capable of continuing with digital zoom. “The P900 features 166x ‘Dynamic Fine Zoom,’ putting the final equivalent focal length at a mind-numbing 4000mm.” I don’t even know that that means exactly but it sounds like a whole lotta zoom. Video by Daniel Pelletier. (via Sploid, PetaPixel)

Your phone is now a refugee’s phone [watch on a mobile] - YouTube

Martin O’Leary made a Twitter bot, Uncharted Atlas, that posts automatically generated fantasy maps. Recently, he described how these maps are generated and how you can do it yourself, complete with a step-by-step clickety explanation and Python/JavaScript code for the backend.

Tags: fantasy

You don’t need me to explain why it’s so good, but it continues the great job of the last one, albeit in a joyously different way.

You remember the last one, don’t you? Still sends shivers down the spine…

© frank gehry - winton guest house - wayzata, minnesota, usa - 1983 

Ornitographies : Xavi Bou

Bou snaps hundreds of photos of birds in flight and stitches them together in Photoshop, compressing several seconds of movement into one frame.

via Wired

Gregor Aisch and Larry Buchanan for the New York Times visualized Olympic medal dominance with a streamgraph for each event. Time is on the horizontal axis, and each stack represents a country. The greater the height is at any point, the more medals the country won that year. Nice labels, too.

Tags: New York Times, Olympics, streamgraph

It’s been well over a year since we last checked in with Australian photographer Steve Axford (previously here and here) who ventures into forested areas near his home in New South Wales to photograph the unusual forms of fungi, slime molds, and lichens he finds growing there. The permutations in color, shape, and size found in each specimen are a testament to the radical diversity of living creatures found in just a small area.

A handful of the images seen here, namely the “hairy” fungi called Cookeina Tricholoma, were photographed last year on a trip to Xishuangbanna, China and Chiang Mai, Thailand. Axford suspects that some of the species he encounters may be unknown to science and that he may have documented them for the first time. You can see more mushroom goodness on Axford’s Facebook and Flickr pages.

poetry-protest-pornography:

amroyounes:

Time for some kitchen charts to help you adult better ;)

Really helpful reference!

SmileMachine Mk 3

Project by @mocymo is a head mounted display that can present a variety of expressions - embedded below is a video taken at the Tokyo Maker Faire taken by makerkun:

スマイルマシンズ！ウェアラブル感情表現ディスプレイ！ pic.twitter.com/wr4VErcTGb

— makerkun (@makerkun)

August 6, 2016

More images can be found here