“Trying to pay the rent selling postcards is a really stupid idea,” laments illustrator Babak Ganjei. But chin up, Babak: the postcards you make are very special indeed. This latest series of work, which is going to be on sale at this weekend’s East London Comic Arts Festival, presents the vacant sitting rooms of some of the TV shows the artist grew up watching.
RoslynOk this is funny, but it is also genius
RoslynYikes
Thousands of bees chased a Welsh woman's car for two days looking for their queen.
The post Bees to the Rescue of Their Queen appeared first on Next Nature Network.
MinaLima, the design studio behind all the Harry Potter graphic art, has opened a huge four-storey immersive exhibition of its work in Soho, London.
The biggest sporting thrill of my life came when Muhammed Ali managed to bamboozle the monster George Foreman to regain the world title that had been wrongly taken from him for his stand against the Vietnam war in the 1960s. What an remarkable, courageous, crazy guy. Anyway, I hope you enjoy this piece of fun.
And here’s Joyce Carol Oates on Ali. Never the white man’s negro.
RoslynBest Lego ever??
Himeji Castle (photo by Bernard Gagnon)
Himeji Castle dates back almost 700 years and is the largest and most visited castle in Japan. The central tower is a monumental 5-tiered structure (in reality it has 6 floors and a basement) that sits atop a hill. A Lego recreation of the castle would be impressive in itself. But a Japanese Lego enthusiast has taken it a step further by creating a replica of the castle that begins flat and then opens up and pops-out like a pop-up book.
Going by the moniker talapz, the Lego master created the Himeji Castle replica over a span of 15 months. No other forms of connectors, bolts or adhesives were used: only Legos. It’s mesmerizing to watch the Lego castle rise up and begin to take shape.
The most difficult part, writes talapz, was controlling the weight, which clocks in at 12.5 kg (28 lbs). The replica even includes a nearby well and corner turret.
We’ve seen a lot of Legos but we’ve never seen them do something like this.
Roslyn!
RoslynYassss
The couch gag on last night Simpsons episode was illustrated in the style of an Ikea instruction manual. See also the Ikea instructions for making Dick in the Box.
Tags: Ikea The Simpsons TV video
While studying at art school, Sasha Katz fell in love with the moving image. Moscow-based Sasha describes her work as “a variety of pixel art” and has a portfolio of perplexing and beguiling work. “For me, the gif is an ideal format,” says Sasha. “It’s concise and infinite at the same time. I cannot go back to static images anymore.”
London-based architecture practice Studio Seilern worked with Muzia Sforza to designed the Gota Dam House in a secret location in East Africa.
RoslynCreepy and mesmerising!
I could watch this giant octopus kite for hours.
(via Coudal)
RoslynPigeons are SO interesting
Robert Krulwich in National Geographic:
At first the whole thing seemed preposterous. No way this could happen. Tom Roden, 66 at the time, was standing at the door of his home near Manchester, England. “I was just setting out on a walk with my dog when I saw him,” he told a reporter. “I recognized him straight away because of his white tail feathers.”
It was a pigeon. His pigeon. It had been missing for five years. Suddenly it was back. Why? And where were the tens of thousands of pigeons that vanished with him?
It had a name: Champion Whitetail. In 1997, Roden had sent Whitetail and a bunch of other racing birds to France, 430 miles south, to compete in the Royal Pigeon Association’s centenary cross-Channel competition, a major long-distance pigeon race with cash prizes that attracted 60,000 bird entries. The contestants, quietly cooing, were brought to a field near Nantes and released at 6:30 in the morning—that was the race’s motto: “At dawn we go.”
At the signal the birds took flight and, following a deep pigeon instinct, dashed at speeds as high as 50 miles an hour straight back toward their roosts, or “lofts,” all across England. This is something pigeons do. It’s called a homing instinct, and even though many of these animals had never been to France before, didn’t recognize the land below them, and had to cross a wide channel of ocean water before finding the house or roof or backyard from which they came, normally most of these racers would have find their way home.
Whitetail was expected to arrive early, because he was a champion. He’d already won 13 races in his lifetime, had flown across the English Channel 15 times, and had finished the Central Southern Classic from Lessay in northern France against a field of 3,026 birds with the winning time. He was a bird to watch.
More here.
Self Portrait of the Artist Thinking About a Dog, 2016
Roslynso many rock puns
Incredible kinetic artwork organizes rocks by geologic age.
“Jller” by Benjamin Maus and Prokop Bartonicek
RoslynLove
Mars will look good in Earth's skies over the next few days -- but not this good.
RoslynHow fascinating is Wakanda?
Rachel Strohm’s recent blog post made me realize that Wakanda has moved from West Africa to East Africa. Here are two maps from Marvel sources, both taken from a slide show by Professor Julian Chambliss. Personally, I love the fact that Wakanda’s location is never truly known, and think that each new writer should situate it somewhere different in the African continent on purpose.
After all, Wakanda isn’t a place, it’s a weird byproduct of a sincere effort by Marvel to engage with blackness in the 1960s, combined with current Afrofuturism, and a ton of remaining residual orientalism about Africa. So why should it be any given place on the continent, instead it should simply be … Africa. Neither of our racist fears nor our futurist fantasies about Africa are actually rooted in any knowledge of a place nor reaction to it. Instead, it’s all about Africa as a mirror to American and European anxiety about the other. Fine then. Let it be as rootless as our fears and hopes are.
Charles Yu in The New Yorker:
Once upon a time, there was a man whose therapist thought it would be a good idea for the man to work through some stuff by telling a story about that stuff.
The man lived in a one-bedroom efficiency cottage all by himself, in a sort of dicey part of town. One day, the man woke up and realized that this was pretty much it for him. It wasn’t terrible. But it wasn’t great, either. And not likely to improve. The man was smart enough to realize this, yet not quite smart enough to do anything about it. He lived out the rest of his days and eventually died. The end. Happy now?
The man could see that his therapist was not amused.
A rather unsatisfactory ending, the therapist opined, and suggested that the man could do better. The man thought, Is she really serious about this? But he didn’t say anything out loud. The man was not convinced that he needed to be talking to the therapist at all, but he had tried so many other things (potions, spells, witches), and spent so much of his copper and silver, with absolutely nothing to show for it, that he figured why the hell not.
So how do I do this? he asked.
Why don’t you start again? the therapist replied. And, instead of rushing to the end, try to focus on the details.
O.K., the man said.
More here.
Project from Interactive Architecture Lab combines performance, production and robotics using computer vision to capture movements to construct a physical visualization:
Performance is presented as a process of fabrication. Reciprocally, fabrication is presented as a process of performance. A circularity of human body-gesture and computer machine-gesture leads to the construction of notational spatial artefacts. Space is constructed through the transforming conditions of dance, and performance is constructed through the transforming conditions of architecture.The project is a spatially interactive design system. Driven by the motivation of a participating performer/designer, body movement is tracked, analysed and translated into tool paths for fabrication by a robotic armature and an industrial CNC pipe bending machine. Discrete construction elements are fabricated in response to the dancer/designers performance. The generative cycle of construction encourages bodily interaction and the aggregation of a form of spatial notion that described repetition, rhythm and pattern. ’Fabricating Performance’ qualifies movement in space and raises questions of how these qualitative motion segments can be articulated in a quantitatively physical manner.
