patrick

Beautiful Chemistry is a new collaboration between Tsinghua University Press and University of Science and Technology of China that seeks to make chemistry more accessible and interesting to the general public. Their first project was the creation of several short films that utilize a 4K UltraHD camera to capture a variety of striking chemical reactions without the usual clutter of test tubes, beakers or lab equipment. I definitely would have paid a bit more attention in chemistry class if we’d had the opportunity to watch some of these. Filmed and edited by Yan Liang.

Product designer Marcel Dunger conceived of this fascinating and elegent way of creating small rings, pendants, and earrings by “repairing” broken pieces of maple wood with colored bio-resins. The resin is first poured onto a larger piece of broken wood and after the hardening process the piece is then machined into pieces of jewelry.

We’ve seen so many different projects using resin lately from sculptures of aquatic life to hair ornaments, but what’s probably more interesting, as pointed out by The Fox is Black’s Bobby Solomon, is the trend of visibly incorporating repairs into new or improved objects. We’ve seen it with Japanese Kintsugi pieces, furniture created by fusing tree trunks with cast aluminum, and even another wood/resin combo resulting in glowing kitchen shelves. As far as turning waste products into functional objects, or extending the life of something broken, it’s a visually striking idea that will hopefully be incorporated by more artists and designers. You can see more of Dunger’s work in his online portfolio. (via The Fox is Black, Behance)

Update: Jewelry designer Britta Boeckmann creates a similar form of jewelry and has quite a few pieces available in her shop.

Giant Ant strikes again for Men’s Health, this time explaining how a bean becomes a gaseous expulsion of malodorous intent (i.e. a fart). Check out their previous project for Men’s Health, “How a Protein Becomes a Muscle.” Credits Client: Men’s Health Magazine Creative Director: Thomas O’Quinn Illustrator: Rami Niemi Directed by Giant Ant Producer: Cory... Read more »

Stockholm-based illustrator, printmaker, and artist Nina Lindgren was been working with cardboard to build a series of stacked geometric cityscapes that look like small architectural islands. The works are assembled like puzzles from carefully cut cardboard panels with internal lights for some of the houses. Her most recent piece, “Floating City” was recently on view at ArtRebels Gallery. You can see more over on her website. (via Hi-Fructose)

If you want to create detailed and imaginative flying machine sculptures that look like they’re about to take flight, cardboard is hardly the material to use. Unless of course you’re artist Daniel Agdag (previously), who has been toiling away creating a series of new works each more detailed and fascinating than the next. “The Principles of Aerodynamics” is Agdag’s first solo exhibition where his series of cardboard contraptions that portray his “ongoing pursuit of escape through the metaphor of flight” will be on display through Aug 31, 2014.

As he’s done in the past, Agdag forfeits all blueprints, drawings and plans choosing, instead, to work only from mind and scalpel. His industrial beasts–get close and you can almost smell the oil and smoke; hear the clanking and buzzing–come together only from sliced cardboard hinged with glue.

Illustrator and designer Akihiro Mizuuchi designed a modular system for creating edible chocolate LEGO bricks. Chocolate is first poured into precisely designed moulds that after cooling can be popped out and used as regular LEGOs. It’s hard to determine exactly how functional they are, it seems like he had success in building a number of different things, though I can only imagine how quickly they might melt in your hands, but I suppose that’s beside the point; this is two of the greatest things in the world fused together. If you google around there are numerous attempts at creating various forms of LEGO in chocolate or other food, but this appears to be the most detailed and well-designed of anything out there. (via Legosaurus)

Photographer Oleg Oprisco (previously) who lives and works in Kiev, continues to wow us with his vivid style of conceptual photography that places subjects in the middle of surreal and fantastic tableaus. Oprisco spends large amounts of time scouring flea markets and resale shops to collect props, costumes, and other items for each shot which he often sketches beforehand in a sketchbook, with the final shoot requiring 2-3 days of preparation. I love this bit from an interview with 500px earlier this year where he was asked to give advice to amateur/student photographers:

I strongly advise to use your time wisely. Laziness is your worst enemy. Enough looking at photographs taken by your idols. You’ve commented on enough work that you hate. It’s time to take photos. Your best photos. Let go and shoot, shoot, shoot!

All of Oprisco’s work is available as prints which you can inquire about directly. You can see more of his recent work on Flickr and Facebook. (via 500px)

Collector’s Space Shuttle Screenprints!

I’ll be debuting 3 new screenprints at Comic Con next week commemorating the amazing Space Shuttle program which spanned 30 years! These will be available indivudually or as a set. Each one is 10”x28”.

Come visit me and my friends Jasmin Lai and Tiffany Ford at Booth #5007!

Beautiful illustration work from Berlin-based designer Michela Picchi.

 

 

 

——————–

Also worth viewing:

Vicki Turner
Timothy Hunt
Tom haugomat

Follow us on RSS, Instagram, Pinterest, Wanelo, Luvocracy

——————–

Share on Facebook

Thanks to this week's Sponsor // ThemeIsle: WordPress themes

(Source)

30 Day Challenge // Day 24 // Something That Represents Your Favorite Culture

I’m Buddhist and I’ve always loved the imagery even before I was. The wrathful deities from Tibetan and Mahayana art always fascinated me as a kid. They were like transformations the gods took on in battle. Like a monster magical girl I guess. His is name is Mahakala. Power Prism Make Up.

30 Day Challenge // Day 23 // Something That Makes You Happy

woutervandevoorde:

Hume Sunrise

via http://jaw5h.tumblr.com/page/26

“Il récolte plus de 6.000 dollars sur Kickstarter pour préparer une salade de pommes de terre”

- 20Minutes (à cause de beldorin)

Patrick Joust

As a quick follow-up to our video from Keith Skretch yesterday, here’s a similar concept from two years ago by Laurin Döpfner who used an industrial sander to grind down logs, electronics, and even a skull in thin layers which he then photographed to create this amazing stop motion video. Each object is comprised of about 100 different photos, a process I can only image was extremely labor intensive.

This will be trending on /r/ThingsCutInHalfPorn/ by the end of the day if it hasn’t already. While you’re at it see also @HalfPics, and for the not so faint of heart there’s the Visible Human Project. (via Jason Sondhi)

Shane Walsh - From the series Shipwreck Paintings (2010)

via http://kanaes.com/gallery?page=3

[Image: Photo by Benjamin Halpern, courtesy of the U.S. Library of Congress].

The Stanley R. Mickelsen Safeguard Complex in Cavalier County, North Dakota, is the focus of an amazing set of images hosted by the U.S. Library of Congress, showing this squat and evocative megastructure in various states of construction and completion.

It's a huge pyramid in the middle of nowhere tracking the end of the world on radar, an abstract geometric shape beneath the sky without a human being in sight, or it could even be the opening scene of an apocalyptic science fiction film—but it's just the U.S. military going about its business, building vast and other-worldly architectural structures that the civilian world only rarely sees.

[Images: Photos by Benjamin Halpern, courtesy of the U.S. Library of Congress].

As Pruned described these structures back in 2008, it was a "mastaba-shaped radar facility reminiscent of the work of architect Étienne-Louis Boullée."

As such, Pruned suggests, it offers convincing architectural evidence that we should consider "the "U.S. anti-ballistic landscape as a subset of Land Art"—as lonely pieces of abandoned infrastructure isolated amidst sublime and almost unreachably remote locations.

[Images: Photos by Benjamin Halpern, courtesy of the U.S. Library of Congress].

The photos seen here, taken for the U.S. government by photographer Benjamin Halpern, show the central pyramid—pyramid, monument, modular obelisk: whatever you want to call it—that served as the site's missile-tracking station. Its omnidirectional all-seeing white circles stared endlessly at invisible airborne objects moving beyond the horizon.

The Library of Congress gives the pyramid's location somewhat absurdly as "Northeast of Tactical Road; southeast of Tactical Road South." In other words, it's ensconced somewhere in a maze of self-reference and tautology, perhaps deliberately obscuring exactly how you're meant to arrive at this place.

[Image: Photo by Benjamin Halpern, courtesy of the U.S. Library of Congress].

Yet the pyramid has become something of a roadtripper's delight in the last decade or two. When I initially published a slightly different version of this post on Gizmodo, commenters from around the world jumped in with their own photos and memories of driving hours out of their way to find these military ruins looming spookily on the horizon.

Most if not all of them then discovered that it was as easy as simply saying hello to the guard, walking unencumbered through the front gate, and then hanging out for hours, running up the side of the pyramid, taking pictures against the North Dakota sky, and enjoying this American Giza as a peculiarly avant-garde site for an afternoon picnic.

You can even see the structures, arranged like some ritual sequence of spatial objects—a chapel of radar aligned with war—on Google Street View.

[Image: The pyramid, seen somewhat jarringly in full color, via Google Street View].

One thing I like so much about these shots is how they resemble early expeditionary photos of the hulking Mayan ruins found at Chichén Itzá.

Check out these comparative shots, for example, where the latter image was taken by photographer Henry Sweet during a 19th-century archaeological journey led by Alfred P. Maudslay. The photo was featured as part of an exhibition at the University of North Carolina back in 2007.

[Images: (top) Photo by Benjamin Halpern, courtesy of the U.S. Library of Congress; (bottom) photo by Henry Sweet, courtesy of the UNC-Chapel Hill].

Of course, there is nothing really to compare outside of their same overall geometry—yet it's striking to consider the functional, if obviously metaphoric, similarities here as well. 

One structure was built as part of a kind of analogue system for tracking divine events and celestial calendars, as dark constellations of gods spun across the sky; the other was a temple to mathematics built for guiding and pinging missiles as they streaked horizon to horizon, a site of early warning against the apocalypse, as a new zodiac of nuclear warheads would burst open to shine their world-blinding light on the obliterated landscapes below. 

Trajectories, paths, horizons: both pyramids, in a sense, were architectural monuments for navigation of different kinds. Both timeless, strange, and seemingly inhuman: spatial artifacts of lost civilizations.

[Image: Photo by Benjamin Halpern, courtesy of the U.S. Library of Congress].

In any case, the original photos on the Library of Congress website are heavily specked with dust and some lens artifacts, but I've cleaned up my favorites and posted some of them here. 

[Images: Photos by Benjamin Halpern, courtesy of the U.S. Library of Congress].

This is how modern-day pyramids are made: huge budgets and ziggurats of rebar, as tiny figures wearing hardhats scramble around amidst gargantuan geometric forms, checking diagrams against reality and trying not to think of the nuclear war this structure was being built to track.

[Images: Photos by Benjamin Halpern, courtesy of the U.S. Library of Congress].

(An earlier version of this post previously appeared on Gizmodo).

To explore the photography of French art director and concept designer Nicolas Bouvier is to become lost in strange new world, the inhabitants of which are dwarfed by the towering silhouettes of tree and mountains, or swallowed completely by eerie fog and haze. Though these landscapes are indeed real, shot in locations mostly in the Pacific Northwestern U.S., it may not be surprising that Bouvier’s day job is pure science fiction: he creates stunning concept art and illustrations for video games like Halo and Assassin’s Creed. While his concept art has gathered wide acclaim (he’s currently publishing a third book of his own illustrations), his photographic work has also flourished, garnering a significant following over on Flickr. We’ve featured his images several times right here on Colossal as part of our Flickr Finds series.

Currently based in Seattle, Bouvier first picked up a camera in the 1990s while in school, but it wasn’t until 2007 that he began shooting again in earnest. He has since amassed a collection of nearly two dozen cameras (he mentions he picked up a Lumix ZS40 just yesterday), all of which he experiments with as he explores locations around California, Washington, Oregon, Mexico, and France with his family who often appear as subjects in his surreal photos.

It was nearly impossible to make a selection of work for this post, so I strongly urge you to click this link, grab some coffee, and then press the right arrow on your keyboard about 1,100 times. You won’t regret it.