Rebranding America
Paper Magazine asked 15 leading “visual communicators…to create original advertising concepts that could redefine our country’s image” for their annual design issue, themed “Home Sweet Home.” I have chosen a stellar list of my favorite mavericks (you are one!) and invited you all to create a visual page —as if it was an ad— for [...]
Read More »SUNfiltered music videos
A music video for recent NYU graduate Nyle’s “Let the Beat Build,” a progressive upbeat hip hop, was filmed and audio recorded in one take. It looks easy, but only after 31 takes and 6 practice runs.
Check out more music video picks below.
Read More »William Hundley, With Cheeseburgers
This provocative series by William Hundley appears to comment on our banal consumptive nature. I get that, but am I just a mindless product, the proverbial Pavlov’s dog, of that societal tendency because those photos just happen to evoke a craving for a cheeseburger?
Font-clone wars
This one’s for the typography nerds: In a follow-up to last year’s excellent short “Font Conference,” the loopy gang at College Humor gives us “Font Fight!,” a violence-filled showdown between two typeface gangs–one led by Helvetica, the other by Helvetica’s “shameless impostor,” Arial. The ending features a surprise cameo by perhaps the most evil font [...]
Read More »Prom is hell
FOOTLOOSE came out in 1984. We saw it before we got our periods and even way back then the premise seemed antiquated: Could places where dancing and music were forbidden really still exist, when we live in a such modern world with Walkmans and drum machines? So imagine our surprise at this week’s news story about a kid getting suspended from his Christian high school for attending his girlfriend’s prom at another school where rock music and dancing are — cover your ears! — actually allowed.
Read More »Star Trek singularity
Sundance Channel may not normally be in the habit of talking about mainstream summer blockbusters, but often there are interesting threads on the fringes that grow out of these pop culture behemoths.
Take Artie Vierkant, who stitched together all episodes of Star Trek Voyager into a grid in a single sped up video. Unlike most science fiction or space adventure shows, Vierkant’s clip does at least one thing right: There is no sound in space!
Click below for much more.
Read More »Green tech finds (5/14/09)
Just in time for the weekend — your round-up of cool green technology news and notes.
- Not planning to download one of the coal industry’s new ringtones? How about one of these greener alternatives…
- The fight against deforestation may one day have its own version of the daisy cutter: the Seedbomb (via Treehugger)
Hollywood Forever, again
To kick off what has become a summertime tradition for many in LA is nothing less miraculous than Paul Newman’s sweaty, shirtless, and need I add absolutely perfect body in COOL HAND LUKE (Can you believe he was 42 at the time?) this Saturday at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery.
Read More »Chris Jordan, Gyre – woodblock prints out of trash
Artist Chris Jordan built this amazing 8′ x 11′ reproduction of Hokusai’s famous woodblock print, the Great Wave made entirely from just plastic trash collected from the Pacific Ocean.
Read More »A peek inside nytimes.com’s research and development lab
A guy from Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab paid a visit recently to the R&D studio at The New York Times, where the paper’s “design integration editor,” Nick Bilton, gave a demonstration of all sorts of cool future-of-media technologies, including electronic ink, flexible screens, and highly customizable newspaper apps built on the Adobe Air platform. Nick [...]
Read More »Corpses do it with stiffies
We guess it was only a matter of time before Gunther von Hagens — a.k.a. Dr. Death, as the Germans so fondly call him — decided to up the creepiness factor in his traveling Body Worlds exhibit. You know the one — cadavers displayed with their muscles, nerves, and tendons intact thanks to a preservation technique he calls plastination. All of von Hagens’ specimens signed consent forms before they died, though you have to wonder if they knew what positions they’d be getting into: One woman is in a backbend, nipples fully erect, while one guy actually has eternal jazz-hands! So much for doing it for science. But that’s all old news. The most recent exhibit, now on display at Berlin’s Postbahnhof, features two bodies in a state of sexual congress.
Read More »Hot Tweeters: The ranking site you didn’t know you needed
It seems safe to say that no technology can be deemed truly mature until people are using it to cast judgment on others’ appearances (that, or to try and get a date). The founders of Twitter can breathe easy, then, now that Hot Tweeters (a sort of “Hot or Not” for Twitter) has arrived.
Read More »5 innovative non-profits making bicycling (and bikes) more accessible
We’re right in the middle of Bike to Work Week, and, hopefully, you’ve taken the opportunity to try out a two-wheeled commute.
Bicycles aren’t only an efficient means of transportation; they’re also relatively cheap. But, for many people in both the developed and developing world, the few hundred bucks required to buy a new bike may be out of reach. Numerous non-profits have sprung up to make biking accessible for these people; here are just a few doing innovative work on this front.
Read More »Planet ERASERHEAD
ERASERHEAD screens this Thursday at 10PM E/P on Sundance Channel.
The last time I saw Eraserhead on the big screen was in Prague in 2001. The place looked like a Lynch interior, had old ornate European furniture in the lobby and an escalator leading up to the main room. Again this is how I remember it and I’m not fact-checking with friends because memory is mutable in the David Lynch world and that’s where I was. The theater wasn’t made for movies but had a huge screen, a screen so big that it makes most of the current New York city arthouse theaters look like Ipods. It was sold out… sold out! I looked around at the audience, noticing that many wore geriatric and clunky looking headsets to hear a simultaneous live translation of the movie in Czech. Poorly designed, these headsets leaked their sound in murmurs. Somehow it was so fitting… all these strange mechanical humming devices just another layer of the soundtrack for this startlingly odd and wonderful film.
Read More »Isabelle Huppert – Madame President
President of the Jury for the 62nd Annual Cannes Film Festival – Isabelle Huppert The 62nd Annual Cannes Film Festival kicked of today in France. For only the 4th time in its history, the Festival Jury is presided over by a woman, Isabelle Huppert. (Others were Liv Ullmann, Jeanne Moreau and Françoise Sagan). Huppert, one [...]
Read More »Decoding the Grid Index
Unless you’re a mathematician or designer who lays down a complex map and then designs over it, Grid Index, “the first comprehensive visual lexicon of patterns and grid systems” complete with a CD of “editable vector graphic data files” might not make a whole lot of sense. Looking at page after page of geometric patterns, it’s difficult (for me, at least) to visualize what the final result might be. But not for author Carsten Nicolai whose most recent sculpture, poly stella, was unveiled in Tokyo last month.
Read More »Defy gravity with design : FlyNY Kite Festival
Architect Heinrich Hohmann with his entry, “City of Glass.” Photo credit : Macy Lao.
On May 9th 2009, architects, designers, artists, and assorted kite lovers converged on Manhattan’s Riverside Park for the first annual FlyNY, an international kite design competition. Founded by architects Hannah Purdy, Aurelie Paradiso, and Victoria Walsh, the festival was open to novice recreational flyers to seasoned pros. The top three designs will be featured in an article in the June issue of Metropolis magazine, and all winning kites will be auctioned off at a party in Chelsea on May 28th, with proceeds benefiting Architecture for Humanity.
Read More »PARALLELOSTORY
Parallelostory from impactist on Vimeo. Kelly Meador and Daniel Elwing who partner under the alias Impactist created this meditative animated short. Spend a couple minutes in the multiverse and you may find it comfortable enough to participate in your own PARALLELOSTORY, which is just hip meta-universe slang for “parallel love story”. But remember, this is [...]
Read More »Best green jobs list: Solar panel technician
This is the second in our list of the best green jobs as our country converts to a 21st century Green economy. If you missed it, read the first entry in the list.
Energy courses through every aspect of industrialized civilization. Since everyone can agree that polluting energy sources need to be cleaned up, solar technology seems to have an absolute advantage when it comes to providing sustainable energy. Being a solar panel technician will allow you to directly improve the environment. Every unit you install adds more alternative energy to the nation’s grid.
Read More »Richard Haines for J. Crew
Richard Haines’ blog What I Saw Today takes streetstyle for a spin. There are no photos of the well-dressed gents he sees on the street, only sketches, a fitting combination of Haines’ background in both fashion and illustration.
Read More »The puppet show
Italian photographers Romina Raffaelli and Stefano Marini of Winkler + Noah created this utterly uncanny collection titled “The Puppet Show” of “30 portraits of children from two to eight years old, taken very naturally and transformed into dolls by a subtle play of retouching.” [Via]
Read More »Louis Clichy, A quoi ca sert l’amour
Cute minimalist animated short film, “A Quoi ca Sert L’amour” (To what end is love?) from the ever talented Louis Clichy about a boy who meets girl, boy then loses girl, boy gets girl back, boy then loses girl again, but girl finds boy and finally boy gets girl. Note the visual double entendre in [...]
Read More »Story of Stuff called “anti-capitalist”
In internet time, Annie Leonard’s The Story Of Stuff is relatively old. But the 2007 web video, produced by Free Range Studios and funded by the Tides Foundation and Funders Workgroup for Sustainable Production and Consumption (among others) has attained cult status in American classrooms. According to the New York Times, teachers around the country use the video to supplement environmental education textbooks that often lack information on recent scientific discoveries.
Creative teaching, right? Not in Missoula County, Montana, where the school board responded to a parent’s complaint about the video’s “anti-capitalist” message with a decision that use of The Story of Stuff “violated its standards on bias.”
Read More »Naked News (05-12-09)
photo by babasteve No joke: Saudia Arabia holds a “Miss Beautiful Morals” pageant. Gossip Girl takes a hit: Study links viewing adult-themed TV to earlier sex in teens. Oh, but Serena van der Woodsen and Chuck Bass make such good company on lonely, lonely nights. Finally! Funding for failed abstinence-only programs bites the dust under [...]
Read More »Time to transform Utah’s energy-producing future
image credit: the russians are here
used under a creative commons license
Anyone who knows Utah knows the power of wind, water and sun. You can see that power in Utah’s sculpted arches of stone, in our majestic mountains capped with snow, and in the cracked earth of our deserts.
Nature’s power is so obvious that you have to wonder why we’ve mostly ignored it as a source of energy to run our homes and businesses, and to propel our cars and trucks.
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