sundance

I went to MoMA and…

Quoting Duchamp who once said “It is the spectators who make the pictures,” MoMA decided to engage the 3 million people who walk through their museum with a project called “I went to MoMA and…” where visitors could fill out a note card finishing that sentence and share their experience with the museum and public. [...]

Robyn Documentary

Robyn, the prolific and innovative Swedish pop singer, is the subject of a new hour-long documentary. It’s a fascinating glimpse into the life and professional evolution of a child star to an iconic force. It is in four parts – click through to the next part after each part ends.

Looking back: Maurice Sendak

Maurice Sendak, 82, beloved children’s author and illustrator of the cherished childhood favorites Where the Wild Things Are, Higglety, Pigglety Pop! and Chicken Soup with Rice, isn’t feeling so great these days. “I’m old,” he says. “I’ve been rather sick, to tell you the truth.” But, he adds, “I can make believe I’m well.” Sadly he was too unwell to attend the unveiling of the fifty-year-old mural he painted for the children of a young Manhattan couple in back in 1961. The entire wall, 1,400 pounds in all, was removed and taken to the Rosenbach Museum and Library in Philadelphia, where it is part of the permanent collection.

3eanuts

We should probably post something about the royal spectacle wedding, but fuck it. No love or marriage or sex today. Just existential angst: the genius site 3eanuts.com posts Peanuts comics without the last panel to reveal just how dark and depressing Charles Schulz’s world view really was: The somber subject matter of Peanuts often goes [...]

Complete guide to Seinfeld’s sneakers

Complex Magazine compiled this diligent and impressive study of all the various sneakers worn by Jerry Seinfeld on his eponymous sitcom. The magazine lists the make and type of the sneaker as well as the episode it was featured. Who knew that Jerry has something in common with all the sneakerhead kids who line up [...]

Retro news websites

Take a step into a time machine and let’s go allllll the way back to the 1990s (ancient, I know) and check out homepages of various news organizations from the pre-Twitter era. The Los Angeles Times site looks like it was created by a 13 year old and hosted on Geocities.

Designer Mind Games

“The Statistical Clock”

Design/art collective Dunne & Raby don’t actually call themselves artists. Anthony Dunne is a design professor at the Royal College of Art in London and Fiona Raby has a background in architecture, but unlike design studios that specialize in creating fonts or objects or furniture, Dunne & Raby make projects that “use design as a medium to stimulate discussion and debate about the social, cultural and ethical implications of existing and emerging technologies.” Their work is in the permanent collections of the MoMA, the Victoria & Albert Museum, Frac Ile-de-France and FNAC.

To give you an idea of what those discussion-generating projects are like, let’s take a look at “Do You Want to Replace the Existing Normal?” (2007/08), a four-part installation that anticipates design in a “time when we will have more complex and subtle everyday needs” as opposed to our current “unimaginative and practical” desires.

Green tech finds (4/28/11)

Together we all go solar. from Solar Mosaic on Vimeo.

A classic hybrid for sale, more poop to power, and solar kits at Costco… your green tech finds for the week.

• Are you ready for an electric vehicle? A new smart phone app and companion website from BMW tracks your current driving habits to show whether you’re ready to transition to an EV. (via Crisp Green)
  
  
• Crowdfunding community solar: Berkeley company Solar Mosaic creates a marketplace for individuals to invest in (and get paid from) community solar installations. See how it works above… (via Care2)
  
  




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Comments: Posted by: Jeff McIntire-Strasburg
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Tags: app / batteries / biodiesel / biogas / cooking / Crowdfunding / electric vehicles / hybrid cars / solar

Pat Robertson vs. evil lesbians

Have you had your daily allowance of crazy today? If not, here’s a little something to meet your needs — and then some. It’s a clip of Pat Robertson explaining why liberals are so intent on killing babies: apparently, it’s all part of a vast evil lesbian conspiracy. The clip was posted by RightWingWatch.org. So [...]

Notes from Chris

While reading this New York Times piece about a note posted on a pole at the intersection of 43rd and 6th Avenue by a guy named Chris who with apparent sincerity reviews two different coffee carts, I learned via the article’s comments that this note was just one in a series called “Notes from Chris.” [...]

Megan Griffiths’ THE OFF HOURS

THE OFF HOURS, which premiered in January in the Sundance NEXT category, blew through my town this week and I was happy to have the chance to see it. Meticulously crafted, the film simply felt to me like years and years of work, as in, “This filmmaker has seen these shots in her head for some time now!” Turns out, that’s close to true. Another product of the “I almost made this movie 1,000 times with ‘name’ actors and a budget” syndrome, Seattleite Megan Griffiths bit the bullet last year and made her film the good ol’ microbudget way. I can sympathize, as I was on the same path last summer, buying batteries in bulk and making props in my living room. Griffith’s film has a solid polish that belies any major funding deficits, and the performances are subtle and sophisticated.

What’s on the back of a website?

For your today’s procrastination, check out Back of a Webpage: an independent project from the creative minds of Jeff Lam and Josephine Yatar, it’s an amusing and clever look some popular websites such as Facebook, Google, and Flickr (above). Lets get one for SUNfiltered up there! [Via]

The carbon-neutral, ultra-modern tiny house: The Cube Project

A tour of the Cube from Mike Page on Vimeo.

Think you could live in 100 square feet? Certainly, you’d have to do without some basic amenities, right… because you couldn’t cram a kitchen, bath, bedroom, and living/dining area into that small a space?

Hipster animals

Artist Dyna Moe illustrates different stereotypical subsets of the “hipster” demographic as anthropomorphic animals over at Hipster Animals. They’re all so cute and spot-on that I couldn’t figure out which of Moe’s animals to feature here, but I think “Trust Fund Asshole” fox is my favorite.  He’d be quite the party animal. [Via]

Twitter invasion

Does the new Tweetseat make a compelling case for connecting digital and physical communities or is this an example of technology and social media gone too far? Designed by Chris McNicoll, the Tweetseat is a park bench at the Botanical Gardens in Dundee, Scotland that takes two pictures each time someone sits on it. The first picture, taken from the bench, captures the point of view of the sitter, and the second is a photo of the person/people sitting on the bench taken from a nearby tree. This set of pictures is then automatically uploaded to the Twitter feed @Tweetingseat.

Episode Recap – Dana-Maxx – They’ll Be Watching

This was clearly not my favorite part of this week’s episode: Dana-Maxx not getting an immediate pick-up by Bergdorf Goodman. But the silver lining in this week’s episode is exactly what I had explained to her right after our presentation to Linda Fargo: That Bergdorfs may not have committed to the collection this season, but Dana-Maxx is now in a better position. She has the eye now of one of the most powerful Fashion Directors in the business.

Sharing a beautiful sunset

Untitled from jasperelings.info on Vimeo. Dutch artist Jasper Elings created “Sharing a Beautiful Sunset,” a one minute crowd-sourced video of a sunset compiled from hundreds of photos collected from Google image searches of sunsets from around the world. Viewing a sunset is probably one of the most universal experiences humans can have. [Via]

Hands-free drawing

Drawingmachine by Eske Rex from Core77 on Vimeo.

A lot of amazing projects made their debut at Milan Design Week, and amongst the most impressive was the “Drawing Machine” conceived and built by Danish designer Eske Rex. Comprised of two nine-foot-tall triangular structures and the flat drawing surface between them, the machine makes drawings with a single pen held at the end of two long arms connected to weighted pendulums. The pendulums move the pen around in circles that vary in size depending on how much weight is placed on them. More weight is harder to pull and thus makes smaller circles while less weight yields larger shapes. If you stack each pendulum with equal weight you get a perfect circle, and if you disperse the weight unevenly you get a lopsided form.

Vimeo of the Week: Symmetry

Symmetry from Everynone on Vimeo. Symmetry, a film created by Everynone, comes in at under 3 minutes long. This is a remarkable thing to note as the film has such an powerful emotional punch. The film’s split screens shows the dualities of life. A muscled torso sits side-by-side with weights, cookies with milk. Cops and [...]

Billboards to beach sandals: Paper Feet

Billboards don’t just “litter” our roadways… they create an awful lot of waste: according to Jimmy Tomczak, founder of Paper Feet, “Every year in the U.S. alone, so much billboard vinyl is thrown away that, if laid out, it would more than cover the state of Massachusetts.” For Tomczak, that mass of printed vinyl going to landfills turned out to be the perfect material for a product he envisioned while an undergrad at the University of Michigan: minimalist “barefoot” sandals that protected his feet while still providing the feel of going shoeless.

Huffington Post calls ALL ON THE LINE “A Must-See Show”

Fashion journalist Blue Carreon loves reality shows — especially ALL ON THE LINE. Find out why he thinks you should be watching: What All On The Line does is give another dimension to the fashion industry. Zee lifts the veil of glamor often associated with fashion designers — especially in an age when many kids [...]

Naked News: We are all sexual deviants.

• A massive internet study finds that we are all sexual deviants.
  
  
• It doesn’t just happen in Thailand. Sex trafficking in the U.S. is called “an epidemic.”
  
  

Roger Ebert’s winning New Yorker caption

After years of submitting his punchline to The New Yorker’s caption contest found in each issue, film critic Roger Ebert finally won after 107 attempts with the above entry to the accompanying cartoon. Of course, not every winner gets a write-up by the magazine’s cartoon editor Robert Mankoff who shared some of Ebert’s previous entries. My juvenile alter-ego found the one below, which didn’t get past the cartoon censors, plane-ly hysterical. Congrats Mr. Ebert!

It’s Time to Grow Up! Tonight at 10p.

I am always intrigued by up-and-coming designers who have worked under major designers with strong, distinct styles. Case in point: Dana-Maxx, who peaked my interest for this week’s episode when I heard she had once done stints at Betsey Johnson and Marc Jacobs, two top-of-the-game designers with unique but very different sensibilities. I find designer apprenticeships extremely interesting because I am always curious to see how much of their former employer’s voice they actually retain, or in some cases if any at all. Some new designers can take several seasons to wipe that ingrained training out of their own DNA while others can find smart new ways to adapt it into their own work.

The walking table

Dutch designer Wouter Scheublin created this kinetic walnut table, “Walking Table” that responds with an uncanny shuffling walk when pushed and thus “perplexing our perception of the ordinarily static piece of furniture.” The designer also built an accompanying walking bookcase. As someone who moves apartments as frequently as I have, I’m hoping walking furniture is [...]