Category: art

art

From the "Art Imitating Life Imitating Art" Department

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This news is a few months old but just as funny now as it was then. A few hours after television producers set up a replica of Occupy Wall Street for the filming of a new episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, the real Occupy Wall Street announced plans to occupy the fake one.
As Mother Jones put it, “It’s straight out of a Don DeLillo novel.” I frankly just love the speed in which this happened – further proof the “art-life-art” cycle is moving faster than ever.

art

The Patternizer

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Ever need to develop a pattern as a place holder, filler, background and didn’t know how? Well then, the Patternizer is for you.
From the creator, who happens to be a co-worker of mine:

“All patterns are saved with the URL patternizer.com/username/pattern , and each time you save, it creates a new version /1 or /2 or /24. For you extra-techies, this site is a front-end (or UI) for the patternizer.js < canvas > script I wrote. So the patterns you make on the site can be used anywhere with the code it generates.”

Good job Matt.

art

Star Wars Photo Fantasies

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I’ve been meaning to post this for a few month’s now. The artist Cedric Delsaux uses his own pictures of cityscapes as the backgrounds for sci-fi fantasies and then digitally inserts Star Wars film characters into his urban realms. The artist’s Dark Lens series started out with his views of warehouses, harbors, and industrial spaces in the suburbs of Paris. He found those pictures a little too ordinary so he then added Darth Vader, R2-D2, Jabba the Hutt, and other Star Wars figures and vehicles to the settings and presto: they were suddenly fantastic!
Cedric Delsaux's "Dark Lens"
From Paris he continued the series in Lille — a medieval city in France — and then Dubai. In case you were wondering, he had the blessing of George Lucas (which has been notoriously tough to get in the past). While the gallery show at Galerie ACTE 2 in Paris is now over, the first link in this post shows you 15 different and great photos. Enjoy.
Via Flavorwire

art

Pixel Perfect

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When you receive a video from two different people who found it on two different sites, you know its probably going to be good. That’s what happened today with the video “Pixels” by Patrick Jean which is embedded below.
First, I received an email from a friend with a subject line that read “Very cool video” but I was too busy to watch. Then, later while at work, I received a company-wide email that was sent by a co-worker which only had a subject line that read “Pixels.” Someone responded a few minutes later with “That was dope” so I watched and agreed – it was dope. After watching the video, I then went back to my buddy’s email and sure enough, it was a link to the same thing.
So, check out the video below and let me know what is your favorite part. Mine is the Tetris scene. ‘Nuff said.

PIXELS by PATRICK JEAN.
Uploaded by onemoreprod. – Discover more animation and arts videos.
UPDATE: My RSS feed had an article from the NY Daily News about how Pixels is burning up the Net
Via Neu and Erick

art

Thoughts on Pop Culture

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In the NY Times magazine this weekend, Deborah Solomon (DS) interviewed Douglas Coupland (DC), a writer best known for coining the term “Generation X.” He had an interesting point of view regarding popular culture that I felt was apt to share:

DS: How would you define the current cultural moment?
DC: I’m starting to wonder if pop culture is in its dying days, because everyone is able to customize their own lives with the images they want to see and the worlds they want to read and the music they listen to. You don’t have the broader trends like you used to.
DS: Sure you do. What about Harry Potter and Taylor Swift and “Avatar,” to name a few random phenomena?
DC: They’re not great cultural megatrends, like disco, which involved absolutely everyone in t he culture. Now, everyone basically is their own microculture, their own nanoculture, their own generation.

Coupland’s thoughts really resonate with me. Back in the middle of last year when Michael Jackson passed away, one of the reasons that the outpouring of grief was so large was because it just might have been the last time that so many people could be unified towards a cultural event and everyone sort of felt this in their bones. His death was in a way the death rattle of the Super Culture that we’ve been used to for so long. I’m curious to see if this line of reasoning – that a Super Culture is dead – holds up over the next few years or if I look back on this entry and think, “Oh, how quaint.” I guess only time will tell…

art

12,000-Faceted Diamond

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The NY Times has all sorts of specialty blogs devoted to different topics and their Lens Blog – which features photography, video and journalism – just had a great post which tells the story of the Yankees recent World Series victory in time lapse photography – 12,000 shots to be exact. Sick.
Mr. Caplin, who is just 26, said he wanted the montage to seem as if it had been made a hundred years ago — “You know when you look back at old movie footage and they were cranking it? And it was really jumpy and slightly faster than normal?” The game is played to Chopin’s Waltz No. 5, a score Mr. Caplin chose to complement the antique sensibility of the piece.
I love the punny way that diamond – baseball and jewels – has been used. I love the movie and itself. Hopefully you will too. Happy Friday.

art

Today in Flux

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On today’s date 54 years ago, Dr. Emmit Brown was standing on his toilet seat attempting to hang a clock in his bathroom, when he slipped and slammed his head on the side of the sink (11/5/55 for those too lazy to do some simple mental math). Upon regaining consciousness Brown reported having “a revelation, a picture, a picture in my head.” A picture which he crudely scrawled down on a piece of paper and subsequently spent 30 years of his life and family fortune to build: the flux capacitor.
As evidenced by three movies, two theme park rides and countless exclaimations of 1.21 gigawatts!The world has never been the same since.

art

Museum Madness

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On a semi-recent flight to Las Vegas, I read an article in Delta’s Sky Mag that talked about the world’s must-visit museums (note this is not “the best” but “must-see” – a subtle difference but an important one none the less). To quote the article:
“The Ancient Greeks brought us the word museum; a place dedicated to the muses. Today, museums exist in countless interpretations in all corners of the world. They celebrate a single artist or pay tribute to a single topic. Museums as showcases for modern architecture has rewritten the global skyline and grabbed the world’s attention. But perhaps it is the looming world-class repositories of stunning collections we most associate with the classic idea of a museum: The Prados, Louvres and Mets of the world.
You could spend many lifetimes seeing just a fraction of the museums, great and humble, the world offers.”
Because their mag exists online only in some dumb ass virtual magazine form, where you need a special reader to “turn” the pages, I’ve taken the time to type out Delta’s list. The ones that have been italicized are ones to which I’ve been.



  1. Musee du quai Branly, Paris
  2. Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston
  3. de Young Museum, San Francisco
  4. La Fondation Maeght, Sanit-Paul-de Vence, France
  5. National Archaeological Museum, Naples
  6. The City Museum, St. Louis
  7. The Field Museum, Chicago
  8. The International Spy Museum, Washington, D.C.
  9. Kariye Museum, Istanbul
  10. The Hermitage, St. Petersburg
  11. Guggenheim Bilbao, Bilbao
  12. Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam
  13. The Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia
  14. The Frederick Meijer Gardens, Grand Rapids, Michigan
  15. National Museum of Anthropology, Mexico City
  16. Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum, Springfield, Illinois
  17. National Palace Museum, Taipei
  18. The Getty Center, Los Angeles
  19. The Uffizi Gallery, Florance
  20. Museum of Modern Art, New York City
  21. Walker Art Center, Minneapolis
  22. High Museum of Art, Atlanta
  23. American Visionary Art Museum, Baltimore
  24. British Museum, London
  25. Edo-Tokyo Museum, Tokyo
  26. Egyptian Museum of Antiquities, Cairo
  27. Vatican Museums, Rome
  28. Calouste Gulbenkian Museum, Lisbon
  29. Museum of Latin American Art, Buenos Aires
  30. Botero Museum, Bogota
art

Who is Ana?

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I have been staring out my office window at a billboard that says “See the World Through Ana’s Eyes” for the past few weeks and had no clue who Ana was, what world she was looking at and what the billboard was advertising. A search on the Net only brought up Flickr albums of people either named Ana or people who know an Ana who thought the billboards were cool. I spammed my company asking “Does anyone know the meaning / purpose behind these billboards?” and got a lot of inspired but in the end incorrect responses.
Finally, bored and starting at the billboard last Friday I tried one more web search and found a link to a tweet (that is a Twitter message for those not in the know – if you don’t know what Twitter is, well, then you are even less in the know) that informed me it was an ad for Ana Tzarev who is opening a gallery of her work in November. I contacted the PR firm Fitz & Co. who is representing Ana and spoke to Bethanie Brady who confirmed that yes, the Ana in the ad is Ana Tzarev. She said,

the text-only black and white campaign will give way to a city wide public art exhibition of colorful large-scale (some 4-stories tall) reproductions of the artist, Ana Tzarev¹s work. In anticipation of their November opening, Ana Tzarev Gallery has worked with New York based cultural marketing firm LaPlaca Cohen to create this campaign to share Ana Tzarev¹s work with all of New York.

The billboard across the way has already changed over and I’ll try to update this post with before and after pics soon. In the meantime, kudos go to all who worked on the campaign as they were able to keep it’s message under wraps for quite some time. My co-workers are all very Net savvy and no one could figure out what the billboard meant. Sure, that pissed some people off but in the end, if you are advertising something, you want people to be talking about that something.
Now, where Ana gets the money to open a gallery and purchase all of these billboard ads is another question altogether…

art

Post-It Pop Art

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Is there anything sufficiently motivated and nerdy students cannot do? The Donkey Kong a la Post-It installation below can be found at UC Santa Cruz. It took a team of ten Nintenerds about five hours to complete it and they used over 6,400 colored Post-it Notes (although they had to buy over 14,000 to get all the colors they needed.) in the process.
Via Nintendo Power.
No, I’m not kidding. I have a Wii and I wound up subscribing. I feel like I’m 11 all over again. There is nothing like having a bad day and then finding out that the latest issue of Nintendo Power just arrived. Nothing.