Water Figures

Fotoopa's flickr set called Water Figures" has more amazing shots like this one:

The setup includes a homemade hardware controller and a couple of lasers to control the flashes.

Cheers...

French Knitting with Reclaimed Plastic Yarn

How could you possibly resist a blog entry with a title like this? Anyway, Mike over at Atomic Shrimp shows how to do something a bit more creative with that mound of plastic shopping bags that you've been saving to reuse. If you're like me, just reusing them to throw something out doesn't seem to cut it.

Kids love to knit using the French bobbin technique, and I have no idea why it seems to be something that we outgrow. It's a pity really because it truly is a lot of fun.

I don't think I would be as ambitious to take on this for an initial project but it at least shows what is possible to generate ideas.

Cheers...

FoodScapes: Amazing Photo Art You Can Eat

London based photographer Carl Warner was apparently never scolded to stop playing with his food - or perhaps he was and this is the result. Using food as the medium, he constructs landscape photos that generate the double-take effect followed by the obligatory "How did he do that?"

Consider this fishscape which features rocks made of oyster shells and crab claws, boats made of marrows and asparagus, and a shining, silvery, slippery sea of fish.Carl admits that there is some wasted food in the process, but most goes to feeding the crew, family and friends.

Cheers...

Women At Risk

Women At Risk International is an organization whose aim is fighting "gendercide".

THE PROBLEM
UNVEILING THE HIDDEN GENDERCIDE is our goal. Every 2-4 years the world looks away from a victim count on the scale of Hitler�s Holocaust. Women face nothing short of a �Hidden Gendercide��114 to 200 million women are �demographically missing� from dowry deaths, infanticide, domestic violence and all manner of risk. (UN Secretary General).

THE SOLUTION
OUR PASSION is to give voice to the silenced cries of women of the world who flow through our projects, creating circles of protection and hope. We offer a safe place to turn crisis into a story of hope by wrapping arms of love and whispering the message of worth.

Check out the W.A.R. Chest online shop.

Cheers...

It Was a Good Week After All

I read recently where one non-chemical way to doze off gracefully is to lay in bed thinking of all that you have been blessed with.

There is a group on Flickr called "52 Blessings" who encourage their members to upload a photo once a week for a year for what they have been blessed by in their lives that week. If you're intentional about looking for it, you'll have a better chance of finding it.

Cheers...

This is your Brain on Light

We used to do this in the driveway on Independence Day with sparklers or when out camping with our cheesy flashlights. Of course when produced by German artists Cenci Goepel and Jens Warnecke who actually have some talent and imagination, the results are stunningly beautiful.
They call it Lightmark.

Cheers...

Latest Mashup: Simpsons & Legos

So take the opening credits from an iconic animated series depicted by a classic building toy filmed in stop action and of course you will get...

"The Simpsons Legos Style"




Cheers, Homer...

Words as Art

A lot of blogs lately are including "tag clouds" which are used to show prominent tags on postings in the blog. But what if you just want to take an essay that you've written, or a letter to Auntie Grizelda, and create a "word cloud" based on your text.

Well, now you can and you can do it with Wordle. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes.

You can also create a "word cloud" for any url, as shown here with today's homepage from CNN:

Cheers...

It's Gotta Be The Shirt...

Call them t-shirts or tees, there are a lot of cool shirts out there to be had. In my day, we had to flip through pages of the novelty catalog or hang out at the half-clothing half-tobacco pipe shop to get unconventional tees. Or spend two week's minimum wage on a concert tee.

One of the coolest synergy stories I've read in a while was an article in Inc. about a couple guys who started Threadless. Basically, people submit their own custom designs, everyone votes on the most popular, and then that one is sold in limited quantity and then retired. Genius.

Some of the other offerings on the net include Funny T-Shirts from BustedTees and Snorg Tees.

My favorite from Snorg: "My Butt Hurts"

A couple of emerging ideas (which means I can't go there yet) are from these guys. Maybe I tripped on the Swedish avatar dress-up thing. It sounds naughty.

A new partnership between Swedish avatar dress-up site Stardoll and German t-shirt commerce site Spreadshirt allows users to take virtual clothes they create or see online and get them made into the real thing. Users will be able to take logos or graphics from popular labels in the Stardoll world and get them emblazoned on real-life t-shirts, hats and other items.

Cheers...

The Blue Man Group is Green

They never say a word, do some pretty strange things on stage to make music and get you to ask "How'd they do that?" All in all, they come across as relatively harmless and it turns out, they respect the planet. [read more]

Cheers...

If you could read my mind...

...while I was playing chess, it might look like this:



Actually, this is what it looks like to read the artificial mind of Thinking Machine 4 while it plays chess.

The artwork is an artificial intelligence program, ready to play chess with the viewer. If the viewer confronts the program, the computer's thought process is sketched on screen as it plays. A map is created from the traces of literally thousands of possible futures as the program tries to decide its best move. Those traces become a key to the invisible lines of force in the game as well as a window into the spirit of a thinking machine.

Cheers...

Islands of Consciousness

While doing some light research on Flickr mashups, I came upon an interesting merger of random sights and sounds from two artists. The site is Islands of Consciousness. Truly inexplicable and surreal. Like a train wreck that you can�t stop looking at.

Cheers...

iPop Art

When an ad campaign becomes an integral part of our culture, someone will inevitably find a way to profit from it, besides the original promoter.

iPopMyPhoto.com puts you into the ultra-hip iPod adverts that you can order as posters, t-shirts, greeting cards and more.

Neat.

Cheers...

Cool but Creepy

This is called a motion potrait - crazy graphics of a woman's face set in motion.

Cool.

Then you move your mouse.

Creepy.

Reminds me of the paintings on the wall in Scooby-Doo or Harry Potter.

Cheers...

Japanese Paper Trout

I don't always think of Japan when trout fishing comes up in conversation, but then I had never been to Yoshikazu Fujioka's Trouts and Seasons of the Mountain Village. Not only does he get into fly fishing for trout, he also paints the object of his obsession and shares these by way of print-them-yourself paper trout and selling limited edition prints.

Cheers...

Optical Illusions

Here's a guy who draws scenes on the sidewalk that you would swear are 3 dimensional...

Cheers...

Okay - here's a candidate for technology at it's best - Remote Chicken Petting.

Here are two movie related synchronicity events of late:

1) On Friday, May 6, I booked 4 nights at the Hilton London Hyde Park Hotel as part of our summer vacation. On Sunday May 8, I watched Moonlight Mile. In the beginning title sequence there was a splash screen for the film's production company - Hyde Park Entertainment.

2) On Thursday, May 5, I received the DVD of Pollock from Netflix. I ended up watching it on Wednesday, May 18. After watching the movie, I Googled for more info on Pollock and came upon a story from NPR that on May 10 it was announced that a friend of Pollock's had discovered 32 of his paintings in an old storage locker back in 2002.

Theo Jansen is a Dutch artist who creates new forms of art and nature with his wind-powered creatures that walk the beach. You can check them out at Strandbeest.

I was at a friend's house last week watching the Peter Gabriel concert DVD "Growing Up Live" and he rolled around the stage in one of these. I always wondered who would ever buy one - and now I know.

I was out running this past Sunday morning and I saw a guy running with his dog. This of course is not uncommon where I live nor is it uncommon to see the owner running with a plastic bag full of dog poop. However, this guy was tying the bag of dog poop to the dog's collar so he could carry it under his chin. So later over the fence this dog was heard to say to his neighbor, "My owner loves me. He takes me running with him. He lets me carry my own poop in a bag tied to my collar."

Here's something odd languagewise that I encountered this week: If we eat Thai food from Thailand why don't we eat Eng food from England?

Some tidbits from around the internet today:

If you�d like to congratulate the new pope, you can send him an e-mail at benedictxvi@vatican.va No lie.

If you�ve always wondered why Bluetooth is named Bluetooth and even more about how it works, check this out.

And here�s a group who make art out of robots. My favorite is Super Dog Monkey of course.

Here's the scoop. I read an article in Information Week and ended up here. Well, not HERE, but at another blog that I played around with. From THERE, I'm bringing over three recent findings. First, a friend of mine stumbled on the Silophone, which is one of those great abandoned stuff turned into art things. If you like words like I like words, you should like visiting TextArc. Finally, I'm always on the lookout for people that are doing original work on the web. The people at BrainPuppy seem to fit that description.