In 1971, an astronaut placed a 3 1/2-inch aluminum sculpture on the moon, igniting an art world scandal transcending our earthly bearings. The long, bizarre tale of "one of the smallest yet most extraordinary achievements of the Space Age" is recounted by Corey Powell and Laurie Gwen Shapiro over at Slate. If there’s anything to be learned, it’s that egos inflate in space.
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We collectively use about a million plastic bags a minute, a figure that will peak during next week’s holiday rush. As you’re sitting around in a post-Christmas funk next week, consider following the lead of Japanese artist Yuken Teruya, who carves tiny, perfect trees out of the flimsy walls of old shopping bags.
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Edward Tufte is a data viz pioneer, well-known for making complex information easy to parse. But the man is also fascinated with manipulating the physical world; he has transformed the rolling hills and wooded terrain of Hogpen Hill Farms in rural Connecticut into a 234-acre sculpture garden that’s like a modern-day Stonehenge—if those pre-historic folks had access to I-beams, Airstream trailers, and Richard Feynman diagrams.
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What if, instead of marketing to a general demographic, you marketed to a specific individual? What if, instead of waiting for a patron to commission new work, an artist simply designed it based on someone’s psychological profile? If an online ad asked for you by name, could you resist?
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The Fulton Street Transit Center currently being built in the Financial District of Manhattan is shaping up to be not only the biggest place to catch a train in the five boroughs, but also the coolest. Where normally you’d expect the MTA to build tunnels through the ground, at Fulton Street they’ve assembled one to the sky. The MTA released a time-lapse video and a new set of photos that show a massive net lined with reflectors being installed inside the $1.4 billion dollar hub.
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Because it never gets boring to look inside creatures
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What are you going to remember from the year 2013? Will you think of all the great people we’ve lost? Will you think about Miley’s tongue? Will you think about Game of Thrones or Orange Is the New Black? Sports? Twerking? Viral videos? Movies? iPhones? Xbox Ones and PS4s? Maybe all of that. Maybe more. With two weeks left in the year, Mario Zucca drew a fantastically wonderful image for Beutler Ink to summarize all the happenings of 2013. There was a lot.
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A couple of years ago Steven Lefcourt had a go at making realistic Pokémon. He ended up making creepy creatures, but they’re not nearly as scary and Kaiju-like as Yuuki Morita’s versions. The freelance CG artist used 3D animation and modeling programs to portray the final forms of the original starter Pokémon.
Check out the abs on Charizard. Blastoise looks equally mad…
…and Venusaur is daring you to choose someone else over him:
It’s hard to believe any of these three would accept orders from a kid, let alone willingly confine themselves in a Pokéball.
[Yuuki Morita via Geekologie]
Mouse brains! Bat embryos! Hungry algae! Today, Olympus unveiled the winners of the tenth annual BioScapes photography competition, which showcases the best photography captured through light microscopes. The top ten were chosen from a mind-boggling 2,100 entries.
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Greg White has shot some of the most remote and unusual places in the world. The UK photographer has published photo essays on Chernobyl, Svalbard, and even CERN. But for his latest project, he discovered an alien world within the ordinary confines of his home country: The labs where satellites are built.
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This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
