Sex education is an important tool for minimizing the spread of certain diseases and unwanted pregnancies, but how far is too far? If you’ve ever asked yourself that question, here’s the answer. This Baby’s First Baby doll comes with a tiny fetus it’s apparently just given birth to. And the doll’s packaging boasts that the baby’s baby is pregnant too. How horrifically awful. More »
It takes years for a person to learn how to write Japanese or Chinese characters. There’s good news though. Robots can do it a lot quicker. A research group has developed a ‘bot that can identify and mimic detailed brush strokes that are required to write these kinds of characters.
The Motion Copy System was developed at Keio University by Seiichiro Katsura. It stores the gestures associated with traditional Japanese calligraphy, and copies them. All that one needs to do to train the system is to guide the robot’s arm with their hand, and it can precisely replicate their recorded brush strokes. Unlike traditional system, the robot can record and reproduce the force applied to the brush similarly to when people touch something.
The calligraphy replication ‘bot was presented at the 2012 Combined Exhibition of Advanced Technologies in Tokyo, Japan.
[via DigInfo.TV via designboom]
Bartek Elsner, an artist who uses cardboard to build things far more awesome than your childhood fridge box fort, created this monstrous paper boombox for a Mini Cooper dealer in Zurich, Switzerland. What’s even more awesome is that the creation works, and is powered by the car battery from a Mini that’s actually parked behind the stereo. More »
Italian artist Lorenzo Durantini made this 5-foot tall tower from his collection of 2,216 VHS tapes. It looks like a shrine to the TV demons. Or, if you believe that TV makes you stupid, a monolith that turns people to monkeys on touch. Unless these are all 2001 tapes. More »
Before CGI, when a movie blew up a train, they either had to blow up a train, or build a model, film it at high speed and fill it with firecrackers. For this week’s Shooting Challenge, we’re exploring option 2. More »
What looks like a mad scientist’s oversized scheme to conquer the city of Winnipeg is actually a half million dollar sculpture created by artist Bill Pechet. Standing 35 feet tall, the Emptyful artpiece towers over the city’s Millennium Library Plaza looking like a constantly brewing science experiment thanks to a colored fountain and misters creating a cloud of fog. More »
Different pencil sharpeners result in differently-shaped and textured pencil shavings. For example, the ones that come with a handle churn out thin, coil-like shavings (which I packed into tiny bags and used as instant noodle props for my Barbie dolls when I was a kid.)
Then there’s the handier, compact sharpener that produces the kind of shavings that Marta Altes uses in her art.
The caricatures are playful, fun, and obviously creative. I wonder why nobody thought of doing this before, but then again, pencil shavings don’t really seem very appealing as an art medium at first thought.
Aside from the rad guy with the shaving mohawk, check out the rest of series featuring a lion, a ballerina, and a cool surfer dude all penciled in with shavings completing the scene.
[via Buzz Patrol]
Last week, we featured an sculpture of a horse that was made out of old keyboards. While it was truly impressive, there’s no chance you’ll be putting it in your house any time soon. Here’s some keyboard art you might actually hang on your wall.
Christopher Cobell of SketchkeysArtistry hunts down laptop keycaps in a variety of shades of grey to create these masterworks of pixel art. The largest of the current selection is his portrait of Marilyn Monroe shown above. Each one is handmade by gluing thousands of individual keys to a black foam backing, suitable for framing. Though I kind of like the idea of leaving the keys exposed so you can actually feel them.
He’s got several other images available for sale in his Etsy shop right now, including a sailboat, an abstract cityscape, and my personal favorite, a humorous image of a pair of bombs – reminiscent of Bob-Omb.
The artist states that part of his process is to “check for any accidental expletives from the random placement of the keys.” Darn, I was hoping to make that a game for my houseguests – to find the hidden dirty words.
Prices for this awesome keyboard wall art range from $179 to $965 (USD), depending on the size and complexity of the image. If you look closely at the bomb image, you’ll see a Windows start key in the bottom right corner. I wonder if that’s intentional.
If famous works of art just aren’t hip and modern enough for you, there’s an app for that. ATART, an augmented reality app for iOS, will take those stuffy old static images, and show you the GIFs they were always meant to be. More »
Some people like building machines that make doing some mundane task easier. Others, like Dan Grayber, do so in order for the machines to fulfill their own mechanical needs – whatever they may be.
Dan is an artist based in San Francisco and he builds complex machines that work best without humans. That’s probably because they were built with us humans taken out of the equation. Things might seem a bit harder to imagine at first, but once you see his creations, you’ll have to agree that they are pretty cool.
Objects are invented in order to satisfy particular needs, specifically, human needs. With my sculpture I investigate the concept of need when the human is removed from this equation. I do this by replacing the human with the object itself. My sculptures are invented only to sustain themselves, functioning as self-resolving problems.
Okay, I stand corrected. They aren’t pretty cool. They’re crazy awesome. The gallery below features more of Dan’s elaborate machine sculptures in all their standalone glory:
[via Laughing Squid]
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.
