Hasta La Gadget!

If art always seemed a little bit too passive for your liking, we have a little something that might change your mind. Wall artist Alexandre Farto has been creating images without paint, pen or charcoal, opting instead for very precise explosions. He places charges into a wall and then detonates them, blowing off bits of plaster to create large murals, with the contrast between the exploded bits and intact wall forming the image. 

The murals can be found around London and Moscow and are part of a series called “Scratching the Surface”. His site contains images of other pieces he’s made with explosives, as well as links to his other works (mostly of the more tame, non-volatile variety).

The artist, also known as Vhils, collaborated with the musician Orelha Negra to create a video of the creation of the pieces, explosions and all. Watching the bits of plaster fly off the wall, leaving behind a simple slogan or picture is honestly breathtaking, especially given how carefully targeted these blasts had to be to make this happen. Can’t help but think that required art classes would be a bit more fun using his technique. Check out the video after the break.

[via Hack-a-Day]

Giant and Midget by Ryuji Nakamura

Ryuji Nakamura decided that he’d turn himself into a giant. A virtual giant. With some paper, a sharp blade and a few minutes of careful cutting and folding, Nakamura came up with this webcam covering house, which makes any video conferencer look as if they are a huge monster, peering one-eyed through the window of a tiny home.

Nakamura’s model comes complete with a minuscule dining suite of table and chairs, and was built for the DesignEast exhibition at the end of last year. What I like best about the piece, called Midget and Giant, is that the outside is as carefully made as the inside. You can’t see the overlapping roof or any of the upper floor from the webcam, but they are there, cutely propped atop an old iMac.

While you could just snap yourself as a giant and forget about it, there may be more practical uses, too. I imagine a miniature replica of the office to use when chatting to my editor, Dylan Tweney, via Skype, or a virtual cocktail bar to make me look more cosmopolitan when I send pictures to dating sites. It seems foolproof, except for one thing. I’ll have to explain why I have grown so huge. Dylan should be easy to fool — I’ll just tell him I’m testing out a new shrinking machine and it went wrong. The dating site? Well, that could be a little trickier.

Giant and Midget [Ryuji Nakamura via Unplggd]

It’s not unusual to have art fairs held in hotels, with each room being taken over by a gallery and their works. However, this is the first time I’ve heard of a karaoke space being used for an art fair event.

Mancy’s Tokyo is a luxury salon-style restaurant and karaoke bar in Azabujuban. Last year in January it hosted Mancy’s Art Nights, which saw galleries descend on the venue to display their artists’ work inside the decadent karaoke room lounges.

The art fair returns this weekend and features around a dozen participating galleries from Tokyo, Hong Kong and Seoul. You can check out pictures from last year’s event here.

Two photos in a single frame. The double exposure is a fantastic manipulation of photography, and these 69 entries to this week’s Shooting Challenge prove it. More »

It’s not every day that you see something handcrafted with time and care on the internet, but what you see above certainly qualifies. An art / craft project by German designer Maria Fischer, it’s called Thoughts on Dreams, it contains threaded ‘hyperlinks‘ which are there to help guide the reader to links between important passages. The book is sadly (for us) in German, so we can’t know what it says, but we can imagine that it’s all sorts of beautiful, mysterious things that can only be conveyed by paper and colored string.There is one more image after the break, just because.

Continue reading Hand-sewn, hyperlinked book is a thing of beauty, and a joy for several minutes

Hand-sewn, hyperlinked book is a thing of beauty, and a joy for several minutes originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 10 Feb 2011 15:49:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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