Fly by Night, by artist Duke Riley. You can read more about this amazing performance art at The Creators Project. There’s a faq at the project’s website: http://creativetime.org/projects/flybynight/faq/ and the show will be going through June 12th at the Brooklyn Navy Yard.
Louie’s Jurassic Park:
In his off-duty time, NASA Astronaut Don Pettit experiments with the physics of
water in the weightless environment aboard the International Space Station:
McAvoy goes full Stewart:
25 Contemporary Artists Reimagine the African Mask.
Nandipha Mntambo (South African, born 1982). Europa, 2008. Exhibition print, 31 ½ x 31 ½ in. (80 x 80 cm). Photographic composite: Tony Meintjes. Courtesy of the artist and STEVENSON, Cape Town and Johannesburg. © Nandipha Mntambo. Photo: Courtesy of STEVENSON, Cape Town and Johannesburg.
Click the link for more photos, and the full story.
I’m not a “selfie” person, and I shudder when I see “selfie sticks”, those things look like cattle prods to me. I don’t see the virtue in constantly taking photos of yourself, but if that’s what makes you happy, go for it. Just leave the art out of it. A great deal of art work gets damaged by those seeking selfie perfection in the never-ending I can top that! selfie competition. The latest victim to selfie-ism is a statue of Dom Sebastiao, who ruled Portugal from 1557 to 1578, at Lisbon’s Rossio train station.
The statue of Dom Sebastiao before it was destroyed. Courtesy of Peter Burka, via Flickr Creative Commons.
The statue of Don Sebastiao was broken by a young man taking a selfie. Courtesy of Infrastructure Portugal.
The 126-year-old statue shattered after a 24-year-old man reportedly knocked it over while climbing on it to take a photograph. The suspect, who has not been named, is said to have attempted to flee the scene before being apprehended by police.
A spokesperson for Infrastructure Portugal told the Daily Mail that he did not know when the statue would be repaired. Before the unfortunate incident, the sculpture was perched in a niche between two doorways at the station, which is a protected monument.
[…]
Sadly, this is not an isolated incident. Last May, a pair of tourists damaged a statue of Hercules in the northern Italian city of Cremona while taking a photograph with it. In 2014, an Italian student tried to pose sitting in the lap of a 19th-century cast of an ancient work at Milan’s Academy of Fine Arts of Brera, only to smash the sculpture in the process.
Some museums have taken steps to protect their art by banning selfie sticks, which extend the reach of the photographer, and may increase the likelihood of inadvertently striking a work of art. (Even without selfies, accidents happen, like the boy who lost his balance and punched $1.5 million painting, or the woman who tripped and smashed an ancient Greek vase.)
Lots of wows here, amazing work by Collin van der Sluijs. Van der Sluijs was most recently in Chicago where he completed a tremendous mural in the south loop as part of the Wabash Arts Corridor that depicts two endangered Illinois birds amongst an explosion of blooms. He also opened his first solo show in the U.S. titled “Luctor Et Emergo” at Vertical Gallery, featuring a wide range of paintings and drawings. You can follow more of his work on Flickr.
Via Colossal Art.
In 1977, sculptor David Nash cleared an area of land near his home in Wales where he trained a circle of 22 ash trees to grow in a vortex-like shape for an artwork titled Ash Dome. Almost 40 years later, the trees still grow today. The artist has long worked with wood and natural elements in his art practice, often incorporating live trees or even animals into pieces. The exact site of Ash Dome in the Snowdonia region of northwest Wales is a closely guarded secret, and film crews or photographers who are permitted to see it are reportedly taken on a circuitous route to guard its location. Nash shares in an interview with the International Sculpture Center:
When I first planted the ring of trees for Ash Dome, the Cold War was still a threat. There was serious economic gloom, very high unemployment in our country, and nuclear war was a real possibility. We were killing the planet, which we still are because of greed. In Britain, our governments were changing quickly, so we had very short-term political and economic policies. To make a gesture by planting something for the 21st century, which was what Ash Dome was about, was a long-term commitment, an act of faith. I did not know what I was letting myself in for.
The newly described dinosaur Zhenyuanlong suni measured 5 feet in length and was a relative of the velociraptor. The fossil’s well-preserved wings bore complex feathers, not simple hairlike structures. Illustration by Zhao Chuang.
Click image for full size. I don’t know about you, but if something like that was chasing me…godsdamn. Feathers, much more terrifying than scales, hands down.
They Had Feathers: Is the World Ready to See Dinosaurs as They Really Were? (Via Pharyngula.)
Swale, a collaborative floating food project, is dedicated to rethinking and challenging New York City’s connection to our environment. Built on an 80-foot by 30-foot floating platform, Swale contains an edible forest garden. Functioning as both a sculpture and a tool, Swale provides free healthy food at the intersection of public art and service. With Swale, we want to reinforce water as a commons, and work towards fresh food as a commons too.
Swale is an artwork. Art is integral to imagining new worlds. By continuing to create and explore new ways of living, we hope that Swale will strengthen our ways of collaborating, of cooperating, and of supporting one another. At its heart, Swale is a call to action. It asks us to reconsider our food systems, to confirm our belief in food as a human right, and to pave pathways to create public food in public space.
This is a great way to get fresh, healthy food to known food deserts. Have a look around Swale’s space, and donate if you can.
© Sara Landeta.
http://www.saralandeta.com/2015/05/la-medicina-y-sus-metaforas-medicine-as.html
A most poignant series by Sara Landeta. Her description:
The project includes a collection of 120 boxes of drugs that have been consumed by different patients to overcome their illnesses. All boxes are illustrated inside with a broad classification of birds from different families, being the only animal that although it gives it a meaning of freedom, because it is the only one able to connect with the earth and the sky, is also one of the main animals in captivity. This juxtaposition of the natural and the synthetic interprets the patient as a captive animal, and the bird as its metaphor.Draw a collection of birds inside these boxes holding a single reflection ; l will learn to be birds in captivity, but they are wanting to fly, and that is what keeps them alive.
Esther van Hulsen at work on an octopus drawing using 95 million-year-old ink. Photo by Stian Steinsli
Dutch wildlife artist Esther van Hulsen was recently given an assignment unlike her typical drawings of birds and mammals from life—a chance to draw a prehistoric octopus 95 million years after its death. Paleontologist Jørn Hurum supplied Hulsen with ink extracted from a fossil found in Lebanon in 2009, received as a gift from the PalVenn Museum in 2014. After several millennia Hulson was surprised to find that the color had remained so vibrant, preserved all of this time in the cephalopod’s ink sac. “Knowing that this animal has used this ink to survive is absolutely amazing,” said van Hulsen of the prehistoric ink.
The Moldovan-born performer of Britain’s Got Talent fame appeared on Ellen to show off his acrobatic sword-swallowing routine. Magala not only swallowed two different swords—a typical Western-looking blade and a katana—but also managed backflips and pole-dancing with the swords. Inside him. Because gay men everywhere just needed to be knocked down a peg—or 20.
Ellen asks what we’re all thinking. Why—just why?
“I’m from Moldova, it’s in Eastern Europe,” Magala says. “It’s a poor country, pretty much nothing to do.”
I’d say something, but the screams are still echoing in my brain.
German multimedia designer Tobias Gremmier visually captures the poetic kinetics of martial arts in Kung Fu Motion Visualization. This four minute video is the latest project from the prolific author, musician and cyber-savant. Posted to his Vimeo, Gremmier materializes the physics of the human body through digitally analyzing the movements of a kung fu drill. Each motion of the fighter’s body is outlined and traced through by a trail of digital dust particles, a mesh of geometric planes, or a stream of fractal webs.
Via The Creators Project.
Ingrid Baars; all images courtesy of Joseph Gross Gallery.
Art LeadHER is a colorful tribute to the recent rise of female artists in contemporary art. The group show, opening today at Joseph Gross Gallery, is the inaugural annual exhibition for ArtLeadHER, a platform launched by the show’s curator Mashonda Tifrere in March of this year for International Women’s Day. The platform, like the show, is dedicated to “celebrating and bringing awareness to women in the art world.”
Motorbikes by yok and sheryo.
Traditional artists try virtual reality art for the first time.
We all know that art can exist in virtual reality, from games like Adr1ft, to films such as Collisions. Virtual reality has shown itself to be a unique medium for immersing audiences in a work of art. But what about creating art within virtual reality? Google’s Virtual Art Sessions set out to experiment with exactly that.
Google invited six artists who all work with different mediums and material, to test out Google’s new Tilt Brush software. Tilt Brush functions as a palette and a brush that simulates painting in a 3D environment. Jeff Nusz, one of the people on the Data Arts Team at Google, commented in the behind the scenes video that it was interesting to take artists accustomed to working with physical things and “hand them this new medium, this new tool that no one knows how to use.”
Frank Howarth once again does magic with wood. (Be warned, his galleries and videos are a serious time sink).
The 2016 National Geographic Travel Photographer of the Year is open, and accepting submissions until May 27, 2016. Those of you with travel photos, get them in! (Looking at you, Saad).
This picture was taken during Mt. Bromo eruption, the horse seems a little agitated due to the sound of the eruption, © Reynold Dewantara / National Geographic Travel Photographer of the Year Contest.
This image was captured very early in the morning after climbing Yellow Mountain at 3 am and waiting for few hours in the cold and wind at -4 degrees. No HDR and no Photoshop was used for the effect of this image, everything is 100% natural. The magic of the nature did its work and I have been lucky, © Thierry Bornier / National Geographic Travel Photographer of the Year Contest.