LA Photographer Eric Curry’s series “American Pride and Passion” is just beautiful. Each piece is achieved using a very simple technique: The scene is staged in darkness, a camera positioned to record it, and different parts individually illuminated—say, with a flashlight—while a long exposure is recorded. The many resulting images are composited in appropriate software, and with considerable artistry, to create the glowing, ethereally-lit finished pieces.
Make contributor Jason Torchinsky describes how he built his gigantic Space Invader sculptures for the IndieCade Festival.
Sixteen feet long, five feet wide, and four feet tall, this 1/72 replica of the US Navy’s “Big E” represents nineteen years of builder Gabriel Suryani’s hobby, and has been called “something that is close to the limits a single modeler can achieve.”
With multiple performances by video hackers LoVid, duels on guitars-turned-game controllers by Modal Kombat, and a handful of other visual delights and audible jams, Signal to Noise is becoming something of a staple for the art-meets-tech community in NYC.
According to the bio on his website, Jólan van der Wiel admires objects which show experimental discovery and are translated into a functional design. His Gravity Stools demonstrate that perfectly. Using a custom magnetic material and a machine with large magnets to stretch the legs off the seat of the stool, he manufactures a product which is “characterized by the freakish and organic shapes that are so typical of nature itself.”
Bill Secunda’s sculpture “Mantis Dreaming” was inspired by The Verve’s song “Catching The Butterfly.” Of it, he writes: “I imagined a praying mantis might have that dream, his opposite, the butterfly, beautiful, delicate, and always out of reach. He is so infatuated with it, when the butterfly lands on him he stands frozen. His instincts clash with his fascination, all he can do is hope it doesn’t fly away.”
As the artistic duo RoboCoco, Petra Gemeinboeck and Rob Saunders explain:
The installation embeds a group of autonomous robots into the walls of a gallery. They punch holes through the walls to inspect what’s outside, signal each other, and conspire. As if the walls had ears and a hammer to pierce holes for their eyes to see. The work develops a political relationship between the stealthy invasion of digital surveillance and urban combat tactics in which soldiers are instructed to walk through private walls. The installation stages this relationship in the form of an autonomous sculptural process that marks and wounds our environment, leaving behind open scars.
