art

Smallest zine in the world

Smallest zine in the world

Last year, I gave family members letters from the World’s Smallest Postal Service for Christmas. They are awesome and make a fun gift. Spotted on the MAKE Flickr pool is this professed “smallest zine in the world,” an art “zine” done with eraser-carved stamps. I love the idea of doing eraser carvings on pencil heads. […]

Seasonal Flickr color cycle

Seasonal Flickr color cycle

This visualization of the way colors in Flickr images change over the course of the year was created by Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg of IBM’s Visual Communication Lab. It’s called “Flickr Flow.”

The two of us see the world as a stream of color, and in 2009 we finally had a chance to draw the river in our heads. We began with a collection of photographs of the Boston Common taken from Flickr. Using an algorithm developed for the WIRED Anniversary visualization, our software calculated the relative proportions of different colors seen in photos taken in each month of the year, and plotted them on a wheel. The image [above] is an early sketch from the piece. Summer is at the top, with time proceeding clockwise.

The finished infographic, complete with seasonal labels and callouts of representative images, appeared in the Metric section of Boston magazine in March of 2009. You can view a low-res version of it here.

The city at night is made of light

The city at night is made of light

Tokyo/Glow is a short film, written and directed by Jonathan Bensimon, about the little glowing guy from a cross-walk sign who jumps down from the sign, at night, and wanders around Tokyo gawking at all the lights. I don’t think there are any CG effects. The film’s amazing look was achieved by combining a real actor in a custom glow-suit with a bunch of photographic hi-jinks: stop-motion, time-lapse, long exposure…did I miss anything?

Biomechanical steampunk taxidermy

Biomechanical steampunk taxidermy

We have blogged about American assemblage artist Ron Pippin’s work before, with a focus on his wunderkammer pieces. But he’s been busy since then. Fair warning: Much of Pippin’s work uses real animal parts, and although I personally find it very beautiful, some viewers may be disturbed and/or offended. [via The Automata / Automaton Blog]