We covered artist Peter Root’s smaller Low-Rise staplescape back in 2009. It’s only about 1.5 m2. His newest work, Ephemicropolis, shown uppermost, is a full 18 m2. Be sure to check out the making-of video at his website. As impressive as Root’s models are, I have to admit I am almost equally charmed by Tofi Stoler’s miniature of Manhattan Island, shown immediately above. [via Boing Boing]
Many people try to get rid of cockroaches with poison and traps. But one man is celebrating them in an odd way. Michael Boudin owns the “Cockroach Hall Of Fame Museum” in Plano, Texas. He keeps some of them as pets, and then when they ‘pass on’, he adds them to his collection. His museum […]
Homemade snowmobile! This bulky machine constructed by one enthusiast retiree from the Russian city of Kirov is powered by the old Yamaha motorcycle engine and is entirely made of scrap. Fiberglass seat was formerly a part of a small carousel, gear shift lever was a part of an unidentified old Coca-Cola souvenir. The front skies […]
Dana (Mon Valley, PA) built “The Great American Horn Machine” using a gasoline-powered air compressor, 620 gallon air tank, along with an array of ship & train horns + whistles. The whole thing is controlled by a couple dozen relays hooked up to a Highly Liquid MIDI board, and in case you didn’t notice -it’s […]
Reykjavik designer Sruli Recht is selling a limited number of these kevlar pocket squares made from “military grade lemon aramid” fiber. For some reason, he calls it “DÆmdur,” which apparently means “The Damned .”
All joking aside, this thing may be the most beautiful piece of kinetic art I have ever seen. It has a Cartesian robot to draw 1s or 0s on the tape as needed, a rolling felt-covered drum for erasing symbols, a camera that can recognize what symbols have already been written, a bank of white LEDs to provide illumination for the camera, and a beautiful custom control panel.
No, they don’t call themselves that. “Bamboobender” is my hackish take on “sandbender,” which many of you folks will probably recognize as a term coined by arch-cyberpunk William Gibson in his novel Idoru. Very roughly, a “sandbender” is a craftsperson who makes a living by carefully hand-crafting ornate enclosures for mass-produced electronics. We don’t see a lot of that, at least in the first world (although mass-produced after-market “custom” enclosures and enclosure-decorations are common), probably because our personal electronics are still pretty ephemeral to us: we all know we’re probably going to be sporting a new phone and/or MP3 player next year. This example, however, comes from Cameroon, where, I presume, the device turnover rate is a lot lower. It’s the work of teacher and wordworker Lekuama Ketuafor, whose runs a sole-proprietorship cottage industry called Bamboo Magic. [via AfriGadget]
