When Ken Schroeder was repairing appliances for a living, he decided that a spring-loaded switch from a dishwasher would be ideal as a trigger for some kind of device that his dog, Bender, could activate. Two years later, while studying industrial design at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh, Ken mounted the switch behind the sensor […]
Photography by Amber Henshaw The area around the house of Azmeraw Zeleke in northern Ethiopia is littered with burnt-out mortar shells left over from a war with neighboring Eritrea. For months, Azmeraw wondered what he could do with them as he saw them being sold around Mekele town (about 800km from the capital, Addis Ababa). […]
Photograph by Muriel Thies If you love the look of movies such as The Nightmare Before Christmas and The City of Lost Children, there’s a sculptor out there after your own heart. In fact, none of Stéphane Halleux’s darkly whimsical renderings — robotic wheelchairs, squat submarines, armored cars, men with mechanical bat wings, animal soldiers […]
Photography by Simon Jansen New Zealander Simon Jansen has all the bona fides of an alpha maker. A software engineer and classic car restorer, he’s got a half-built R2-D2 and a custom minibike he made from scratch. He achieved geek fame with his ASCII animation of Star Wars scenes (asciimation.co.nz), which practically defined obsessive attention […]
A Washington native, Claude Zervas brings his background as a software engineer to a fine art practice using technology and related apparatuses rather than paint and canvas as a medium. Zervas’ predominant subject matter for the past few years has been the Northwest’s verdant and extreme landscape: dense evergreen forests, glacier-melt rivers, and strange roadside […]
Photograph by Rob Carter of Mixed Greens Gallery In Lee Stoetzel’s world, Harley-Davidsons, Volkswagen buses, Macintosh computers, and McDonald’s Big Macs all grow on trees. Or at least the materials to make them do. The Pennsylvania artist recreates iconic products entirely out of wood, with a little steel and Bondo for support. “I stick with […]
The modern gymnasium is very much a 19th- century creation, no matter how much the fitness freak is kitted out with bad hair, retro headbands, and spandex, or contemporary embedded LCD interfaces and computer-generated body plans. Gyms harken back to a world of classical mechanical physics, plugged into equations of work and energy. To the […]
