art

Shapeways user Maundy created the Steampunk Geared Cube, a magnificent geared confection that came out of the 3D printed fully assembled!

The cube contains a total of 28 gears, all of which turn from manually rotating only one (though the designer notes that rotating two gears results in a smoother motion). The outermost gear on each side has handles for easy rotation, and each is linked to its adjacent gear in an interlocking pattern. Once one gear is spun, the others correspondingly spin along.

In addition to the fascinating pattern and mechanics, the cube has a tray in the middle for holding various small objects. The product also comes with a stand and a lockable lid, which is placed on top of the cube and can be locked and unlocked by rotating the gears.

3D Printed 28-Geared Cube     

Glow in the dark inks on a poster can be hit or miss. In the best cases, they act as almost a night light, revealing a beautiful second image that’s invisible in the day time. On the other hand, some are so subtle and light, it’s almost as if they don’t glow in the dark at all. And maybe that’s a good thing.

The Bottleneck Gallery in Brooklyn, NY will surely have a little of both in their latest exhibit, When The Lights Go Out, which opens April 12. Over 60 artists have made brand new pieces with glow in the dark inks, which will be displayed at all hours via a new installation of blacklights.

Some of the topics of the art include 2001: A Space Odyssey (above), The Shawshank Redemption, Alien, Game of Thrones, Band of Brothers, Where the Wild Things Are, Tron, Poltergeist, Time Bandits and more. It looks like a very fun show. Check out a selection of art below.

When the Lights Go Out opens at 7 p.m. April 12 and will remain open through May 1. It’s located at 60 Broadway, Brooklyn. Find more information at www.bottleneckgallery.com, and that’s also where the show will go on sale online at noon EST on April 13 at that link.

Mouse over each piece for the artist name, and property. Where we can, we’ve placed the original with the glow in the dark element side by side. Some of the images provided either only had one way, or both together. Those are at the bottom of the gallery.

And that’s just a small, small sampling of the full show.

Which is your favorite?

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NYC barista Mike Breach paints milk portraits in lattes.    

Grey, a new and beautiful pattern by Nicolas Sassoon.

[ By WebUrbanist in Architecture & Public & Institutional. ]

Watch these videos and you will never see built environments in the same way again. Some tackle timeless questions of light, dark and color, while others address emerging technologies and the architectural problems of tomorrow. Skim the descriptions below to decide which you want to view – or take an hour of your day to enjoy them all!

Richard Kelly starts out with Le Corbusier’s modern classic Notre Dame du Haut in Ronchamp, illustrating the amazing plays of light and dark that together make for a deeply spiritual experience of space. He goes on to talk about Richard Kelly, a pioneer of lighting design, who talked in terms of focal glow (space-dominating sources), ambient luminescence (mood lighting) and plays of brilliants (bright points in a dark space). If you have any doubt about the importance of light and color in architectural design, you need to watch this video.

Daniel Libeskind is a designer who preaches what he practices. He abhors neutral and strives for inspirational, emotional, complex, risky, raw and story-telling architecture that both describes but also rises above the times in which it is built. At the same time, he is not a proponent of artistic expression for its own sake, but shows surprising pragmatism – architecture, like the Ground Zero memorial towers, should fit the consensus and respond to the needs of people occupying it.  Whether or not you are a fan of his elaborate Deconstructivist-style monuments and institutions, this talk will help you put one of today’s most energetic architects in context.

Rachel Armstrong proposes self-repairing and evolving metabolic materials that will step beyond design and history. She boldly proposes that sustainability means connecting to nature in a fundamental way: namely, with building blocks that can grow and change. It is more than just a vision, though – she brings actual material developments to the table that defy the inert qualities of familiar concrete, wood and bricks.  These can respond in real time to environmental conditions. Instead of imposing structure upon matter, these concepts, like what they contain, are necessarily dynamic – they will literally grow out of material science in the coming years.

Magnus Larsson has an improbable but grand project in mind, turning bacteria and grains of sand into a sandstone wall that could span the entire continent of Africa.  Each second, one billion grains of sand are created in the world – some become sandstone, but others collect in dunes and deserts. Each day, the Saharan frontier moves a meter forward, taking over human-occupied lands and displacing populations. To reclaim vast and uninhabited areas of the Earth, it only makes sense that we turn the destructive desertification power of sand to our advantage. This proposal would have multiple benefits, reclaiming such spaces, reducing droughts and curbing climate change.

Bjarke Ingels asks how we tell the architectural design stories outside of the finished project, using alternative media (including comic books!) to talk about history, evolution and the avante garde of architecture. If you enjoy offbeat comparisons, visual juxtapositions,  comedic concepts and experimental expression, this is a much-watch video.

Cameron Sinclair was and is an early proponent of open-source architecture to address everyday issues of sustainable global design, from emergency housing and transitional shelter to shipping container infrastructure, straw bale construction, mobile health clinics and more. This talk is now nearly a decade old, but the lessons are just as applicable today, or perhaps more so than ever.

Liz Diller (of Diller + Scofidio) describes architecture as a special-effects machine – beyond basic shelter, it is theatrical in essence. Her work challenges conventions of spatial use and building technology. Notably, she recognizes that her projects are not always easy to capture and display in museum retrospectives – they are about a time, place and experience, for better (and/)or for worse. This video should be a fittingly light-hearted end to these series of somewhat-heavy features.

[ By WebUrbanist in Architecture & Public & Institutional. ]

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VICE Loves Magnum: An Interview with Christopher Anderson

Magnum is probably the most famous photo agency in the world. Even if you haven’t heard of it, chances are you’re familiar with its images, be they Robert Capa’s coverage of the Spanish Civil War, Steve McCurry’sAfghan Girl or Martin Parr’s very British holiday-scapes. Unlike most agencies, Magnum’s members are selected by the other photographers in the agency, which, given they’re the greatest photo agency in the world, means that becoming a member is a pretty grueling process. As part of an ongoing partnership with Magnum, we will be profiling some of their photographers over the coming weeks.

First up is Christopher Anderson, who became a Magnum nominee in 2005 and was a full member by 2010. His early work on Haitian immigrants’ illegal journey to America—during which he and they sank in the Caribbean Sea in a handmade wooden boat named Believe in God—won him the Robert Capa Gold Medal. And last year, we produced an episode of Picture Perfect about him.

His subsequent book projects include Son, a series of photos capturing his wife and young child as his own father grew ill with cancer, and Capitolio, which documents unrest in Caracas during the time of Chavez.

I had a chat with him about how he sees himself and how that’s changed over his career.

Joe Biden descends from Air Force Two in Virginia, shot for New York Magazine.

VICE: You’ve vocally distanced yourself from photojournalism in the past. Why is that?
Christopher Anderson: There are photojournalists in Magnum, but I don’t see it as a photojournalist agency. It’s more founded in documentary photography. If I were to use a term for myself, I feel I’d fit more closely in the bracket of documentary photography than photojournalism. The term photojournalist tends to be loaded with meaning: specifically that one reports the news. I don’t see that as my function. Even when I was photographing things that were news topics, like conflicts, my function was not that of a news reporter, my function was to comment on what I saw happen that day and to offer a subjective point of view. In my role, I was commenting on what was happening, but also trying to communicate what it felt like to be there when it was happening.

So you wanted to capture images that were more emotional and personal?
Exactly. But I would go further and say that I not just wanted to do that, that is in fact what I did do. I had no pretence of objectivity. I was photographing, giving my opinion, and I wanted you to know that I was giving my opinion.

Did your unconventional approach make it initially more difficult to sell your photos, or was it beneficial from the start?
Well, I don’t think I was going ‘round articulating that to editors, saying, “No, I won’t work for you unless you understand that what I do is subjective.” With the agency I was with before, it didn’t make a difference, as I was already sort of working for “journalistic magazines,” and I worked a lot for the New York Times Magazine. The kind of stories that I would do, even ones from conflict zones, would be longer and more in depth in their approach to what was happening there, trying to put what was happening in a more human, intimate context rather than the headlines of the day. But to be honest, the marketable advantage never crossed my mind at the time. I was just intent on trying to do what I did in the way I wanted to with as much integrity as possible.

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This is a huge time for Mondo. The company kicked off SXSW last week with their massive Game of Thrones show. Later this week is the even bigger Stout/Taylor show. (Check back Friday for more on that.) And today they’ve revealed a truly historic entry into their archive.

Martin Ansin has done a poster for Martin Scorsese‘s Taxi Driver, tied to a screening at the Alamo Drafthouse in Austin, TX next week. Not only did Robert De Niro allow Mondo to use his likeness, Scorsese himself approved the poster. Check it out in full, below.

For more information on the screenings, visit this page. And here’s the Taxi Driver poster.

I can’t wait to see this one in person and look at all the detail. But I love how it evokes not only the dirty New York of the film, but the seventies style of the poster.

Odds are this will sell out at the screenings but, if there are leftovers, @MondoNews on Twitter would be the way to find out.

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Philip Bump took the recently discovered 17-million-digit prime number and, six digits at a time, converted it into RGB colors. This is the result.

Martin Parr

Terry Richardson

Nan Goldin

When we first saw the line up for the new photo show opening tomorrow at the Aperture Foundation Gallery, simply titled Photography, we fell out of our chairs. The show features new (new!) work from William Eggleston, Nan Goldin, Ryan McGinley, Martin Parr, Terry Richardson, and Stephen Shore. You don’t have to be a photo nerd to know that this selection of artists are some of the most important photographers making work today. To have new work by them all in one room is crazy. We decided we had to sit down with Ken Miller, the curator of the show, to figure out how he pulled it off. Turns out it was pretty simple.

VICE: What’s up, Ken? How did this project start?
Ken Miller: It started with a sort of unrelated exhibition of abstract photography that I did in Tokyo about a year and a half ago. That was kind of a weird way for it to begin. It was a show with Sam Falls, Marcelo Gomes, Mariah Robertson, and this Japanese photographer named Taisuke Koyama. Somebody from Fujifilm came by and I guess they liked the show, so they got in touch. They took me out to drinks and showed me these cameras they were coming out with and were like “Do you think you could get photographers to use these?” The cameras were really nice, so I was like, “Yeah probably, it’s a free camera.”

We started putting a list of photographers together. I was initially thinking of people I’d worked with before, who seemed easy to approach. Then I thought, Fuck it. I’ll just ask ambitiously and worst comes to worst, they’ll say no. And amazingly, basically everybody said yes. Of the initial people we asked, only two passed for different reasons. It was remarkably easy.

That’s pretty amazing.
I don’t want to sound like an advertisement for the camera, but it’s a digital SLR that works like the camera you studied in college. It has a lot of manual functions. So, I think there’s a certain nostalgia for a lot of these photographers who think “Oh, this works like a classic point-shoot Nikon” and they were psyched about that. You sort of forget photographers are camera nerds too, so they wanted to try it out.

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Jane Kenoyer of Hi-Fructose says:

Eric Standley works with hundreds of layers of colored paper creating intricate laser cut stain glass windows. These beautifully constructed works are made up of interlacing positive and negative spaces that seem to “float” in a fabricated suspension. He begins with a drawing, this helps him create the complex range of imagery needed to make a workable design, before cutting and assembling the paper pieces.

Eric Standley’s intricate laser-cut stained glass paper windows