brandon ray: the land eaters.

Animator Brandon Ray created “The Land Eaters” with some hand-made paper puppets, a $200 Flip Mino, and a whole lotta love in After Effects. The results are totally magical.

Vodpod videos no longer available.

alex mcleod.

Toronto designer/artist Alex McLeod’s 3D digital renderings of various fantasy landscapes are seriously off the charts. They’re so gloriously, glossily fake that for a second they almost seem real. They’re like snapshots of dreams, or brochure photos to some sort of surreal, plastic, rainbow-filled holiday spot. The kind of spot where volcanoes erupt with spring water and clouds are transparent helium balloons. It’s landscape photography meets Saturday morning cartoons.

His site also offers up some completely kick ass wallpapers – like this one, which is up on my computer as we speak. If you’re going to be in Toronto, McLeod has a solo show coming up in June at Switch Contemporary. I wanna see these bad boys in person. And maybe buy one. A guy can dream…

department of eagles + patrick daughters: no one does it like you.

Holy fuck. I don’t know how I missed this when it debuted at a few months ago, but I’m so pumped I stumbled onto it today. I see a lot of videos, and of course there’s a certain style I’m into, but it’s not every day where I see something that I need to watch all the way through, think about, and then say to myself “did I really just see that?” and then watch it over again.

This mind-blowing vid for Department of Eagles’ “No One Does It Like You” first dropped as part of MoMA’s PopRally series. It’s directed by The Director’s Bureau’s Patrick Daughters (who also did Feist’s big time ubiquitous “1234” vid) , who collaborated with amazing Canadian artist Marcel Dzama to create the melancholy, vague, and pseudo-presentational war style captured so perfectly in the video.

Seriously, watch it right now. I can’t keep my jaw off the floor.

Via Life In Planet Hunky Dory

sean tubridy: toys on roids.

Save Polaroid co-founder Sean Tubridy delivers some solid proof on just why the old skool photosystem should stay around. Taking arresting and witty pics of some beloved retro toys with the equally beloved retro camera, “Toys On Roids” is both a play on words and a kick-ass photo series. So kick ass, in fact that luckily Tubridy has turned it into a book. I wants it. I wants it real bad.

The blank emotional slate of toys lends itself so well to reinterpretation by adults. We remember, intrinsically, the lives and voices and personalities we developed into these toys when we were kids. To see them photographed now, as adults in adult situations, it’s just as easy to transer our own meaning onto what they’re doing without losing the joy and nostaliga.

Or, to put it more simply, He-Man is really fucking awesome. If you’re into these, you’ll love Daniel and Geo Fuchs’ Toygiants.

Via Goliblogski

daniele napolitano: notte sento.

It’s way easier to fall in love in Europe. Don’t ask why… it just is.

Created by splicing together over 4500 separate photographs from a Canon EOS 30D, film-maker, photographer, and web designer Daniele Napolitano tells the lovely (and dialogue-free) story of two people who meet and find “an extraordinary chemistry made of knowing glances and small gestures fills the few instants that separate them both from the sunrise.”

Vodpod videos no longer available.

chunky move: mortal engine.

This is completely mesmerizing. Combining video, modern dance, and music (and some kick ass lasers) into a spellbinding multi-disciplinary work, Australian modern dance company Chunky Move’s “Mortal Engine” is totally next level.

Their site says “Mortal Engine is a new dance-video-music-laser performance using movement and sound responsive projections to portray an ever-shifting, shimmering world in which the limits of the human body are an illusion. Crackling light and staining shadows represent the most perfect or sinister of souls. Kinetic energy fluidly metamorphoses from the human figure into light image, into sound and back again. Choreography is focused on movement of unformed beings in an unfamiliar landscape searching to connect and evolve in a constant state of becoming. Veering between moments of exquisite cosmological perfection and grotesque evolutionary accidents of existence, we are driven forward by the reality of permanent change.”

Via Computerlove™

robert seidel: vellum.

German animator, motion designer, and artist Robert Seidel is one of my all time faves. For me, he mixes the organic with the technologic in way no one else does. It’s like retro-futurist, his work often feels like a highly-advanced digital society remembering or re-interpreting the biological. His stuff is so far ahead it’s come back again. 

I recently posted about the new compression artifact technique datamoshing. Always a visionary, Seidel was playing around with what we’re know starting to call datamoshing  in his video (and one of my fave videos of all time) for Zero 7’s “Futures”… back in 2006. The vid was rejected at the time for being too futuristic and outside of the box. Clearly, Seidel is way, way ahead of the curve. 

In his latest work, “Vellum”, Seidel has created a large scale video installation for the COMO/Nabi Art Center in Seoul. A huge, multi-LED screen world, the visuals are aching and secretively beautiful. Like a lot of Seidel’s work, he brings to life an alluring but almost unnerving feeling; of things that seem familiar and comfortable – flowers, seeds, bones, feathers, earth – but which are behaving in ways we don’t understand. Again, with his hallmark air of an altered organic; of mutations and evolutions and natural elements that we think should be completely understood by us but which, for some reason, are behaving just outside of our experience. So intimate, but so alien. 

Vodpod videos no longer available.

Seidel says of the work “The perceived interpenetration f skeletal architecture and unrolled landscapes reveal textures of the man-made restructuring of nature. Their different granular perspectives create a fibrous volume of possibilities fusing past, present and future. In their flatness the visible sculptural slices are reminiscent to our accelerated life, shifting into technology and transcending the physical body. The perceived transformation is based on the sculpture wandering through the building seen from a fixed point of view. In vellum motion is form and form is motion…”

Via Feed

antony gormley: one & other.

I’m a massive fan of Antony Gormley, sculptural mastermind and creator of “Another Place”, one of my favourite works of art of all time. He’s mega-famous (most notably for his landmark outdoor sculpture “Angel Of The North”) and he deserves to be. Now he’s given us yet another reason why.

With “One & Other”, Gormley’s proposed a brilliant idea for a massive, public, personable exchange of artistic expression, which he describes as part of the “democratization of art.” Beginning on July 6th, every hour, for 100 days (2400 hours) a person will take to the top of the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square… and do whatever they want. Creating a “unique portrait of the UK int he 21st century”, the project will be opened for applications from anyone living in the UK and there’s room for 2400 people to take part.  To universalize the project, all 2400 hours will be streamed live online for the world to watch.

Watch this vid of Gormley himself describing his inspiration for the project, and if you live in the UK go here to register to find out when you can apply.

Vodpod videos no longer available.

I’m generally jealous of people who live in London, but this has me mentally salivating. I’m tempted to fake British citizenship just so I can apply to do this, but that would break the spirit of Gormley’s idea. And if there’s one thing I respect above most, it’s the sanctity and purity of an honest artistic idea.

Via Josh Spear

christian faur: crayon series 1 + true color.

I have an overwhelming sentimental attachment to crayons. (For some proof, check out the design of my Twitter page.) Not just the sense-memory of using crayons when I was a kid, but as an adult realizing the fundamental artistic ideas that those little sticks of wax represented to me; colour, creation, exploration, and (a particular sub-set of the general societal crayon fascination) the connection between word and colour. This, for a five year-old, is where written description and visual incarnation collided: the language of colour.

I remember the exact moment I figured out what “Burnt Sienna” meant, and immediately, there was this incredible shade, so much more than an “orange”, right there in my grubby little hand. Don’t even get me started on the others: Goldenrod, Raw Umber, Orchid, Periwinkle. The connection between what I read and what I saw was beautifully obvious, and obvious in its beauty.

Artist Christian Faur understands not only the adult attraction to the ideals of crayons, but has amped them up to create incredible, hand-crafted, crayon-pixellated, eye-defying images that are unlike anything I’ve seen before. Straddling a crossing between sculpture and photography, wax and print, he assembles more than 100,000 hand-cast crayons of his own shades and hues into staggeringly beautiful works of art. Impressionistic, with a hint of trompe l’oeil, the tiny crayon columns of separate colour simultaneously appease the eye and defy it. This is crayon-Pointillism, taking the agonizingly detailed pin pricks of colour pain-stakingly arranged on the canvas, á la Georges Seurat, and leaving the brain to do the other half of the work. Its beauty is partially already realized by the patterns of colour, but then our eye struggles to put the rest together.

A master of balance, not just between bright shades, but between greys and primaries, he shows that he can not only deftly mix colours to imitate the physical nuance of an actual photograph, but also has the control to create the shapes in greys and white and augment the images artistically with colour, rather than creating the shapes with only colours themselves. It’s jarring and gorgeous, creating an almost physical sensation as our mind tries to adjust these point of colour into one big comprehensive picture. The experience of trying to see it is just as important as finally seeing.

Seen from the side, not only does the work involved become more apparent, but an almost separate beauty emerges; the sculptural aspects of the pieces come into view, like miniature crayon horizons, tilted to reveal their relief, these side-ways typographies of colour give us a little insight, from this angle, of what our brains see so differently when viewed from straight on.

Says Faur on his website: “…I have developed a mapping system that translates the English alphabet into twenty six discrete colors and I use these crayon ‘fonts’ to add words and language to each of the pieces in the show… The direct representation of language in each piece further imbues the works with meaning and brings an aspect of color into each composition reminiscent of DNA coding. The alphabetic key at the lower left of each panel allows the viewer to interpret the individual words written throughout the various panels.”

Via @MarcShil via PSFK

philip beesley: hylozoic soil.

This is insane. Hylozoism is the philisophical doctrine that matter is inseparable from life, which is a property of matter. (I had to look it up, I’m not going to even pretend that I knew that off the top of my head…). With that idea in mind, that at the core of all matter is an undeniable essence of life, Toronto digital media artist and experimental architect Philip Beesley created “Hylozoic Soil.”

The installation is so eerily organic and minutely-detailed it’s almost hard to believe it was designed by a person and not borne of nature. It’s like it should be living in a cave somewhere. It’s exciting yet freaky, fascinating but a little dreadful. You have to watch this vid to believe it…

“Hylozoic Soil” won first price at the VIDA Awards, an international competition fostering works of art created with artificial life technologies. The text describing the project on the VIDA website is absolutely amazing. Here it is in it’s unedited glory:

“The glass-like fragility of this artificial forest, built of an intricate lattice of small transparent acrylic tiles, is visually breathtaking. Its frond extremities arch uncannily towards those who venture into its midst, reaching out to stroke and be stroked like the feather or fur or hair of some mysterious animal. In keeping with Beesley’s own description, his enchanted environment complies with the laws and cycles that determine the millenial assembly of a coral reef, with its cycles of opening, clamping, filtering and digesting. Capacitance-sensing whiskers and shape-memory alloy actuators create a diffuse peristaltic pumping motion, luring visitors in to the eery shimmering depths of a forest of light.

Hylozoic Soil implements a distributed sensor network driven by dozens of microprocessors, generating waves of reflexive responses to those drawn into its vast array of acrylic fern stalagmites. Different levels of programmed activity encourage the emergence of coordinated spatial behaviour: thirty-eight controller boards produce specific responses to local action, while a bus controller uses sensor activity collated from all the boards to command an additional “global” level of behaviour. The forest thus manifests a haunting, breathing organicity, as it stirs to envelop and charm its human explorers. In keeping with the tradition of biologist artist Ernst Haeckel’s Riddle of the Universe (1899), which traced actions of organic and inorganic nature alike back to natural causes and laws, Beesley’s Hylozoic Soil stands as a magically moving contemporary symbol of our aptitude for empathy and the creative projection of living systems.”

Holy shit. Anything with “capacitance-sensing whiskers and shape-memory alloy actuators” is more than fine by me

Via Come Up To My Room