To promo their 2009 version of their cult-followed annual hitlist of random daily things to do to transform your life – “This Diary Will Change Your Life 2009” – UK megabloggers/life gurus/jackasses/authors/designers/men about town/shit disturbers/anarchists Benrik (a.k.a. Ben Carey and Henrick Delehag) literally stuck a guy onto a billboard in downtown London next to the obvious question… “stuck?”
Or maybe the more obvious question… what happened when dude had to pee?
To celebrate the inaugural year of the Arts Le Havre Biennale d’Art Contemporain, Montréal-based landscape architect and urban designer Claude Cormier constructed a beautiful impressionist tribute to one of the world’s most famous painters – Le Havre’s own Claude Monet.
Meant to mirror the wisteria flowers that showed up in so many of Monet’s works, “Pergola” is made up of 90,000 plastic balls draped into the trees outside the Le Havre City Hall. I like the weird juxtaposition of the technicolour plastic balls against the organic green of the trees. I kind of want to yank them all down, create a ball pit, and throw some children in it… but this is good too.
Via Lost At E Minor
There’s an intrinsic, undeniable draw towards the sea. Maybe it’s the same lunar gravity that moves the tides, maybe it’s because we were all fish a billion years ago, or maybe it’s the lure of knowing that no matter what machines we strap to our backs or submerge ourselves in, it’s simply not a place where our fragile bodies will let us go for very long.
Or maybe, since we’re mostly made of water ourselves, it’s just the natural, molecular pull of little atoms reaching out to find each other again. A genetic memory too quiet for our brains to understand. What if our very bodies miss the sea? Our skins on the shore, our bones in the beach, our body pulls to return into the same water that it was born from.
In British artist and sculptor Antony Gormley’s “Another Place”, he perfectly captures the universal longing human beings feel for the ocean. Not with much crazy metaphor, but by casting his very own body in iron and replicating himself into a little army. 100 statues are moored into the sand along a 3.2 kilometre stretch of the Mersey Estuary on Crosby Beach near Liverpool, England. Each is over 6’2″ tall, weighs 1400 lbs., and was made from more than 17 different casts from Gormley’s own body. Like sentinels, they each stand 250 metres apart from each other. Some are closer to the shore and some are up to 1 kilometre out, but all are standing exactly the same and gazing into one direction: out to sea.
When the tides are fully out, each of the 100 men are completely exposed. But as the tide rolls back in, one by one they’re slowly swallowed up by the water. Like a ceremony, their yearning pulls it towards them. They each stand and wait their turn to be voluntarily enveloped.
Gormley continued to experiment with the use of multiple figures in 2006 with “Time Horizon”. A second set of figures was cast, this time placed into an olive tree grove at the Archaeological Park of Scolacium near Catanzaro, Calabria, Italy. This time they are each facing different directions and stand at different heights in the ground. “Time Horizon” doesn’t exhibit the same fluidity of “Another Place”, but a more ancient feel. The way the ground erodes and shifts amongst these statues is slow and tectonic and much greater than we can hope to see in a moment of standing there. These are movements so slow we can feel them, but will never be able to watch. “Another Place” rides the waves in a day, while “Time Horizon” carries the weight of eons.
To see more from Gormley, check out this video from his latest exhibition in London, “Blind Light”:
Dutch artist Henk Hofstra is at it again. You might remember his “Urban River” where he painted an entire city street aqua blue. This week he unveiled “Art-Eggcident”: several 30-metre wide fried eggs cracked open along the Zaailand – one of the Netherland’s largest open squares, in the northern city of Leeuwarden.
Wow. Northern Europe is a beacon of pure vanguard awesomeness. It never ceases to bring me joy that they are so open to the most random shit… and in public no less! I suggest we all move to the Netherlands immediately.
The largest eggs are totally flat, but the smaller ones have a three-dimensional “yolk” perfect for climbing on and taking pictures so you can show your friends that you sat on a gigantic egg yolk in the Netherlands
How much do I love this? Let me count the ways…
Proof yet again that the most elemental concepts, envisioned in a different way, can have the most dramatic results. We’ve got words. We’ve got sunlight. We’ve got shadow. And Jiyeon Song has combined them into a breath-taking piece of public art.
Through a matrix of perforations, sunshine gets converted through the dome into lines of poetry underneath. For the text, Song chose classical Korean poems called “Sijos” and translated them into English. It takes about 8 hours to see the entire poem, with each line visible for about an hour. The design actually shifts poems based on the season (how they managed to get it to do that with only one set of holes in the top, I have no idea…). During the summer the poem focuses on a theme of “new life”, during the winter it turns to “reflection and the passing of time”. The time-lapse video showing the the delicacy of the words moving through the shadow of the dome is a must see.
On Song’s thesis site you can check out some incredibly detailed info on the project, from experiments and calculations on how the project would work to some amazing drawings from its developmental phase, like the chart below showing which words would be visible during which phases of the day…
This isn’t the first time we’ve seen ambient escalator stuff – though usually it involves some kind of toilet paper roll or the idea of something unfolding and getting longer. I like this because it’s a bit different and because it looks like your feet will get sucked into this dude’s brain.
(Agency: Rediffusion DY&R – Mumbai)
I don’t care what anyone says. Science Centres are cool. If you don’t want to know how much you weigh on Jupiter, there’s something fundamentally wrong with you.
These awesome new ambient ads for Vancouver’s Science World head right to the point: Here’s some cool shit. Come to Science World and see more cool shit. Done and done.
(Agency: Rethink Vancouver)
Via ibelieveinadv
This is so totally random that you gotta’ love it. That’s right… admit it. You love it. Don’t even try and convince yourself that you don’t, because deep down inside you know you do. It’s a big mother rainbow fruitbowl “Hell, Yes!” sign, and you wish it was on your own house.
The Bowery’s stunning New Museum of Contemporary Art, designed by Japanese architectural team SANAA, is the first museum in New York City ever built right from the ground up. In all of it’s new contemporary hyper-coolness, NMCA has attached Swiss artist Ugo Rondinone’s rainbow-brite 2001 Hell, Yes! to it’s outer façade. The New Museum’s website says that “since 1997, Rondinone has included the practice of making signs in his varied oeuvre. He takes phrases from pop songs and everyday exclamations and makes them into rainbow-hued, neon-lit sculptures that are joyous affirmations of love and life.”
Ugo sounds like a happy guy to me. All sunshine and lollipops and good times. And he made a colossal sign that looks like a school-girls barrette circa 1986. I love this man and desperately want to take him shopping.
Bra advertising is a straight-forward equation: buy bra + put on = big ‘uns.
While Victoria’s Secret pretty much dominates the whole glamazon supermodel angle, Wonderbra succeeds with interesting advertising and outdoor that takes a bit of a new turn on the basic formula:
(Agency: Publicis Belgium)
Though definitely not breaking any new ground, at least Germany is liberal enough to be honest about things. They have a (ballsy) female Chancellor, and they also have Playboy billboards with big ‘uns that, in the undying spirit of the wet tee shirt contest, show you some nip when it rains. Ah, well… it is what it is.
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