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Artist Michael Neff collected discarded Christmas trees from the neighborhood and hanged them from the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway near the intersection of Metropolitan Avenue and N. 6th Street in Williamsburg. On his Flickr page, Neff explained, ”I have been intending to do an installation piece using the discarded Christmas trees for a number of years now. They begin to crowd the sidewalks of New York City as soon as the day after Christmas and have always felt a bit sad to me.” We see these trees on the street all the time in our neighborhood and tend to agree that the post holiday blues are at least somewhat accentuated by the number of dead trees lining the sidewalks. The aftermath of tradition. It’s good to see that someone is finding new ways of recycling them and their meaning. For the full effect, check out the video below to see the trees swaying in the wind.
S Bahn from Zeitbezogene Medien HAW Hamburg on Vimeo. This surreal animated short film, titled “S Bahn,” by artist Marcus Neidel, features animated alien characters communing to work on the German metro rail. The video was made in collaboration with German design school, Zeitbezogene Medien HAW Hamburg . Riding the New York subways, it’s easy to drift into daydream scenes such as this, but Neidel really nails the feeling with these creatures and their side stories. Follow this link to check out more of Neidel’s work. Watch as Stella, age 4, criticizes a company’s design of a dinosaur toy. Of course kids always exhibit the most scrutiny when it comes to toy design, but the stereotype is that it’s often more through use (read: ramming cars together to check for durability) than rational, fact-based, criticism. It’s good to know little purists like Stella are out there, sifting through the noise – a Darwinist approach so that well thought out, quality toys might continue to rise to the surface. This is why we spent a lot of time over the last couple of years on our Gummylamps, making them as accurate to color and appearance as possible, so that we might pay proper homage to the classic image. We hope Stella would agree.
Artist Phil Hansen, skilled at creating art based on pop culture figures, illustrated this copy of a self portrait of Vincent Van Gogh. That may be commonplace on its face, but Hansen’s piece is comprised of over 1000 stories taken from conversations, videos, emails, Facebook and other web submissions – all relating to the theme, “something that shocked you or caused disbelief.” Here is a portion of the illustration at full zoom:
People’s responses varied from “when one of my good friends drowned in a lake” to “finding out that my sister and I did not have the same father.” He compiled the responses and, over 90 hours, drew all of them into the picture, which he then exhibited at the Cherry Creek Arts Festival in Denver Colorado. See the video of the making-of below. This is inspiring, not so much due to the aesthetic of the piece itself, but for the concept, the metaphor, the Web 2.0 of it. It highlights the importance of people’s stories being an integral part of a piece of art, a product, a pop figure, or just a human – a point in time. People have a need to broadcast these stories, in whatever medium. Hansen decided to shape them into this one. In theory, everything we create, own and do should have a story worth telling. These people have a multitude of stories that they may not have told otherwise. Now they have. We also appreciate that he chose to use Van Gogh, being that he’s one of our favorite Little Giants. [via Neatorama]
This piece, titled “tennis-halfpipe,” is by German artist Frank Kunert. It’s one of his series of “Small Worlds,” which he fashions as 3-D models and then photographs. Each appears as a complex scene from a different surrealistic film and each tells it’s own satirical story. Below is an image of Kunert constructing another of his pieces, titled “Upwards.” You can see his other Small Worlds photos here. Each is pretty amazing and I look forward to seeing more from Kunert down the line. Also, we know how much fun it is to sculpt big ideas into miniature, so we have a certain respect for others who share our appreciation.
UK news publication The Guardian collected this gallery of photos of newsworthy events from 2011 reenacted with Legos.  While I’ve seen a lot of year-end round-ups floating around (as with every year at this time), none struck me as entertaining as this. Also, one of the photos in the gallery seems to be from the same Occupy Wall Street Lego piece we posted about from Zucotti Park earlier this year. Although, they’re missing some arguably major events (read: Gabrielle Giffords shooting, Snowpocylapse, Egyptian protests, Joplin tornado, gay marriage in New York, Hurricane Irene, 10th Anniversary of 9/11, floods in Thailand, etc.), the results are nonetheless clever and poignant. Besides, the world looks like more fun through Lego colored glasses. Are there any events from 2011 you’d like to see recreated in Lego? [viaNeatorama] This animated short film is directed by Sean Mullen for Giant Creative animation studio. It depicts two artists having canvas envy, with each attempting to one-up the other while painting a sunset. Without giving too much away, it results in an inadvertant collaboration. Sometimes collaboration is by careful cooperation; other times it is by beautiful accident. This video’s theme indirectly reminds me of a recent referential game of catch between Jailbreak Collective collaborator Jason Freeny and the artist Ron English. Stay tuned for more about Jason Freeny as we gear up to release his exciting CAPSL designs in the new year.
This giant flying sculpture, titled “Little Shining Man,” was conceived by Heather and Ivan Morrison as part of a collaboration with Sash Reading. Queen and Crawford fabricated and hand assembled the 23,000 individual components, consisting of carbon fiber rods, 6,000 3-D printed joints, and Cuben Fiber. Check the video below to see it gracefully take flight. Three Cubes Colliding from Jimandtonic on Vimeo.
These eccentric looking chairs were created by Tarazi Design Studio by filling a female mannequin with cement and dropping it repeatedly on a perforated metal trapezoid until it formed the shape of a chair. Each drop created a different indentation, which would, in turn, make each chair entirely unique. This is a fun sort of intuitive, but traditionally reverse, design. Rather than making a chair to look like the generally accepted image of a chair and have a person retroactively test to see how it fit, it’s making a a chair by pushing a person-shaped-thing into a material that contours to the body. It would be nice to see other industries pick up on this proactive ergonomic concept. If so, perhaps someone could make ear buds that actually comfortably fit a person’s ears, for instance.
[via Design Taxi]
Artist Kyle Bean made these weapons out of harmless materials for a collection he titled “Soft Guerilla” for a spread in CUT Magazine. My favorite, by far, is the jello grenade, but I’ve got to admit that the melty popsicle time bomb is making me wish it were a warm summer day. Pretty cool stuff and a smart concept.
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