Archive for November, 2005

Superb drawings and paintings from Canadian turned Brooklynite Jillian Tamaki.

Did you see there’s a bedbug epidemic in New York?

Cool creature paintings from Chris Ryniak. His work will soon be on show at The Showroom NYC.

All it would take to undo global warming would be to paint every roof on earth white. The amount of warm sunlight reflected would almost exactly cancel out the global warming that has taken place since the start of the industrial revolution, says a quick calculation by scientists.

The latest Snow Show is going to happen alongside the 2006 Winter Olympics in Torino next February. Heavyweight artists and architects team up to build structures out of ice and snow. Past shows have included Zaha Hadid, Steven Holl, Tadao Ando, Kiki Smith, Norman Foster and Morphosis. View previous shows and concept sketches for the next show.

Corey Arnold is a Californian photographer who’s been taking some incredible photos of his current life as a commercial fisherman in Norway and Alaska. His landlubbing photos are just as incredible. Don’t miss portfolios of the Animal Condition and Night photography. (The editorial board of Houze.net is especially interested in night photography right now.)

What happens when an octopus battles to the death with a shark? See previous entries from the series animals eating things.

Seattle programmer and artist David Lu is making some really cool drawings with Screenbrush, a drawing program he created using Processing. Some recent drawings incorporate photos too.

Japanese photographer Toshihiro Yashiro takes photos of interior and exterior spaces and incorporates himself as a spinning blur in the foreground. To see more, click on Works > KaitenKai > slideshow at Yashiro’s site. Or read an exquisitely mutated essay on his work that seems to have been translated four times before it made to english.

Here’s a great Flickr set from a journalist who’s recently arrived in Bagdad for his fifth working tour. You can also follow along with Twocrab’s blog. Hope to follow along as he puts up more photos.

More details were announced this week by MIT’s Nicholas Negroponte on their plans to bring $100 laptops to the world’s children– because the children are the greatest natural resource of any country, says Negroponte, Whitney Houston and The Simpsons. Third world seven year-olds could soon be telecommuting to a cube near you with these bright green laptops which will have mesh networking internet access, handcrank power and a Linux OS. Countries participating are required to purchase at least 1 million laptops.

Working with her sister using period clothing and props to impersonate family members, Irish photographer Trish Morrissey makes elaborately staged portraits that re-enact family holidays and occassions from her life in the 70s and 80s. A new exhibit of her photos are at the University Gallery at the University of Essex in Colchester, UK.

I know how you rockit in your cube when your favorite playlist kicks in and you hold your mouse like a microphone when you sing. Now you can annoy your workmates a little less by at least getting the words right. EvilLyrics is a program that automagically downloads and displays the lyrics to whatever song is playing in your iTunes. You can download EvilLyrics here.

It’s true, this really has been the longest year of my life. There will be an additional second added to the year 2005.

Among contemporary paintings of Secretaries of State, the recent one of Condoleeza Rice by Luc Tuymans is one of the more fascinating. Recent work by Tuymans is up at David Zwimmer in New York through the 19th.

Cool Pettibon-esque drawings from San Francisco artist Justin Limoges. Tonnes more at his blog or maybe through diyorelse.com.

The UK Guardian has an interesting online project that brings together 14 artists who come from the same country but who are now geographically and politically separated. Half of the artists left their native country for London and half stayed. As well as their work being exhibited online, each artist will take part in a dialogue with their partner - hosted on the Guardian talkboards - in order to exchange text, images and ideas. The dialogues will begin on October 31, and continue for six weeks until December 11.

Even if you don’t live in New York you might appreciate this New York Magazine piece that tries to find how far gentrification goes into Brooklyn. Where is the line that separated new Brooklyn from old, pioneer from native? Apparently it’s the Jefferson stop.

Some of y’all might know that I’ve had some hearing loss in one ear for the past four and a half years. Well this morning at breakfast I heard a little pop and suddenly my hearing is now nearly restored. My bad ear’s at about 90% now, at least twice as good as it was yesterday. I’d like to thank the loud rock and roll of The Red Thread at the Hotel Utah last night for this miraculous restoration. Everything is really loud right now.

Scott Hessels and Gabriel Dunne have created incredible planetarium artwork with their Celestial Mechanics project. The artists worked with accurate tracking and protocol statistics to create 3-D models of the airborne systems and they’ve made poetry out of airplanes flying over the U.S., media helicopters and sound patterns over LA and low earth satellites. See movies of U.S. flights and images stills.