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Archive for the ‘Creativity’ Category

Vacant Buddha: Intricate Paper Sculptures Seem to Disappear

22 Nov

[ By Steph in Art & Sculpture & Craft. ]

ho yoon shin 1

Deceptively solid-looking when seen from either side, the delicacy of these paper sculptures is revealed if you simply shift your position to view them straight on. Korean artist Ho Yoon Shin coats strips of paper with urethane and attaches them to each other with paper joints to create Buddhas, replicas of famous sculptures and other human figures.

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The translucency of the sculptures is a commentary on what Shin sees as the vacancy of modern society, relating social and political conditions in Korea to Buddhism’s philosophy of emptiness.

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“I am interested in social phenomena and approached the essence of it,” says Shin. “I realized that the closer I approached it, I realized there is no essence. I think it is already intrinsic in me or in you, being judged and evaluated by the inherent values in our things. Therefore, if examined in that viewpoint, I begin to understand why the power group of Korea has wanted to split all kinds of social systems – the right and the left, social classes divided on its economic structure, dominance and subordination, etc.”

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“In the end, it’s a story about the situation and a point where we fill a surface that doesn’t exist… and console and satisfy ourselves.”

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In addition to his human figures, Shin’s paper work includes large-scale installations of highly detailed, curtain-like sheets of paper, including ‘Imegrated Flowers,’ which filled an entire hallway at the Kobe Biennale.

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Deserted Space: Photos Document NASA’s Abandoned Launch Pads

20 Nov

[ By WebUrbanist in Abandoned Places & Architecture. ]

abandoned space graveyard photos

The race for space has shifted gears in recent years with the rise of private programs, leaving a series of amazing space-related graveyards around the United States, which this photographer has spent 25 years exploring and documenting.

abandoned nasa building sign

abandoned rocket room

abandoned flight ring rocket

In his upcoming book, Abandoned in Place, Roland Miller takes readers on a “photographic exploration of the American space launch and research facilities that played a crucial role in the early period of space exploration. The goals of this project are to preserve and portray these abandoned, deactivated, and repurposed sites through photography that surpasses the official government approach to documentation and to lend historical and artistic insight to the subject.”

abandoned secret nasa complex

abandoned space program complexes

abandoned space program facilities

With special permission (and an escort every time), Roland has managed to visit locations including the Marshall Space Flight Center in California, the Stennis Space Center in Mississippi and the Kennedy Space Center as well as Cape Canaveral in Florida. His book features 100 full-color photos – the best and brightest of his extension decade-spanning collection.

abandoned nasa deserted spaces

abandoned nasa crane gantry

The photographs cover all kinds of incredible objects and details, from cranes and gantries to blast doors, flame deflector tracks, launch rings and even lunar modules. The book will be released by the University of New Mexico Press and contain poems and essays alongside its rich imagery.

abandoned control panel switchboard

Superstructure,Navaho Complex 9, Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida1990

abandoned observatory dome exterior

This project is part guide book and part historical document – it “serves not only as a documentary body of work, but also as an artistic interpretation of these historic sites. The blockhouses, launch towers, tunnels, test stands, and control rooms featured in Abandoned In Place are rapidly giving way to the elements and demolition. By my estimates, fully half of the facilities I have photographed no longer exist. The costs involved in restoring, maintaining, and securing these sites are enormous. Most of these historic facilities are located on secure military or NASA facilities, which drastically limits access by the public. Therefore, photography is the only practical method to preserve and portray these historic locations.”

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So Metal: Intricate Sculptures Made of Nothing but Nails

20 Nov

[ By Steph in Art & Sculpture & Craft. ]

nail art 1

Most people use nails just to hang art on the wall, but Maine-based sculptor John Bisbee collects thousands of them to craft incredibly intricate sculptures into spiked balls, undulating waves, tree-like structures and towering geometric stacks.

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Bisbee got the idea after entering an abandoned house looking for found objects to use in his art, and finding a bucket full of old nails. “I kicked the bucket and it flipped over,” he told NPR, “and the nails had cohered, oxidized – they’d rusted into the bucket shape. And it was just such an obvious thing of beauty – it was so clearly above anything I had ever envisioned making myself. And I sat down on the bed, and I knew that I needed to get some nails.”

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Since then, Bisbee has created dozens of sculptures using nothing but nails in a free-flowing process that the artist improvises, getting them “into my hands and out into space.”

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It was only recently, after spending years welding and bending the nails into shapes, that Bisbee realized there’s something really obvious he can do with them as well: hit them with a hammer. From this revelation has come lots of wall-based art made with a pneumatic power hammer.

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Evil Espresso: 13 Amazing Artistic & Unusual Coffee Machines

19 Nov

[ By Steph in Drawing & Digital. ]

coffee maker dutch lab 1

Your countertop coffee maker will suddenly look inadequate compared to a monster of a sculptural espresso machine, an elegant steampunk orb and a piston-powered copper coffee maker fit for a villain’s lair. These 13 artistic, high-end and highly unusual coffee and espresso machine designs take the process of brewing your essential daily caffeine intake to the next level and then some.

Sculptural Steampunk Coffee Machine by Dutch Lab

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Would you ever guess, seeing it across a room, that this thing is a coffee maker? Dutch Lab created this Gothic-themed steampunk ‘monster’ intending for it to look a bit evil. The AKMA is named for the Korean word for ‘devil,’ and like all of Dutch Lab’s coffee machines, it uses a cold-brew technique relying on the force of gravity and a very particular grind of coffee beans – finer than those used for drip coffee, but coarser than those used for espresso.

Coffee Alarm Clock

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Coffee could literally be your alarm clock with the Barisieur, which brews up a single cup of fresh coffee at a designated time. It doesn’t just wake you up with smell, but also with gentle sounds as the process begins and the water starts to boil. It does require a bit of preparation at night, but as the designer notes, it “encourages a ritual before going to sleep, signaling to the body and mind that it is time to unwind and relax.”

Steampunk Glass Balloon Coffee Maker

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Another steampunk design looks like something straight out of a scientist’s laboratory. Café Balão by Davide Mateus consists of a pair of hand-blown glass vessels, one of which contains a wand-style heating element to boil the water. This siphoning coffee maker uses vapor pressure and vacuum to produce coffee, with vapor from boiling water in the lower chamber forcing water into the upper chamber containing the coffee grinds. When the heat turns off, gravity pulls the brewed coffee into the lower vessel.

Piston-Powered Espresso Machine

coffee piston espresso

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You’ll feel like you’re doing something diabolical when you pull the lever on the Streitman ES3 Espresso Machine, except instead of blowing something up or revealing a secret lair, you’ll be starting the piston-powered process of making a cup of espresso. The sleek wood and copper design forces hot water through ground coffee with a piston, and is available with a dual spout for making more than one cup at a time. It doesn’t come cheap, retailing at $ 1,700.

Minimalist Single-Serving Brewing Device

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Is this the world’s most minimalist coffee maker? The Canadiano is a single-serving brewing device made of wood, which you simply place on top of a mug. Add coffee grounds, pour in some hot water and wait for your brewed coffee to seep through the metal filter. It’s available in three different wood varieties which ‘remember’ your choice of coffee, building up the oils of your specific beans and roast over time.

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Evil Espresso 13 Amazing Artistic Unusual Coffee Machines

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Tiny Flip Books Filled with Secret Slots & Negative Spaces

19 Nov

[ By WebUrbanist in Design & Products & Packaging. ]

flip book negative space

Pushing the limits of the traditional printing craft, these stunning little Japanese flip books illustrate the power of slicing, splicing, zooming and panning, all to create a series of vertigo-inducing effects and dizzying optical illusions.

gif dizzying flip books

Flipping through the pages of these creations of artist Mou Hitotsu reveals a series of hidden surprises, including embedded objects and stories that unfold in the negative space cut out progressively in sequential sheets of each volume.

gif flip book design

Some of these play into abstract and surreal short stories about planetary systems or biological processes while others are simply used to convey holiday-themed wishes.

flip book secret surprise

Via Colossal and spotted by Travelry during a book convention, there are a number of works in this series from JP Books, each one playfully using similar devices to tell different tales as the pages unfold.

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Gravesend: Fake Town for Simulating Crimes, Riots & Terrorism

19 Nov

[ By WebUrbanist in Travel & Urban Exploration. ]

artifical street urban complex

Like the set of a movie or setting of a video game, this surreal suburban facility could easily be mistaken for a real place at first glance – in reality, the installation is an elaborate artificial environment used by police to simulate complex and dangerous situations (photos by Chris Clarke).

artificial empty building facaDE

As Geoff Manaugh summarizes the setup, “the barren streets and hollow buildings of this militarized non-place were designed for use as an immersive staging ground for police-training exercises, fighting staged riots, burglaries, bank robberies, and other crimes” including hostage situations and terrorist attacks.

artifical training ground building

Located in Gravesend, Kent, just outside of London, this strange facsimile of an urban complex is devoid of residents but comes complete with parks, nightclubs, estates, aircraft, trains and tube stations (for hijacking and bombing simulations). Its population, instead, consists of the ebb and flow of the Metropolitan Police, of which the complex accommodate up to 300 militarized participants at one time.

artificial city for police

Open “in 2003 to provide London’s officers with firearms and public order training,” the complex’s designers at Advanced Interactive Systems (AIS) “provided all specialist firearms-related design, fit-out of the live-fire ranges with internal ballistic and anti-ricochet finishes, simulation and targetry equipment, and range sound systems.”

artificial backdrop city street

The same company was later contracted to “upgrade the specialist indoor shooting ranges and simulation systems [to] feature High-Definition projection systems, additional support for standard issue firearms and less-lethal devices, laser-based 3D virtual training environments, and a course editor for creating bespoke training exercises.” Even these official descriptions lend themselves to a range of dystopian speculation and dark interpretation.

artificial complex urban tube

Author of Subtopia, Brian Finoki notes that this dull gray place is deeply bizarre in nature, “a city standing on the planet for one purpose: to be rioted, hijacked, trashed, held hostage, sacked, and overrun by thousands of chaotic scenarios, only so that it can be reclaimed, retaken, re-propped in circuitous loops of more dazzling proto-militant exercise, stormed by a thousand coordinated boots for eternity, targeted by hundreds of synchronized crosshairs of both lethal and non-lethal weapons.”

artifical commercial street facade

Photographer Chis Clarke, whose Flickr photo set is worth seeing in its entirety, suggests a bold take on the complex and its meaning in the contemporary cultural context of the United Kingdom: “Gravesend can be interpreted as a warning – a prophecy of society’s potential to alienate itself from itself, and kill its collective identity. This surreal installation serves as a chilling account of the death of community in 21st century Britain.”

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Haunted Half-Pipe: Skateboarding in an Abandoned Psych Ward

18 Nov

[ By Steph in Drawing & Digital. ]

skateboard abandoned hospital 2

In place of the usual ramps, rails and pipes are busted wheelchairs, dusty bowling pins and gaping holes in wooden floors as skater Rob Miceli maneuvers his board through an abandoned psychiatric hospital in New York State. Miceli and fellow skater Sean Colello gained access to an unnamed facility (speculated to be the Pilgrim Psychiatric Center in Brentwood by Gawker) and filmed themselves using various rotting rooms of the hospital as one big skate park.

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“Back in 1931 the center was thriving, but around World War 2 things started falling apart when unqualified workers took over for nurses who had to serve in the war,” Colello told Jenkem. “It wasn’t until the 1970s when they officially shut down a handful of the buildings on campus and they’ve just been rotting away ever since.”

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Colello reports that most of the buildings are so boarded up they’re virtually impossible to access, but once you find a way into one, you can access all of them through a network of underground tunnel. In the eerie video, the duo can be seen making their way through the dark, wet subterranean maze to find themselves in a bowling alley, a children’s playroom and a theater.

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Flying Bikes & Pedaling Robots: 14 Futuristic Bicycles

18 Nov

[ By Steph in Technology & Vehicles & Mods. ]

flying bike

All you need is an alien in a basket to make your biking experience just like a Spielberg film with this crazy flying bike and 13 other highly unusual, sometimes impractical bicycle designs. While some are just wild concepts, others represent truly innovative ideas for the future of cycling, from bending frames that function as built-in locks to extremely aerodynamic shapes and chainless drives.

XPloreAir Flying Bike

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In a surreal scene straight out of ET, this bike can actually be flown right off the ground to an altitude of up to 4,000 feet. The XploreAir X1 Paravelo flying bicycle is a compact commuting bicycle that can be used like any other bike, or attached to a trailer equipped with a biofuel-powered fan. Get it going and the bike will lift into the air with the help of an attached fabric wing, traveling at up to 25 MPH for about three hours until the battery runs out.

Joules the Bicycle-Pedaling Robot

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If you want to bike around without actually doing any work, and look as conspicuous as possible in the process, here’s an idea that’s right up your alley: Joules, the bike-pedaling robot. Perched on the back of a tandem bike, Joules essentially performs the same function that an electric motor would. Says the creator, “Joules came from a challenge to build an electric tandem bicycle powered by actually pushing the pedals like a person. Fun kinetic design was part of the intent, practicality was not.”

Bending Bicycle Frame is Its Own Lock

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Is this the ultimate theft-proof bicycle? Thanks to an innovative ratchet system, the frame of this bicycle can actually be bent to wrap around a lamp post so it can be secured without the need for a lock or a chain. Ratchet the frame tight again to make the bike rideable in an instant. The bending capability also makes it easy to store.

Air-Filtering Bicycle

futuristic air filter bike

In cities like Beijing, riding a bicycle is a popular and practical alternative to fighting monstrous traffic every day, but then you’re breathing in all of the exhaust from those millions of vehicles. Artist Matt Hope found an interesting if not very attractive solution: a 5,000v air filtration system with a filter that’s powered by your pedaling. The clean air that passes through the filter is then sent through a hose to a fighter pilot mask on the rider’s face.

StreetFlyer Harness Bicycle

futuristic streetflyer bicycle

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Pretty much the opposite of ultra-compact urban bicycles, the StreetFlyer is a massive three-wheeled contraption that gives you the feeling of flying by suspending you from a lightweight frame using a harness. You strap yourself in, get a running start and then use swimming-like movements to pilot the thing.

The Contortionist Folding Bike

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The Contortionist Bike folds from full-size to the size of a single wheel in just twenty seconds. Once it’s folded, you can simply pull it behind you with the handlebars, freeing up your other hand.

Lunarctic Chainless Bicycle

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The larger rear wheel and smaller front wheel of the unusual Lunarctic bicycle isn’t purely to give the bike an eye-catching look; it’s functional, too. The larger wheel provides stability, while the smaller one offers enhanced maneuverability. But the truly notable feature of this bike is the lack of a chain, making use of a belt drive instead.

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Flying Bikes Pedaling Robots 14 Futuristic Bicycles

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H2O to Go: Bike Bottle Makes Water from Thin Air as You Cycle

17 Nov

[ By WebUrbanist in Conceptual & Futuristic & Technology. ]

water bottle in situ

Using air flow and solar energy, this ingenious device creates up to 16 ounces (a half-liter) per hour of drinkable water via condensation as you ride, quenching your thirst just when and where you need it most: while cycling hard in hot and humid climates.

fontus bottle

water bottle explanatory diagram

Austrian designer Kristof Retezár has submitted his work on this self-filling water bottle (dubbed Fontus) for award consideration to the James Dyson Foundation. His prototype and proposal cite potential benefits both to athletes but also more broadly to regions where obtaining potable water can be difficult (in many cases, these are also places where many travel by bicycle).

fontus water bottle design

water bottle humidity graph

The gadget itself attaches to the frames of bicycles and contains a slot where a standard-sized disposable water bottle can be attached, filled and detached when needed. Retezár experimented with various materials, systems and processes to make a working prototype in his own bathroom, testing under various temperatures and humidity conditions.

water bottle experimental stage

water bottle from air

How does it work? “Basically, condensation occurs when you cool air to its saturation point. Fontus has a small internal cooler that is divided into two halves. A solar panel provides energy to cool the upper half of the condenser, a process that heats the lower half. When air flows past the heated lower half, it makes the top cool even further. Air moving through the chambers is slowed and cooled to condense moisture, which drips down into the bottle.”

water bottle form design

water bottle design prototype

For now, it is a work in progress – whether this design hits mass-production without kinks or complications remains to be seen. The inspiration: “According to UN statistics, More than 2 billion people in more than 40 countries live in regions with water scarcity. In 2030, 47% of the world´s population will be living in areas of high water stress. Water scarcity may be the most underestimated resource issue facing the world today. Every measure to ease this upcoming crisis is a welcome one.”

water bottle modeling process

air condensed water bottle

“Harvesting water from the air is a method that has been practised for more than 2000 years in certain cultures mostly in Asia and Central America. The Earth’s atmosphere contains around 13.000 km3 of mostly unexploited freshwater. This project is an attempt to discover these resources. My goal was to create a small, compact and self-sufficient device able to absorb humid air, separate water molecules from air molecules and store water in liquid form in a bottle.”

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Dirty Camp 30: Canadian POW Camp Battles Neglect & Decay

17 Nov

[ By Steve in Abandoned Places & Architecture. ]

abandoned camp 30 barracks
Camp 30, located east of Toronto, was one of Canada’s main World War II POW camps and although named a National Historic Site, continues to be neglected.

abandoned camp 30 entrance sign

abandoned camp 30 windows

The community of Bowmanville, Ontario, is home to just over 40,000 people, many of whom work in Toronto and commute daily via Highway 401. Only a tenth as many made Bowmanville their home in 1941, however, when the Canadian government ordered the Bowmanville Boys Training School (a “school for unadjusted boys who were not inherently delinquent”) to vacate the site. By the end of the year, the former school and its environs had been converted into Camp 30 and the first German prisoners of war arrived. (credit AlexLuyckx with the above images)

abandoned camp 30 sunset

abandoned camp 30 cafeteria red door

abandoned camp 30 turn around graffiti

Many of these prisoners were considered “high profile” – the reasoning being, the farther they were from Nazi Germany, the less chance of them returning there after a successful escape. Among the more notable Camp 30 prisoners were U-boat commanders Wolfgang Heyda and Otto Kretschmer, the latter credited with sinking 47 ships (totaling 274,333 tons) between the start of the war and his capture in March of 1941. (credit Courtney McIntosh with the above images)

Shallow End

Paint Chips

In stark contrast to the treatment doled out to Allied POWs in German prison camps, those prisoners sent to Camp 30 enjoyed a wealth of freedoms and amenities. As Camp 30 was a former boy’s school, prisoners were allowed to use the indoor pool as well as the soccer and football fields. If that wasn’t enough, authorities approved requests to build a tennis court and a mini zoo! (credit ckocur with the above images)

abandoned camp 30 pool blue

abandoned camp 30 electric

abandoned camp 30 pool graffiti

These perks and much more (read about Camp 30 in detail at the unofficial Camp 30 website) didn’t stop the prisoners from carrying out their duty to escape, and at least a half dozen attempts – some quite elaborate and well-planned – were foiled by guards. (credit Rick Harris with the above images)

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Dirty Camp 30 Canadian Pow Camp Battles Neglect Decay

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