With a week and a half until PIX 2015, we’re taking the opportunity to introduce you to some of our talented re:FRAME speakers. Cristina Mittermeier’s resume is long, but it’s easy to see the trend. Over a 20 year career, she’s focused her energy on a number of conservation projects. Read more
Tag: Earth
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Marble Earth: 7-Mile Scale Model Timelapse of Our Solar System
[ By WebUrbanist in Art & Installation & Sound. ]
Starting with a model planet Earth the size of a marble, a team of filmmakers set out to simulate our entire solar system in motion and capture the results in a compelling short movie.
In normal images and models of the planets in our solar neighborhood, nothing is too scale – at scale on a piece of paper, planets becoming vanishingly small and effectively impossible to see on the page. Textbooks and other graphics misrepresent sizes almost by necessity simply because it would be impossible to depict things otherwise in a small visual field.
The resulting visuals distort our sense of the distance between celestial bodies. In the scale model featured above, set in the Black Rock Desert of Nevada, Alex Gorosh and Wylie Overstreet give the viewer a much greater intuitive understanding of the separation and size of these spatial objects.
“As we got farther and farther away it diminished in size. Finally it shrank to the size of a marble, the most beautiful marble you can imagine. That beautiful, warm, living object looked so fragile, so delicate, that if you touched it with a finger it would crumble and fall apart.” said James Irwin, Apollo 15 astronaut. He is one of only 24 people in human history have seen the full circle of the Earth with their own eyes.
Using LED lights, GPS calculations, a dirt disrupter and ultimately cars driving in circles to simulate the orbits at night, the team created a 1:847,638,000 scale model in which blips of light represent the various bodies in space.
One of the participants climbed a nearby mountain to film it all from above, while post-production overlays create a key for the video. Process documentation was made in part with a drone flying overhead. According to its creators, this is the first scale model of the solar system ever constructed.
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City of Sounds: Scale Model Plays Urban Soundtrack
Every city has its own unique sound, but until now those sounds have been less than musical. This unique project turns the city itself into an instrument.
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Incredibly Intricate 2.5 Ton Carved Marble Manhattan
The island of Manhattan is a fascinating place on its own, but one artist has given it new life. This marble recreation of Manhattan is full of amazing details.
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See-Through Solar: Crystal Clear Panels Are 100% Transparent
Applied to anything from the surface of your smartphone to the the sides of a skyscraper, the possible uses of this innovation for everyday surfaces are …
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[ By WebUrbanist in Art & Installation & Sound. ]
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UrtheCast releases first full-color HD videos of Earth recorded from ISS
UrtheCast has published the first full color HD videos recorded of Earth from space via a new camera system mounted on the International Space Station. The videos are short recordings of regions in Barcelona, Boston, and London, and show the cities at a one-meter resolution. Read more
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Clever Land Artist Copyrighted Earth to Beat an Oil Pipeline
[ By WebUrbanist in Art & Installation & Sound. ]
Canadian land artist and sculptor Peter von Tiesenhausen occupies a stretch of land in Alberta covered with his artworks, but it was not until he turned the top six layers of the soil on his 800 acres of land itself from private to intellectual property that he was able to fend off encroaching corporate interests.
In Canada, a landowner has surface rights but must allow the government to grant paid subterranean access, allowing companies to create or mine passageways, pipelines, minerals or other natural resources below the ground.
They are compensated, per This.org, and “this compensation is usually for lost harvests and inconvenience, but, Tiesenhausen reasoned, what if instead of a field of crops these companies were destroying the life’s work of an acclaimed visual artist? Wouldn’t the compensation have to be exponentially higher?”
Effectively, by contacting a lawyer and protecting the surface of his land as intellectual property, he has prevented anyone from breaching that surface without compensation, which, for a work of art, could be essentially any amount. While oil companies could contest his claim, so far they have settled for costly reroutes, perhaps to avoid losing and setting a precedent that could hurt them more in the long run.
“I’m not trying to get money for my land, I’m just trying to relate to these companies on their level,” says Tiesenhausen from his home near Demmitt, Alberta. “Once I started charging $ 500 an hour for oil companies to come talk to me, the meetings got shorter and few and far between.”
Now an artist, Tiesenhausen has a great deal of experience with natural resource companies, having worked in oil fields, mining gold and even crushing boulders for airstrips earlier in life before turning to large-scale works of land and installation art and sculpture.
Cantech Letter notes of the clever strategy, “This is eerily similar to the defense Portia deploys against Shylock in ‘The Merchant of Venice’ in which he is legally entitled to extract a pound of flesh from a debtor who can’t pay, so long as he doesn’t extract a single drop of blood or marrow or bone.”
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Floating on Dry Land: 17 Derelict Houseboats Find New Home
Located in the north of Amsterdam, the recently-opened De Ceuval (conceptualized by Space&Matter) is a radical redevelopment project featuring homes, …
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Zen-Like Artist Creates Intricate Pencil Tip Carvings
Artists have been creating works of art in pencil for centuries – but in this artist’s capable hands, the pencil itself becomes the canvas.
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Mirage Muralist: Street Artist Bends Surfaces Using Illusion
With works often requiring second looks or sanity checks, artist Pejac bends reality in his use of paint and other materials to create sublime art from walls, …
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[ By WebUrbanist in Art & Installation & Sound. ]
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Journey to the center of the Earth with Robbie Shone
British adventure and cave photographer Robbie Shone travels into the earth to get stunning images of the world beneath our feet. He’s been suspended 200m above the floor of the world’s deepest natural shaft, explored the far ends of a 189 km long cave system and spent nearly four days underground on one shoot. His images take us to places few of us will go and he doesn’t plan on stopping anytime soon. See gallery
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Incredible photos of Earth from the European Space Agency
There’s no better view of the earth than the one you get from space. The European Space Agency’s mission is to ‘find out more about Earth, its immediate space environment, our Solar System and the Universe’, and as such, every year it produces thousands of high-resolution images of earth from orbit. Click through for a selection of stunning photographs and links to the ESA’s website (which, unlike NASA’s US government-funded site, is still online).
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Cassini spacecraft takes spectacular pictures of Saturn (oh, and Earth)
Last Friday, while orbiting Saturn, the Cassini spacecraft turned its camera lens on earth from almost a billion miles away. NASA has released the images, which show not only Saturn and its rings, but also the Earth in the (very far) distance. The original ‘raw’ images taken by the spacecraft are grayscale, but astronomy enthusiast Valerie Klavans has converted some of them and added color. The results look pretty spectacular. Check them out after the link.
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The Eye of God – Recreating Andreas Gursky (Google Earth Remix)
www.flachware.de As many young photographers, I always dreamt about flying around the world, visiting spectacular spots and places, just like Superstar Andreas Gursky does. So finally I decided to stop dreaming and just do It …in Google Earth. So here is my personal remake of Andreas Gursky’s megapicture. www.fastcompany.com
Video Rating: 4 / 5Life as a portrait photographer… some clients are more lovely than others.
Video Rating: 5 / 5 -
Earth – The Pale Blue Dot
A film by: Michael Marantz www.michaelmarantz.com Buy the instrumental piano here itunes.apple.com This is Carl Sagan reading from his book, “The Pale Blue Dot”. Director Michael Marantz shoots the timelapse for this piece, composes the music and edits.
Video Rating: 4 / 5