bomomo

bomomo – a browser based drawing scribbler time waster thingy. Won’t let you erase or undo but you can save your crap masterpiece. (Only works in Firefox, Safari, and Opera. That’s right. Up yours Internet Explorer. Go home. Nobody wants to play with you anyway.)

(via)

Plastic From the Stomach of One Albatross

Oh! I really like your photograph of all that plastic debris. Great colors and textures. I like the way you meticulously laid out the pieces in a…

What? I’m sorry but what did you say? It came from where? The stomach of one albatross!?! Eww.

All of the plastic in the picture above was pulled out of the proventriculi – part of the birds complicated stomach system – of one bird, a Layson Albatross, on Kure, an island near Midway. The weight of the proventriculi on this bird was 340 grams and 80% of that was the plastic above. The plastic weighed as much as six golf balls.

From the book, Archipelago: Portraits of Life in the World’s Most Remote Island Sanctuary by David Liittschwager, Susan Middleton:

Inside dead chicks, I found, to my disgust, a printer cartridge, shotgun shell casings, paint brushes,  pump spray nozzles, toothpaste tube caps, clothespins, buckles, toys, and shards from larger plastic items such as laundry baskets and buckets. – David Littschwager

You can even make out a couple of cigarette lighters in the picture above. Pretty freakin’ sad if you ask me.

Open this PDF and scroll down to page 8 if you want to see a pretty gruesome picture of the bird itself.

Here is a good NPR story about this issue.

Subliminal Advertising

Proof that subliminal advertising works…even on the douchebags who create it.

“Psychological methods to sell should be destroyed…” ~The Minutemen

MUTO

Have you watched MUTO yet from Argentinian (I think) artist BLU? Well if not, grab yourself seven minutes of free time and watch his incredible wall animation.

“Big Bang” by Cursive

I love this video, “Big Bang” by Cursive. Great song and a great idea once you figure out what is going on. All you have to do is look at the title. Makes me smile every time I watch it.

Pinhole Photography by Bethany de Forest

Dutch artist Bethany de Forest creates her art by first building tiny models and dioramas. She then takes pinhole photographs of the models, capturing the look and feel of a truly imaginary world. The models she creates are meticulously detailed and are made with such materials as sugar cubes, twigs, cotton balls, fruits and vegetables, and meats. She also frequently uses mirrors to enhance the small spaces she creates. To hide the camera from the mirrors, she custom builds most of the cameras for each shot so, that when a shot is taken with a mirror directly in front of the camera, the cameras blend right into the scene.

Thanks to Joe Barr (also a pinhole photographer) for sending me this about three years ago.

Lightmark.de

I wanted to share this site that I found. I really do not have much information on it. All of the information on the site is in German. If you click on the “Making Of” link you are just shown a photograph of someone loading film into the back of a camera.

But what I do know about the site is that it has some beautiful long exposure photography exhibited.

Battles – Tonto

The first post in my two post series about light is musical in origin but is just as much about light as it is sound.

Last years debut album by Battles seemed to go unnoticed by most. In fact, I nearly missed it but I am certainly glad that I didn’t. It has been one of the albums that I have been listening to quite a bit lately and I return to it regularly however it is so unique that I couldn’t find a way to include a track from their album on my yearly mix CD. I just couldn’t make it work.

The band is made up of members of the (now defunct) bands Helmet and Don Cabellero, and you can hear the influences of those bands in the music of Battles. (Video bio here.) I can anyways. You could call it Math Rock or Future Funk or whatteverthefunk you want to call it but, in my opinion, it rises above those categories.

What pushed me over the edge on these guys was the video they created for ‘Tonto’, one of the tracks off their album. They teamed up with United Visual Artists (UVA) who are know for their interactive light installations that they create for museums and galleries. (I highly recommend that you click on that last link and peruse their entire site. There are some amazing videos of their installations as well as photos on how they are are created. They are doing some very cool things.)

UVA and Battles took their ideas to a Welsh slate mine. They created a sound triggered LED light display to match the music. In filming this, Battles played for eleven hours. If you were not aware, that is a very long time to be playing the same song. But the results are beautiful and the intermittent light flashes complement the music perfectly. Near the end they use gorgeous time lapse photography that ushers in the dawn as the song slows down to a crawl (from the 4:30 mark to the end, which is about three minutes). I find it very effective.

I hope you have good speakers and I hope you enjoy it. This music isn’t for everyone but the collaborative art is.

The Art of the Modern Business Card

Here is something for the Frickin’ Creative department: an amazing collection of business cards on Flickr. These things make me drool. Most of these cards are for designers and artists because most regular folk wouldn’t want to spend the dough to get these things made with all the fancy die cuts and cards made out of metal and such. However, can you put a price on a first impression? Yeah, probably.

The Vanishing Point

This is my new favorite site. it is called The Vanishing Point. It is a website all about exploring the man-made structures that are buried beneath our feet and abandoned like old power plants and abandoned mines. I have always wanted to be an urban cave explorer. I find the huge abandoned spaces filled with discarded heavy machinery fascinating. The site gives some great history of the places they explore as well as some great photographs. Sometimes the writing is a bit forced but the rest of the site makes up for it.

Well worth exploring. Pun intended.

(Via BoingBoing)

Marc Levoy – Advanced Photographic Research

Photography + technology = *Drool*

Gigposters.com

I just found out about this site. It is a gigantic library of music gig posters. And I mean Gi-frickin-gantic. I have yet to really search through it but on a quick glance, there are some real beauties in there. There is also a bunch of crap too.

You can search by band or by the designer. They also have a place to sell posters and other music merch. I did a quick search for Modest Mouse and came up with 145 posters. Some are super cool too:

And I have this Decemberists one designed by Mike King (reminder to self: go get it framed!):

If you find any cool posters, let me know in the comments!

Perspective is Everything

This is a detail of a very large image (60 X 100″) by Seattle Artist/Photographer/Activist Chris Jordan. The full size is the visual representation of how many containers are processed in American ports in twelve hours (38,000). This is part of his series “Running the Numbers – An American Self-Portrait“. It is a collection of visuals that are created in Photoshop that shows contemporary American consumption. It is very impressive.

This project visually examines these vast and bizarre measures of our society, in large intricately detailed prints assembled from thousands of smaller photographs. The underlying desire is to emphasize the role of the individual in a society that is increasingly enormous, incomprehensible, and overwhelming.

My only caveat about this series is that the prints must be seen in person to be experienced the way they are intended. As with any large artwork, their scale carries a vital part of their substance which is lost in these little web images.

He is probably right. I would love to see this exhibition some time.

Here is Chris is on the Colbert Report and on Bill Moyers. He is also going to be speaking at the TED conference this year (which I will miss yet again this year because some lacky keeps leaving me off the guest list!)

RAINBOW DIVIDERS!!!!!!!……

Welcome to web .20. Don’t forget to refresh your browser as there seems to be an unlimited amount of these eyesores.

Why do I love this so much? I should envy the blind but…there you go.

Link

Moo

Oh, MAN! I love this! Crazy music, crazy animation with rampaging mutant cattle…give me whatever Cyriak is having and make it a double!

Link to high-res video (via WFMU)