April 8, 2007
View Comments | Post CommentLinks As An Artistic Medium
- In a bit of D.C. trivia, I bet none of you knew that the National Cathedral has a Darth Vader gargoyle. It was added in the 80's when a young student won a contest to design a new grotesque for the cathedral. This is pretty awesome but it appears to be too high up in the cathedral to be able to get a good view without binoculars.
- Joshua Bell, a virtuoso violinist, played for 45 minutes in the L'Enfant Plaza metro station, as an experiment to see whether anyone would even notice. He usually makes $1000 per minute playing to sold out concert halls, and here he played for free, in a metro station, on a $3.5 million Stradivarius violin. It was a stunt designed to highlight the importance of context to art. The end result? No crowd gathered, barely anyone even slowed their gait. He did, however, make $32 that people threw into his case.
- Check out this art installation that consists of two ferrofluid towers in which liquid metal is controlled by electromagnets moving along with music. It's wild.
- Some people do some pretty amazing artistic work on official state Easter Eggs. But in a big political gaffe, Wyoming's state egg was painted by some Illinois student, and looks about ten times crappier than any of the other states' eggs. Check it out. Thanks, Chad.
- A German family has made quite an interesting conversation piece. Not quite art, but it is the mother of all computer case mods. They've turned their dead, stuffed dog into a PC. "The Zimmermans also added that almost always the first question people ask is where is the USB Port."
- An artist makes awesome sculptures out of construction paper.
- A Russian gangster built a giant, ad-hoc, wooden house thirteen stories tall.
- Apparently shoes are now coming out that have stingray leather as one of their materials. Oh, New Balance, you cads!
- Nikon posted a really cool flash project called Universcale, putting the entire universe to scale. You can zoom to various incremental sizes to see what objects occupy that world.
Posted at April 8, 2007 3:45 PM | Comments (7)
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those are all very cool links. i just spent 30+ minutes staring at universcale. and the construction paper sculpture is just amazing.
Posted by: jeanette at April 9, 2007 4:26 PM
That universcale thing is like an interactive version of Charles Eame's Powers of Ten. Only without all the 70's-ness.
Posted by: cooper at April 9, 2007 7:53 PM
I had to look that one up, Jon. So for everyone else, see this info about Charles Eames' Powers Of Ten. Pretty cool idea back in the day.
Posted by: David Barzelay at April 10, 2007 2:58 AM
Does the presence of this post mean you have a functioning laptop again?
Posted by: Ben at April 10, 2007 7:15 AM
No, Ben, it does not. But there has been a very interesting (and lawsuit-settling) development on that front, which I'll be blogging about in the next couple days.
This post is just because I had amassed a ton of links that I wanted to post, but hadn't been bothering with mini-links since again, no laptop. But I eventually had enough links that I didn't want to let them go to waste, so I decided to make a post. Because I had so many links, I limited it to the ones that related to art.
Posted by: David Barzelay at April 10, 2007 11:58 AM
I'm also amused by the fact that Utah's egg is a drawing of Mitten Butte in Monument Valley, which is located on Navajo tribal land and may actually be in Arizona. This amuses me.
Posted by: Jeff at April 10, 2007 11:36 PM
How do you know that it's Mitten Butte, and not some random scene from Arches National Park? I think it's at best inconclusive.
Posted by: David Barzelay at April 10, 2007 11:46 PM
