An Artist Creates Artificial Fog in San Francisco

Artist Fujiko Nakaya believes in the transformative power of fog.

The first time she realized that her fog sculptures could change a person’s memory was in 1976 during the run of Earth Talk, a fog sculpture made for the Biennale of Sydney, Australia. After seeing her sculpture, an electrician told her how he had taken his family to see the Blue Mountains in New South Wales. The mountain was fogged in at first and he couldn’t see it, but the fog cleared and the view of the mountain was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.

“The instant he saw the fog it changed his experience, and I liked that very much,” explained Nakaya. It was then she understood that her sculptures could feed back to personal experience and improve a person’s feeling about fog. After the electrician’s story, she was determined to reach more people, and not just those in the art world. See more photos and continue reading at Smithsonian.com.

Photo: A view of Fujiko Nakaya’s Fog Bridge. Image by Gayle Laird, © Exploratorium, all rights reserved.

A Rubik’s Cube Mural

It took Cube Works Studio 85,794 Rubik’s Cubes to construct a mural of Macau’s skyline. The image is 200 feet long and 13 feet tall and took months to complete. After completion, the experts at the Guiness Book of World Records named it the largest mosaic of its kind.

h/t enpundit

Ed note: The colors of a Rubik’s cube are useless if you’re blind. That’s why designers have come up with a version that can be solved using only touch.

The History of the Lava Lamp

At a certain moment in the late 1960s, the lava lamp came to symbolize all things countercultural and psychedelic—although, as you might expect, those who basked in its lurid glow sometimes had trouble recalling exactly why. It’s like asking, “Why did we like Jackson Pollock?” says Wavy Gravy, the longtime peace activist and Grateful Dead sidekick. “Because it was amazing! It causes synapses in your brain to loosen up.”

The mesmerizing light fixture, which turns 50 this year, has risen and sunk and shifted its shape in the cultural consciousness for decades. The lamp was invented by Edward Craven Walker, a British accountant whose other claim to fame was making underwater nudist films. He was passing the time in a pub when he noticed a homemade egg timer crafted from a cocktail shaker filled with alien-looking liquids bubbling on a stove top. - Continue reading at Smithsonian.com.

Snakes in a Frame: Stunning Photographs of Slithering Beasts

Mark Laita captured plenty of photographs of snakes striking, their mouths agape, in the making of his new book, Serpentine. But, it wasn’t these aggressive, fear-inducing—and in his words, “sensational”—images that he was interested in. Instead, the Los Angeles-based photographer focused on the graceful contortions of the reptiles.

“It is not a snake book,” says Laita. As he explained to me in a phone interview, he had no scientific criteria for selecting the species he did, though herpetologists and snake enthusiasts will surely perk up when they see the photographs. “Really, it is more about color, form and texture,” he says. “For me, a snake does that beautifully.” - Continue reading at Smithsonian.com.

MORE PHOTOS »

By Megan Gambino

The Man Behind the Best Nature GIFs on Tumblr

Tumblr is home to millions of animated GIFs so standing out in the crowd can be quite a challenge. Head Like an Orange is a unique blog featuring high-quality GIFs of nature’s most jaw-dropping moments. It’s creator, Marinus Olde Loohuis from the Netherlands, has been creating GIFs since 2011 and his love of the natural world inspires him to keep creating five second masterpieces. The international business and languages student recently answered a few questions about his site via email.

What got you into making animated GIFs?

Tumblr did. I’m not even sure if I knew what a GIF was when I started my blog but when I did start, I noticed a lot of people were making these moving pictures, so I decided to try to make some myself.

How do you find the video clips you turn into GIFs?

I always try to keep up to date about what nature/science documentaries are on TV at the moment. I watch them to find interesting bits that could make nice GIFs. Sometimes I also look on Vimeo for videos.

A lot of your GIFs are seamless. You can’t tell when they restart. What is your technique?

There are certain things you can do in Photoship to make water or clouds loop, but that doesn’t really work for a lot of the GIFs I post. You have to find a certain point in a video from which the whole motion starts again, which is quite easy to do for a bird bouncing on a twig, but a lot more difficult for a flying bird.

Most of your GIFs are of nature and wildlife. What draws you to those subjects?

I’ve been interested in the natural world since I was a child and collected fossils and animal skulls. Like many people, I’m fascinated by the diversity and beauty of fauna created by evolution. I try to show some of that variety on my blog.

The quality of the GIFs are very high. How do you achieve this?

Mainly by using HD videos. Due to the limitation of a GIF (maximum of 256 colors) and Tumblr (upload limit of 1MB) it can be quite difficult to come even close to the quality of the original video, so you have to mess with it a bit in Photoshop. I like the limitations though because it gives me a bit of a challenge.

Do you think making GIFs is an art form?

The other day I read an anonymous message on a blog I follow saying that his posts shouldn’t be featured on the “Artists on Tumblr” tag because GIFs aren’t art. I totally disagree with that because there are a lot of people who do very creative things with their GIFs and often create them from scratch. Although, I’ve seen people refer to me as a GIF artist. I don’t think what I do is very creative or should be considered as art but I do believe the people involved with making the documentaries I use for my GIFs are true artists.

What are your thoughts on using GIFs as a storytelling method?

I think in some cases they’re more useful than photographs and video to explain something. I’ve tried to do it in some of my own posts. Somehow, GIFs seem to grab the attention of the person looking at them more easily than photos and they don’t require the person to take any actions like pressing a play button.

What are some of your favorite GIF sites that we should be checking out?

I’m probably forgetting some but these are certainly worth following:

Tech Noir
Mr. GIF
Made by ABVH
Sam Cannon
DVDp
Hoppip
iwdrm

Interview by Ryan R. Reed

thecreatorsproject:

Diller Scofidio + Renfro blow up the Hirshhorn Museum

WATCH

The Unsettling Beauty of Lethal Viruses

To create a body of work he calls “Glass Microbiology,” [Luke] Jerram has enlisted the help of virologist Andrew Davidson from the University of Bristol and the expertise of professional glassblowers Kim George, Brian George and Norman Veitch. Together, the cross-disciplinary team brings hazardous pathogens, such as the H1N1 virus or HIV, to light in translucent glass forms.

The artist  insists that his sculptures be colorless, in contrast to the images scientists sometimes disseminate that are enhanced with bright hues. “Viruses have no color as they are smaller than the wavelength of light,” says Jerram, in an email. “So the artworks are created as alternative representations of viruses to the artificially colored imagery we receive through the media.” Jerram and Davidson create sketches, which they then take to the glassblowers, to see whether the intricate structures of the diseases can be replicated in glass, at approximately one million times their original size. - Continue reading at Smithsonian.com.

Slow Motion Ink Drops in HD

Not a whole to say about this one. Put in full-screen mode and enjoy. Check out more of Jacob Schwarz’s work here.

The Story Behind the Street Artist Who Turned the Art World Upside-Down

The Barton Hill district of Bristol in the 1980s was a scary part of town. Very white—probably no more than three black families had somehow ended up there—working-class, run-down and unwelcoming to strangers. So when Banksy, who came from a much leafier part of town, decided to go make his first foray there, he was nervous. “My dad was badly beaten up there as a kid,” he told fellow graffiti artist and author Felix Braun. He was trying out names at the time, sometimes signing himself Robin Banx, although this soon evolved into Banksy. The shortened moniker may have demonstrated less of the gangsters’ “robbing banks” cachet, but it was more memorable—and easier to write on a wall.

Around this time, he also settled on his distinctive stencil approach to graffiti. When he was 18, he once wrote, he was painting a train with a gang of mates when the British Transport Police showed up and everyone ran. “The rest of my mates made it to the car,” Banksy recalled, “and disappeared so I spent over an hour hidden under a dumper truck with engine oil leaking all over me. As I lay there listening to the cops on the tracks, I realized I had to cut my painting time in half or give it up altogether. I was staring straight up at the stenciled plate on the bottom of the fuel tank when I realized I could just copy that style and make each letter three feet high.” But he also told his friend, author Tristan Manco: “As soon as I cut my first stencil I could feel the power there. I also like the political edge. All graffiti is low-level dissent, but stencils have an extra history. They’ve been used to start revolutions and to stop wars.”

The people—and the apes and rats—he drew in these early days have a strange, primitive feel to them. My favorite is a piece that greets you when you enter the Pierced Up tattoo parlor in Bristol. The wall painting depicts giant wasps (with television sets strapped on as additional weapons) divebombing a tempting bunch of flowers in a vase. Parlor manager Maryanne Kemp recalls Banksy’s marathon painting session: “It was an all-nighter.” - Continue reading at Smithsonian.com.

Photo by: Nick Fielding / Alamy

Bringing Extinct Birds Back to Life, One Cartoon at a Time

Filmmaker Ceri Levy was working on a documentary called The Bird Effect, about how our feathered friends influence our lives, when he took on a side project, organizing an exhibition, “Ghosts of Gone Birds,” at the Rochelle School in London in November 2011.

“Its purpose was to highlight the risk of extinction that is faced by many bird species in the world today,” Levy noted. “The premise of the show was to get artists to represent an extinct species of birds, and to breathe life back into it.”

Levy sent a list of nearly 200 extinct bird species to famous artists, musicians, writers and poets, inviting them to create bird-centric pieces. A cut of the profits from the sale of the artwork would go to BirdLife International’s Preventing Extinctions Programme, which aims to protect 197 critically endangered bird species.

Acclaimed poet and novelist (also, environmental activist) Margaret Atwood knitted a Great auk—a large flightless seabird last seen off of Newfoundland in 1852. Sir Peter Blake, a British pop artist who famously designed the cover of the Beatles’ album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, submitted a collage, titled “Dead as a Dodo,” which consists of a long list of extinct and endangered birds. But the most prolific contributor by far was Ralph Steadman. The British cartoonist, who illustrated the 1967 edition of Alice in Wonderland and Hunter S. Thompson’s 1971 classic Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, painted more than 100 colorful and sometimes silly birds—or “boids,” as he called them in emails to Levy. - Continue reading at Smithsonian.com.

Illustrations by Ralph Steadman