This post is syndicated with permission from GamerFront.net
I’ll admit to having some interesting pieces of gaming (or general geeky) art on my walls, but what I’m missing is something that pays tribute to the console that started it all (for me). Sure, I could track down an old poster featuring an NES title, or maybe a unique piece with a classic Mario theme, but I don’t think that would do it justice. No, what I need is an original NES cart inside of a shadowbox.
This wonderfully Photoshopped image of what you will probably get upon purchase really doesn’t look that great. Honestly, it doesn’t even look like a shadowbox. While I wouldn’t recommend dropping $80 on one of these, I think that you could probably make a pretty decent piece of art for 10-15 bucks with a trip to a hobby shop.
If you you’re the kind of person that is just fascinated by death, and enjoys making people wonder about the state of your mental health, then I’ve got the perfect lamp for you. Designer Marie Thurnauer has decided to provide the world with a way to not only end your life, but also with a way to keep your room nice and bright.
The 53-inch lighting fixture is technically a work of art, though I’m not quite sure I understand the point of such a piece. If you think that you ever might want to use the lamp for any purpose other than illuminating a room, I wouldn’t suggest buying it. Once you realize that you just spent over six thousand dollars on a lamp, you might be tempted to use the noose.
Unlike most pieces of functional artwork, the Seven Rats Table Light doesn’t seem to be making any sort of Statement and may just be weird for the sake of being weird. Designed by Ingo Maurer “and team” (whatever that means) the light sculpture is made of steel, gold, brass, and plastic cages which contain three black and four white rats (plastic rats, calm down), and the whole thing is lit from the bottom with a 50 watt halogen bulb.
Oh, wait. I know what this lamp-thing is all about. It’s so obvious, that’s why they don’t spell it out for you. Clearly, it symbolizes the subconscious obsession of the human race with subjugating nature to create a schism between mind and body that satisfies our materialist and consumerist super-egos while illustrating the conflict between self and other in the context of subliminal racial pressures via a visual exposition of our primal instincts through Plato’s cave allegory. It’s so simple.
No matter how incredibly deep the underlying meaning of this thing is, the $4680 cost means that it would be far, far cheaper to make this light fixture with real cages and real rats. And I bet if you connected all the cages and added some comfy hammocks, the rats (two perhaps, not seven) might even enjoy the setup. And you probably would enjoy it a lot more, too, having some fuzzy little ratties to keep you company instead of a really, really weird sculpture with (okay, I admit it) an incomprehensible meaning.
We featured Jason Freeny’s anatomy of a balloon dog in May of last year, and since then, he’s dissected gummi bears and now a Lego minifig to show us how they operate. I didn’t realize the little guys had fingers and toes under there. And a nose. It’s very cool, but am I the only one who also finds it vaguely disturbing…?
If you’re counting on your child’s artistic skills to fund your retirement, you’ll want to start fostering their creative side as soon as possible. And while crayons and paper make for a perfectly suitable creative outlet, your kid’s masterpieces won’t be that easy to email to the local galleries as you build up their reputation. But this KidiArt Studio drawing desk from VTech not only allows your kids to produce email-friendly digital-only works of art, but also features an integrated digital camera on an arm allowing you to snap pics of works done in more traditional mediums like finger paints, macaroni and of course crayons.
The KidiArt Studio desk also features a Wacom-esque kid-friendly stylus for drawing on the tablet surface and can be connected to a TV or a PC for showing off their creations. In fact, in its PC connect mode the desk and the camera can even be used to create stop motion or hand-drawn animations using the included software. At $79.99 from VTech it’s considerably more expensive than an Etch-A-Sketch, but it also won’t limit your child’s creativity to just two twisty knobs.
Artists Aristarkh Chernyshev & Alexei Shulgin have created some fan art for the iPod. Their gigantic wowPod takes an iPod and makes it human sized and warped. Looking at it for a minute makes me think that it may not be the only thing that is warped.
The interesting thing about this piece of art is that the wowPod actually works. Video and music really play from this work of…art.
I’m curious to see how Apple reacts to this. Will Steve Jobs et al. love the wowPod enough to feature it in an ad or buy it and send it to WillItBlend.com.
Nuit Blanche is an annual all-night cultural festival that started in Paris in 2002, and has since spread to other large cities around the world, including Toronto. The event is held overnight on the first Saturday and Sunday in October, and one of the premiere exhibits here in Toronto this year will be the new Project Blinkenlights installation known as Stereoscope. The two curved towers that make up our city hall will be turned into giant pixel displays showing animations as well as letting people play interactive games like Pong via their mobile phones.
Last night I was lucky enough to wander past city hall as Project Blinkenlights was performing some of their first live tests, but unfortunately the only camera I had on hand was the crappy iPhone. Thankfully, a photoblogging friend of mine managed to snap some considerably better photos and was gracious enough to let me use one for this post. (You can find more shots on his site, daily dose of imagery.) I did however get a chance to speak to a couple of people from the project who were shooting footage for a documentary. According to them, not only will Stereoscope will be the first time the installation uses 2 buildings at the same time (hence the name) but it will also improve on past versions with every pixel being able to display 16 distinct levels. (Compared to just 8 and 4 previously.) Each window uses a 150W spotlight that’s diffused by a screen and controlled by a custom-built dimmer to create the individual pixels, and all 960 dimmers are wirelessly controlled by a master computer. In fact, Stereoscope actually uses quite a bit of new technology and software given the size of Toronto’s city hall (like going wireless instead of running cables) and so far it all looks rather impressive.
I’ll be stopping by Saturday night to grab some better photos of my own, as well as a video or two if the weather cooperates, and if any of our readers in Toronto will be checking it out, let me know in the comments. But for those who won’t be able to be there live, did I mention that Project Blinkenlights has also created a Stereoscope iPhone app allowing you to see what’s being displayed at any given time? You can read more about it after the jump.
Aww, isn’t he just adorable? Tinysaur is a teeny tiny tyrannosaurus rex, made out of a laser cut notecard. With a pair of tweezers and some rubber cement, you can assemble him from scratch (i.e. dismembered flatness) in about half an hour, and then set him loose to prey on fleas. Unassembled, tinysaur costs $5 on Etsy, or if you happen to have your own laser cutter, you can download a template (resizeable to any dimension from gluon to godzilla) for free, here. One more cute pic, after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »
This monster of a clock is called the Corpus Clock. If it looks kinda freaky looking to you, that’s intentional: “It is terrifying, it is meant to be,” said John Taylor, the creator and funder of an extraordinary new clock to be unveiled tomorrow by Stephen Hawking at Corpus Christi College in Cambridge. “Basically I view time as not on your side. He’ll eat up every minute of your life, and as soon as one has gone he’s salivating for the next.”
Just the sort of thing you want hanging in your house, right? The creature on the top is called a Chronophage, which is the evil version of a grasshopper escapement. Every hour, it “eats” up more time, blinks, and a symbolic piece of chain drops into a coffin below the clock.
The 1.8 million dollar clock took 7 years to construct and is the work of some 200 engineers, sculptors, scientists, jewelers and calligraphers. It should run for about 250 years. It has six patents, and is mechanical in nature despite seeming to briefly stop at times, and then run faster to catch up. And here’s the most incredible part: The rippling gold-plated dial was made by exploding a thin sheet of stainless steel onto a mould underwater: none of the team actually saw it happen because the only place in the world which could make it was a secret military research institute in Holland. That’s right: Holland has secret military research institutes.
The clock is currently in residence at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.
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