Archive for ‘Art’

May 21, 2011

Doodle

google doodle

reagan doodles

A doodle is an unfocused drawing made while a person’s attention is otherwise occupied. They are simple drawings that can have concrete representational meaning or may just be abstract shapes.

Doodling can aid a person’s memory by expending just enough energy to keep one from daydreaming, which demands a lot of the brain’s processing power, as well as from not paying attention. Thus, it acts as a mediator between the spectrum of thinking too much or thinking too little and helps focus on the current situation.

read more »

May 21, 2011

Marc Newson

marc newson

Marc Newson (b. 1963) born in Australia, and now based in London, is an industrial designer who works in aircraft design and product design. He incorporates a design style known as biomorphism to his various designs. This style uses smooth flowing lines, translucency, transparency and tends to have an absence of sharp edges.

He is currently adjunct professor in design at Sydney College of the Arts and is the creative director for Qantas. He co-founded and owns the Ikepod watch company. One of his three Lockheed Lounge chairs sold for $968,000 at Sotheby’s in 2006. Every year he races one of his four vintage sports cars – an Aston Martin, a Lamborghini, a Ferrari and a Cisitalia, in the Italian Mille Miglia.

Tags: ,
May 20, 2011

Wally Wood

sally forth

Wallace Wood (1927 – 1981) was an American comic book writer, artist and independent publisher, best known for his work in EC Comics and Mad. He was one of Mad’s founding cartoonists in 1952. Although much of his early professional artwork is signed Wallace Wood, he became known as Wally Wood, a name he claimed to dislike.

EC publisher William Gaines once stated, ‘Wally may have been our most troubled artist… I’m not suggesting any connection, but he may have been our most brilliant.’

read more »

May 20, 2011

RiP!: A Remix Manifesto

copyrightmonster by erica leong

RiP!: A Remix Manifesto is a 2008 open source documentary film about the changing concept of copyright directed by Brett Gaylor.

Created over a period of six years, the documentary film features the collaborative remix work of hundreds of people who have contributed to the Open Source Cinema website, helping to create the ‘world’s first open source documentary.’ Gaylor encourages people to create their own remixes from this movie, using media available from the Open Source Cinema website, or other websites like YouTube, Flickr, Hulu, or MySpace.

Tags: ,
May 20, 2011

TrustoCorp

trustocorp

american

TrustoCorp is an artist or a group of artists based in New York City.

They are known for their humorous street signs and product labels, which can be found in New York City, San Francisco, San Diego, and Miami.

May 20, 2011

Illegal Art

girl talk

Illegal Art is a sampling label that was started by a person using the name Philo T. Farnsworth in 1998. Its first release was ‘Deconstructing Beck,’ a compilation made exclusively from sampling Beck’s music. This was followed by two other theme-based compilations, ‘Extracted Celluloid’ and ‘Commercial Ad Hoc.’

All three were co-released on Seeland Records, an independent record label created by experimental music band Negativland in 1979 to release their own recordings. The releases were also sponsored by RTMark, an activist collective formed to fight the unchecked growth of corporate interests. After these theme based compilations, Illegal Art focused on artist releases. One of the most popular artists on Illegal Art is Girl Talk (aka Gregg Gillis), who in 2006 released his third album, Night Ripper, to critical acclaim on the label. Illegal Art also released the Steinski Retrospective, spanning his work from 1983-2006.

Tags:
May 20, 2011

Girl Talk

illegal art

Gregg Michael Gillis (b. 1981), better known by his stage name Girl Talk, is an American musician specializing in mashups and digital sampling. Gillis has released five LPs on the record label Illegal Art. He ended his career in biomedical engineering in 2007 to focus solely on music. He uses often a dozen or more unauthorized samples from different songs to create a new song. He cites fair use as a legal backbone for his sampling practices. After the success of his album Feed the Animals, for which listeners were asked to pay a price of their choosing, Gillis made all of his other albums similarly available via the Illegal Art website.

Regarding his stage name, Gillis has said, ‘the name Girl Talk is a reference to many things, products, magazines, books. It’s a pop culture phrase. The whole point of choosing the name early on was basically to just stir things up a little within the small scene I was operating from. I came from a more experimental background and there were some very overly serious, borderline academic type electronic musicians. I wanted to pick a name that they would be embarrassed to play with. You know Girl Talk sounded exactly the opposite of a man playing a laptop, so that’s what I chose.’

May 20, 2011

Ultra Music Festival

ultra

Ultra Music Festival is an annual outdoor electronic music festival that occurs in March in the city of Miami usually during the annual Winter Music Conference.

It is held in Downtown Miami in Bicentennial Park. It was a 1-day festival from 1999-2006, a 2-day festival from 2007-2010, and was a 3-day festival in 2011. Ultra celebrated its 10th anniversary in 2008 with performances by Tiesto, Underworld, Justice, Deadmau5, Moby, The Crystal Method, and David Guetta.

Tags:
May 20, 2011

Olafur Eliasson

Olafur Eliasson

Olafur Eliasson (b. 1967) is a Danish-Icelandic artist known for sculptures and large-scale installation art employing elemental materials such as light, water, and air temperature to enhance the viewer’s experience.

In 1996, Eliasson started working with Einar Thorsteinn, an architect and geometry expert 25 years his senior as well as a former friend of Buckminster Fuller’s. Thorsteinn’s knowledge of geometry and space has been integrated into Eliasson’s artistic production, often seen in his geometric lamp works as well as his pavilions, tunnels and camera obscura projects.

read more »

May 20, 2011

Desiderata

Desiderata [dih-sid-uh-rey-tuh] (Latin: ‘desired things’) is a 1927 poem by American writer Max Ehrmann (1872-1945).

The text was largely unknown in the author’s lifetime and became widely known after its use in a devotional in 1959 by a church in Baltimore. When Adlai Stevenson died in 1965, a guest in his home found the Desiderata near his bedside and discovered that Stevenson had planned to use it in his Christmas cards.

read more »

Tags:
May 18, 2011

Blue Velvet

ear

Blue Velvet is a 1986 American mystery film written and directed by David Lynch. The movie exhibits elements of both film noir and surrealism. The film features Kyle MacLachlan, Isabella Rossellini, Dennis Hopper, and Laura Dern. The title is taken from the 1963 Bobby Vinton song of the same name.

Although initially detested by some mainstream critics, the film is now widely acclaimed, and earned Lynch his second Academy Award nomination for Best Director. As an example of a director casting against the norm, Blue Velvet is also noted for re-launching Hopper’s career and for providing Rossellini with a dramatic outlet beyond the work as a fashion model and a cosmetics spokeswoman for which she had until then been known.

read more »

Tags: ,
May 18, 2011

Porno Chic

score

The Golden Age of Porn or porno chic refers to a period in the history of pornography, approximately from the late-1960s to the early-to-mid-1980s that is idealized as a time where difficult to treat STDs had not achieved wide public notice. This freedom was ostensibly reflected in the pornography industry, with adult movies and adult magazines approaching the mainstream and becoming increasingly visible.

The golden age was also typified by interactions with the contemporaneous second wave of feminism. These were radical and cultural feminists which, along with the Christian right, attacked pornography, while other feminists were more concerned with ideas of sexual liberation and freedom from government intrusion into the growing industry.

read more »

Tags: