Imagine having the chance to photograph any location you want, in any setting–a tropical island, a burning forest, or even the moon. New Jersey-based artist Matthew Albanese creates his landscape photographs using all kinds of household items: salt, cooked suger, tin foil etc. to create impressively detailed and realistically looking miniature diorama’s. By using forced perspective, carefully planned lightning and shooting the diorama’s from a specific angle, Matthew can make you believe that he was actually on the moon. You can find some great examples of before and after shots on his Behance.
If you ever wondered what the people from Mad Men might have used to look for stock-images for their ad-campaigns, Google60 may be your best bet. Described as “an art project to explore distances and heroism in user interfaces,” it is one of the creations of Norbert Landsteiner. His creative coding skills brought us the Google BBS Terminal, an 80s Google experience. Anyhow, with his Google60 project, he took the whole idea to another level by replacing the Google front end with a virtual IBM 360-like interface. All the buttons actually work and lets you control the interface as well as the volume. It’s not the quickest way to search for information, but it certainly gives you a badass Google experience – Mad Men-style.
This animated short film, designed and directed by Uli Henrik Streckenbach and Ronny Schmidt, reveals the reality of soil resources around the world. The film covers an array of issues impacting us globally. It is also beautifully animated throughout. This short features stunning transitions and insane details, and is the kind of animation that makes you want to click pause so you can enjoy every little bit of it.
Very intruiging and strikingly simplistic. The works of art by Malika Favre. Her works are now available on Kuvva to tune up your desktop with visual awesomeness. To celebrate this, we’ve asked her a couple of question to unveil the artist behind these week’s series, may we introduce you to Malika Favre:
Hi Malika, we’re very excited to see your works on Kuvva! However, to start with, how has your day been so far?
Very short ; ) I just woke up at 8 30 am to start off my week - quite a rare thing for me as I usually start a bit later than that to be honest - I am having coffee in bed to kick start my day properly and about to head off to the studio for a hectic week of work.
Can you tell us a brief story about yourself?
I am Malika Favre and I am a french illustrator based in London. I originally grew up in Paris where I studied graphic design before moving here 8 years ago. I have been working as an independant illustrator for a bit more than a year now after 4 years of being a designer at Airside. I am all about colour blocking and paring things down as much as I possibly can. I am a very compulsive drawer and I often wake up with the feeling that I am extremly lucky to be doing what I love and being paid for it : ).
100,000 Stars is a recently launched experiment for Chrome browsers (or other WebGL based browsers like Firefox and Safari) that enables you to explore the the Milky Way Galaxy with the click of a mouse-button and your scroll-wheel. The information is derived from multiple sources of which 1 of them is from an actual space mission commissioned by the ESA. It’s recommended to use a mouse rather than your trackpad, scrolling through light-years can be a pain.
These eerie-looking, colorful masks are the result of an material experimentation by Designer Bertjan Pot that began with the question whether stitched ropes could be turned into flat carpets. Although his quest to make rope flat carpets failed, the masks he ended up with are much more intriguing. The material used allows him to create an endless series of masks, this enables him to meet new faces everyday.
The Stone Fields series is created by Italian-based designer Giuseppe Randazzo that reflects his strong interest with finding the edge between art and science. Which started as a 3d-objects optimal packing algorithm over a surface, evolved into totally something different. He explains about his work:
“I love the work by Richard Long, from which this project takes its cue. The way he fills lonely landscapes with arcaic stones patterns and its eroic artistic practice, in his monumental vision, is in strong contrast with this computational approach that - ironically - allows virtual stones creation and sorting in a non phisical, mental way, a ‘lazy’ version, so to speak.”
More about this work can be found on his website.
These wonderful set of books are the works of sculptor Alexander Korzer-Robinson who transforms old books from their utilitarian purpose into a window to an imaginative world. His process involves cutting the front cover and stripping the texts and whitespaces on each page leaving only the images and other visuals out there. He explains, “By using pre-existing media as a starting point, certain boundaries are set by the material, which I aim to transform through my process. Thus, an encyclopedia can become a window into an alternate world, much like lived reality becomes its alternate in remembered experience. These books, having been stripped of their utilitarian value by the passage of time, regain new purpose. They are no longer tools to learn about the world, but rather a means to gain insight about oneself.”
More of his works can be found on his website which includes much more of his hand cut works.
Daniel Agdag is what you would call a cardboard artist. Not just some cardboard artist, a cardboard artist that takes its medium to the next level and pushes it to its limits. His recent works, ‘Sets for a Film I’ll Never Make’ are highly-complex and detailed structural experiments that he simply refers as “sketching with cardboard”. What is mind-boggling about these works is not necessarily the absurd complexity of each structure, but the fact that he done it all without using any detailed plans or drawings, everything has been more or less improvised during the process, which is quite remarkable.
For the first time ever, Google finally pulled down the curtains to reveal us just how much it takes to keep the interwebs alive. Yeah, we know that Google is not by definition the internet, but where would we be without it? The dozens of photographs Google made reveals us just how much design, organization, energy and power it requires to keep this goliath of an apparatus alive. The complete series can be found on the Google Datacenter page which also includes many interesting insights about the workings of Google’s Datacenter.
