Art « Tikkunista!

9. Almost Real

Jan-27-2012 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: Preternaturally skilled artists creating images of nature with wood, paper, and junk. Impressive

* Heather Jansch’s Enchanting Driftwood Horses SeaWayBLOG

Collecting driftwood on the beaches to use it to create sculptures of animals. The author is Heather Jansch an English artist that joining her passions for drawing and for horses have started the amazing series of masterpieces.

* Insects Origami Zuza Fun

* Cyclopean Steampunk Spiders! 1-800-Recycling

Merging the mechanical and the organic, Montréal-based artist Daniel Proulx created these amazing steampunk spiders from pieces of brass, copper, gemstones and antique clock parts. It’s amazing to see how leftover wire pieces, springs, bolts, screws and other objects you might find in your garage or toolbox can be transformed into extraordinary steampunk creations — at least in Proulx’s capable hands.

11. Eyecandy: Festivals

Jan-27-2012 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: Fine photos of celebratory festivals. Not much else needed to be said really.

* Chinese Lunar New Year 2012 In Focus

* Kalachakra: A Tibetan Buddhist festival of teachings and meditations The Big Picture

* Pow Wow

10. Sticky Art

Jan-06-2012 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: Tape, stickers, eggs and flour: all materials used to create art, or at least fun. Should you explore Max Zorn’s site, and be curious that the only North American piece he’s done is in Toronto, we are sad to inform you that the intrepid Tikkunista art explorers found it has been removed. ☹ Plan your trip to Ibi instead.

* Street Art Max Zorn(via the Presurfer)

The idea to work with tape instead of paint was inspired by a friend who worked as a car designer at that time. These guys often use slim tapes to outline their ideas on large boards. I was surprised to see, how fast they could create stunning sketches with it. During the last years that kind of tape-art also conquered the streets as a new form of urban art. However, it is widely practised by using colored tape on walls or streets.

The idea to use light as a medium was born during a nightly run through Amterdam. The nice old street lamps with their golden light seemed perfect to be used as an open gallery for the first test of my modified tape-art.
The installation was very simple by just clamping the taped glass onto street lamps and once the light illuminates the many layers of tape, it creates a very graphic picture that seems to be self-glowing.

* What Happens When You Give Thousands of Stickers to Thousands of Kids Colossal

This December, in a surprisingly simple yet ridiculously amazing installation for theGallery of Modern Art in Brisbane, artist Yayoi Kusama constructed a large domestic environment, painting every wall, chair, table, piano, and household decoration a brilliant white, effectively serving as a giant white canvas. Over the course of two weeks, the museum’s smallest visitors were given thousands upon thousands of colored dot stickers and were invited to collaborate in the transformation of the space, turning the house into a vibrantly mottled explosion of color. How great is this?

* Spanish Festival of Els Enfarinats Celebrated With Flour Fight Amusing Planet

The annual festival of Els Enfarinats is celebrated with flour and egg fights. Els Enfarinats takes place in the town of Ibi in Alicante, Spain on December 28 as part of celebrations related to the Day of the Innocents. In the day long festival, participants dressed in mock military dress stage a mock coup pretending to take over the town. Dressed in a slovenly manner, they enter banks and shops stirring up trouble in a good-humoured way, imposing fines on shopkeepers and bankers, mocking local dignitaries and reading humorous speeches. Those who oppose are assaulted with flour cakes and eggs.

9. Untrustworthy Senses

Dec-23-2011 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: “Trust your senses not your neighbours.”– London Transport security notice. Don’t do it. We explore how you can’t trust your sense of taste, or sight, or hearing. (Touch and smell are trickier to do over a computer, I suppose.) Entertaining and insightful revelations: the last one is a real mind-blower!

* A Bad Taster in Your MouthWired Science

Let’s be blunt: The tongue is really dumb. Unlike the rest of our sensory organs, which are exquisitely sensitive, that lump of exposed muscle sitting in the mouth is a crude perceptual device, able to only detect five different taste sensations. (Your cochlea, in contrast, contains thousands of different hair cells, each of which is tuned to particular wavelengths of sound.)

… All sorts of clever experiments have demonstrated the limitations of the tongue. It turns out that expert wine critics can be tricked into confusing cheap and expensive clarets, that we prefer beer laced with balsamic vinegar (as long we don’t know it’s been added), that most people can’t tell Coke from Pepsi (but still have strong preferences) or pate from dog food. My favorite, though, comes from the mischievous Frederic Brochet at the University of Bordeaux. In a 2001 experiment, Brochet invited 57 wine experts and asked them to give their impressions of what looked like two glasses of red and white wine. The wines were actually the same white wine, one of which had been tinted red with food coloring. But that didn’t stop the experts from describing the “red” wine in language typically used to describe red wines. One expert praised its “jamminess,” while another enjoyed its “crushed red fruit.” Not a single one noticed it was actually a white wine. Because the tongue is vague in its instructions, we are forced to constantly parse its input based upon whatever other knowledge we can summon to the surface. As Brochet himself notes, our expectations of what the wine will taste like “can be much more powerful in determining how you taste a wine than the actual physical qualities of the wine itself.”

* Sidewalk Art Masterpieces Seem As Real As Photographs

* McGurk Effect Audio-Video Illusion BBC

User Hint: Ignore the verbose write-up, and watch the video

10. Eye Twisters

Dec-02-2011 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: OK, if you’re subject to seizures from op-art motion-sickness inducing gifs, you might not want to pursue this section. But if you like images that you stare at, and then go, “Whoa!”, you’re about to have a good time. Stare at centre for ten seconds then look away. Repeat as needed. Do not operate heavy machinery while staring at image!

11. Eyecandy: Along the Shore

Nov-04-2011 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: The bird is happy to see so many of its kind, in Murmuration (Give yourself two points if you know what that word means!). This week all the Eyecandy takes place along the shore, that place of special fertility where different worlds intersect.

* MurmurationVimeo (Thanks Diana!)

* Whale of a Time Eyewitness

* Beach Art … from Jersey Planet Green

* ‘Criminal’ Penguin Caught On Camera The Presurfer

The birds build their stone nests to elevate and protect their eggs from run-off when the Antarctic ice melts. Males with the best nests are more likely to attract a mate, so, in a colony of half a million penguins, the best stones are highly prized.

* Baby CrocodilesEnvironmental Graffiti

9. Surreal

Oct-28-2011 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: Tikkunista’s computer has a built-in dictionary which helpfully defines “surreal” as “having the qualities of surrealism”. It has no definition for surrealism. In a strange meta-way, that makes sense, doesn’t it? And speaking of flaming giraffes, here is a strange and wonderful movie, some photographs, and a conspiracy theory that passes belief, without even slowing down.

* Page 23 The Presurfer

At first sight it might look like an IKEA commercial. Instead, Page 23 is a beautiful 4 minutes short movie that describes a surreal yet real world many of us might live in. The language spoken is Dutch but it’s with English subtitles.

* Photography : marc alain

* Early Morning, Pyongyang The Guardian, Eyewitness

* The Beatles Never Existed

There were multiples of each character performing as “John”, “Paul”, “George” and “Ringo”. Each part of the world appears to have had its own Beatles group, And even then, there were sometimes multiple characters within….There is an ever-increasing amount of evidence and information that this “superstar” rock group was produced by recurring techniques known as Human Simulacra as well as Clones, Organic Robotoids and Synthetic Humans. Take the journey at our forum and decide for yourself. You be the judge.

2. Watch Occupying Wall Street

Oct-14-2011 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: “The revolution will not be televised,” sang Gil Scott-Heron, 40 years ago. But it will be photographed, tweeted, twittered, and streamed. You can watch OWS in real time (or any of 30 other occupations). An artist draws the faces she sees as OWS goes into its 29th day. And In Focus has a stunning photo collection of the occupy movements across the world.

* All Occupy Wall Street Streams and IRC Live Revolution

All “occupy” movements, including Toronto and Vancouver as of 10/15/11 on live video stream.

* Faces of Occupied Wall Streetmollycrabapple.com

I live half a block from Liberty Park, the homebase and nerve center of the Occupy Wall Street movement. I’ve been going down almost every day I’ve been in town to drop off books, tarps, and blankets for the protesters. While the media caricatures the protesters as a group of ne’er do well hippies, its actually hundreds of people of all ages, colors and walks of life.

* Occupy Wall Street Spreads Beyond NYC Alan Taylor In Focus

8. Body Images

Oct-07-2011 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: Explore this set of human images distorted for biological or artistic purposes. We start with underwater sculptures forming a new reef, continue with Tom Gallant’s creation of beautiful cutaway figures out of hardcore porn using a sharp knife (NSFW, but less than you’d think, offer five of Lucien Freud’s portraits (including Queenie!), and end with a lovely sculpture of unknown origin.

*“Bodies” Fill Underwater Sculpture Park National Geographic (Thanks, Diana)

More than 400 of the permanent sculptures have been installed in recent months in the National Marine Park of Cancún, Isla Mujeres, and Punta Nizuc as part of a major artwork called “The Silent Evolution.” The installation is the first endeavor of a new underwater museum called MUSA, or Museo Subacuático de Arte.

* Tom Gallant – Can Porn Be Art? Don’t Panic Magazine

Why do you choose to use hardcore heterosexual porn throughout your work? Is it a conscious choice?

It is a very conscious choice. Basically there are very few gay ‘actors’ coerced into making porn, there are very few gay men trafficked for sex, there are very few gay men exploited by an industry in a way that reduces them to pieces of meat. Straight pornography has a history that is far richer and describes man’s exploitation of women in a very clear and chronological manner from the dawn of our visual culture. Furthermore, I feel that straight pornography holds far more conceptual layers and in many ways is not about sex but fetishes, whereas gay pornography is an extension of a sexuality that is generally more promiscuous and sex more readily available. Whilst society is changing and of course the internet has opened up a much larger public to shared fetishes, straight, bi, S&M, swinging etc.. it is still much harder for a straight man for example to get what they want legally and for a woman to act out fantasies in a safe environment. All of this I feel adds to the ideas contained in straight porn and is then compounded by being cut with surgical blades by a straight white middle class male. I am not making a statement pro- or anti-porn or pornography, rather using the concepts that it contains.

* My top five Lucian Freud paintings The Guardian

* Freedom sculpture

6. Political Performance Art

Sep-23-2011 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: Tikkunista does love political performance art, and here are some fine recent examples: Life Neutral applies the concept of carbon credits to warfare, Tricksters Black Flood and Yes-Men suggest the Tar Sands as a stand-in for Mordor, while a hitherto unknown group “The Doggy Liberation Front” reduces the Toronto Star to gibbering fear by arming themselves with pink toy pliers and sticking up a few posters. Little Brother watches back.

* Life Neutral – Life Beyond Conflict

Life Neutral Solutions works with the defence industry to provide solutions for balancing the unfortunate side effects of weapons use. Through sponsoring the birth and care of children in North America, the United Kingdom and Europe, Life Neutral™ is committed to offsetting the collateral effects of defence operations in third-world conflict zones.

Life Neutral Solutions is interested in working with you. We are seeking potential parents who are committed to an ethical approach to weapons use and are excited by the possibility of an integrated package that would support you in bringing new life into our world.

* One hoax to rule them all: The Hobbit movie tar sands story revealed Rabble

The performance was the culmination of a series of media reports that director Peter Jackson is shooting scenes from “The Hobbit” film in the tar sands. In a press release issued today, a troupe of Toronto activists calling themselves Black Flood, working alongside the infamous pranksters of The Yes Lab, confirmed their role in the events for “the purpose of stirring up some hot and bubbly controversy on the Alberta tar sands.”

It all started on Saturday when Stop Mordor appeared on Facebook demanding that the Alberta government stop the plans to use the Alberta tar sands as Mordor in the new Hobbit film. At the same time there were some tweets claiming sightings of Elijah Wood, reprising his role as Frodo Baggins, in Fort McMurray.

* Dog-loving vandals target fences in off-leash areas Wit Wagner The Toronto Star

A lawless, self-styled Liberation Front is threatening mayhem in the heart of the city. But most residents have little to fear, unless they are dog owners fretful of their pooches running amok….Wire cutters have also appeared attached to notices, signed by the so-called Doggy Liberation Front, instructing potential vandals not to “leave sharp ends exposed.”

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