Art « Tikkunista!

11. Eyecandy: Spring Flowers

Mar-23-2012 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: We entered spring this week (if you’re in the Northern half). So some photo spreads on spring, and flowers… including a most marvellous installation.

* The First Day of Spring In Focus

* Signs of Spring: 2012 The Big Picture

* 28,000 Potted Flowers Installed at the Massachusetts Mental Health Center Colossal

In 2003 a building housing the Massachusetts Mental Health Center (MMHC) was slated for demolition to make way for updated facilities…. How does one memorialize a building impossibly rich with a history of both hope and sadness, and do it in a way that reflects not only the past but also the future? …The concept was simple but absolutely immense in scale. Nearly 28,000 potted flowers would fill almost every square foot of the MMHC including corridors, stairwells, offices and even a swimming pool, all of it brought to life with a sea of blooms.

* Living Color Flowers The Presurfer

11. Eyecandy: Carving

Mar-02-2012 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: We’re used to carved wood, or marble. Here are a few unusual objects for carving: books, eggs, tires. Wow!

* Book Carvings (Thanks, Oriah!)

Using knives, tweezers and surgical tools, Brian Dettmer carves one page at a time. Nothing inside the out-of-date encyclopedias, medical journals, illustration books, or dictionaries is relocated or implanted, only removed.

Dettmer manipulates the pages and spines to form the shape of his sculptures. He also folds, bends, rolls, and stacks multiple books to create completely original sculptural forms.

* Carved-away eggshell

* Wim Delvoye – TYRES

12. Quote of the Week

Mar-02-2012 | Comments (0)

“People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you.

You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity.

Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.

You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.” Banksy

8. A Troupe of Toons

Feb-24-2012 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: The list of unused Tikkunista potential articles (currently way over 1500) had a lot of fine recent entries whose only common factor was that they were all cartoons. So…. we open with a fanfare: a cartoon of six musicians. Click on them to hear their music. Invent new combos. Waste precious hours you’ll never get back. Then look at the last 60 years of the history of Rock, in cartoon form. Topics range over subject material, social impact, profitability, hair style, drug use…. Tom Tomorrow drew our sex talk with Rick Santorum, full of truthiness. And a fine editorial cartoon on Greece, just so you can feel virtuous and educated.

* Fanfare (click for sounds)

* History of Rock (click to enbigify)

* Sex Talk with Santorum: The Evil of Contraception

* Sisyphus

9. Coffee Art

Feb-24-2012 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: There are 7 million articles, Google just revealed to us, on the harmful effects of coffee. Sadly, there are only half that number on the positive effects. Add one to the positive: you can make art with coffee. We start with an amazing portrait, made with coffee stains, continue through a huge mosaic made from coffee beans, and end at (where else?) Dark Roasted Blend which has a glorious all-encompassing feature on coffee art and coffee makers.

* Jay Chou Coffee Stain Portrait Oh I see Red!

* Largest Coffee Bean Mosaic The Presurfer

Most people enjoy a hit of caffeine but Saimir Strati from Tirana, Albania, might have something of a coffee obsession. He has completed a record-breaking mosaic measuring 270 sq feet and made from a million coffee beans weighing 309 lbs.

* Coffee Art and Style Dark Roasted Blend

9. Thinking Differently

Feb-17-2012 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: Nope, it’s not an Apple polish. Sometimes thinking outside the envelope can lead to deep and powerful insights. Other times, it’s just dumb. We have some of each, and you’ll know which one is which.

* Taking Imagination Seriously Janet Echelman Video on TED.com (Thanks, Diana)

Janet Echelman found her true voice as an artist when her paints went missing — which forced her to look to an unorthodox new art material. Now she makes billowing, flowing, building-sized sculpture with a surprisingly geeky edge. A transporting 10 minutes of pure creativity. American artist Janet Echelman reshapes urban airspace with monumental, fluidly moving sculpture that responds to environmental forces including wind, water, and sunlight.

* Noma Bar Interview grain edit (Thanks, Don!)

Noma Bar is a man of few strokes. But don’t let the simplicity fool you. His talent lies in his efficiency in depicting characters and social issues. With bold colors, shapes and one or two icons he captures the spirit of a person.

* Crazy Logistics darkroastedblend

9. Almost Real

Jan-27-2012 | Comments (1)

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!