art
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Giant snow art turns the ground into a canvas
Sometimes it’s nice to stop worrying about the fate of the planet and just appreciate it for its beauty — and it doesn’t hurt if its beauty is slightly enhanced by being part of a massive environmental art project. Sonja Hinrichsen’s snow drawing looks like it could be a Marimekko fabric design, but it’s actually […]
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Ultimate tiny house is suspended 40 feet in the air
Via the Dish, this art installation in downtown San Francisco is the ultimate tiny house. It’s seven by eight by 11 feet, and it’s suspended 40 feet in the air. Plus, it’s recycled AND green: It’s made of 100-year-old reclaimed barn wood, and powered by off-grid solar. Among other ideas, the project is meant to […]
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Damien Hirst to build eco-homes, possibly full of formaldehyde
World’s richest artist Damien Hirst, best known for preserved sharks and diamond-encrusted skulls and having his assistants make all his artwork, apparently owns an obscene amount of land in Ilfracombe parish, Devon, England. And he wants to use it to build a development of 500 “eco-homes.”
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Here’s what the inside of a tree sounds like
Installation artist Bartholomäus Traubeck’s new work, “Years,” uses some kind of optical dealie to translate a tree’s age rings into piano music.
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Mosstika’s living graffiti is amazing
Street art isn't just gang tags -- it can revitalize and beautify urban spaces, increase community identity, and even be a form of nonviolent protest. The work of Edina Tokodi kind of does all of those, plus it's about as green as graffiti can be: Tokodi's studio Mosstika makes street art from living moss.
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Photographer turns unrelenting boringness of suburbia into art
Jason Griffiths is an assistant professor of design at Arizona State, and apparently living in the middle of all that desert sprawl got to him after a while. In the early aughts he jumped into a car, drove all over the country, and made a discovery so banal it’s practically a tautology: Suburbia is the same everywhere.
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The city, stripped down: How ruin porn can help rebuild the Rust Belt
Photo: BB and HHThis essay originally appeared in Rustwire. Living in the Rust Belt, one becomes accustomed to things that many people would find shocking. Examples: Not long ago, I saw the façade of an abandoned building fall out of itself on fire and into the street. Firemen and neighbors gathered around to look. Nobody […]
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Giant smiley measures a city’s mood
The Fühl-o-meter (Feel-o-meter), also known as the Public Face, is an art installation, which is probably good because if it were an official civic amenity it might be a little Orwellian. But as art it’s cool! The idea is that cameras scan the faces of people passing through the city, and analyze their expressions to […]
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Totally plausible water solution: Collect ice in the desert
Look, it's very simple. All you need to solve the water shortage is a giant metal leaf that you put in the desert and it uses solar power to grow ice. Then you drink the ice. How is this difficult? Okay, this is not completely for real. The leaf's creators don't think it will singlehandedly […]