Portent

Well there are high-brow websites and cultural ones but then you get something a little less intellectual like this one. The title may be a clue: statue molesters.

It’s a fairly easy concept to explain. Take a statue- the ruder or sillier the better, have somebody pose near it, maybe holding their hands or posture in a rude or naughty way. Take a photo… The gallery screen shot gives you a clue… there are a lot of pages of photos…

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Something a little different. You are shown image after image and have to rate them for life likeness, on a scale of 0 to 10 where 10 is most like a face like and 0 isn’t anything like a face.

I suspect this is some variation of a genetic algorithm. This is a way of trying to solve a problem that doesn’t lend itself to normal computation by using a process akin to genetic selection. Interesting.

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You wouldn’t want to meet this person on a dark night. I’m not sure if it is a face tattoo or just painted on. Excellent bit of artwork!

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I’ve never been fond of Flash but there’s no denying that it lets designers do some amazing effects. Where theres a lot of Flash code to load, the better designers usually provide a pre-loader; an animation usually showing a %loaded.

That’s all this site does though they do let you filter by year and provide information about the site that each pre-loader was used in. There are some brilliant animations there…

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(Taken from Wikipedia)Yann Arthus-Bertrand (born March 13, 1946) is a renowned and internationally-recognised French photographer. He originally specialised in animal photography, but later turned to aerial photography of subjects in many locations across the world. He has produced over 60 books of his landscape photographs taken from helicopters and balloons. Yann Arthus-Bertrand’s work has often been published in the National Geographic magazine.

As you’d imagine, with that kind of background, the website has some stunning photography. There are three parts- the earth from above, the French people and animals. Since he started “the earth from above” project, he and his team have taken over half a million photos and put a selection on here. The website itself runs in Flash and is very nicely done.

You’ll also find more photos of his here on the yannarthusbetrand.com website.

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Kunst-Formen der Natur (Art Forms in Nature), by Ernst Haeckel, 1898 is now in the public domain (probably has been for a long time) .

This is a wonderful book, which features all sorts of illustrations of the natural world. If you’re doing some research for organic shapes, this book is a nice place to start. There are 397 pages in total, or if you like very big PDF files you can download it from Eric Gjerde’s website. He posted this on Flickr.com, the photo sharing site.

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Australian art student Nichola Manion believes “To reduce a city to almost nothing, To render the landscape in two dimensions, To see the world in a sheet of paper…is to see the humanity in everything” and “Money circles the globe, forming links between cities on opposite sides of the world. I must give them a voice and share the stories they tell…”

He uses art to get this message across using city scapes in paper and in money. There are 36 photos here. A nice piece of work.

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As you can see I won. Mind you it was on the easiest level and when they mean easy they mean very easy.

Playpen is an interesting idea. They’ve taken the mediawiki software that drives Wikipedia and a host of other websites) and created a Ceefax type graphical click and point adventure game.

Being a Wiki type site anyone can edit the screens and add new ones and there are something like 1,500 of them. So enjoy and if you’re creative or artistic add some more!

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It’s been a while since I covered a generator. This one impressed me because of the range of fonts. The one I used is my favourite though there were a couple of others that came close.

Interesting enough, this is done by a program written in C (with a PHP wrapper) called figlet, using a bunch of special font files and if you’re interested you can download the C source from there with fonts and compile and run it on pretty much any platform.

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You have got to love anywhere that says “Come visit the “real” MOBA in the basement of the Dedham Community Theatre, conveniently located just outside the men’s room. The nearby flushing helps maintain a uniform humidity.”

This is a real museum located in Dedham, Massachusetts, as well as the website. The examples shown on the site exemplify that the art shown here is not very good. It’s a community-based, private institution dedicated to the collection, preservation, exhibition, and celebration of bad art in all its forms and in all its glory. The museum was founded in the fall of 1993 and presented its first show in March 1994. You can even buy greetings card featuring some of the Moba art work from the Massachusetts Bay Trading Company. That’s tempting!

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I love it when you see somebody talented do something extraordinary with everyday objects. It gives me the hope that maybe, just maybe I could do that. Though deep in my heart I know I can’t and never will.

A point in question, this photograph and many others (Link goes via Google.com translation as original site is in Spanish). You can also see his art on the online Saatchi Gallery.

These are photo quality but drawn by hand using ballpoint pens from photos he has taken by the Spanish artist Juan Francisco Casas. Apparently he goes through 4 pens per painting! They are of the “i can’t believe it’s not a photo” quality. Just amazing!

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If you’ve got three minutes, watch this film. It’s beautifully shot and a bit sad as this bloke’s life flashes before him.

That’s not the point though. It’s that this was shot on a modern digital camera; a Canon 5D Mark II with some Canon Prime lenses. Prime should be a clue that these are not the cheapest lenses! I guess though the camera plus lenses probably cost under $15,000 in total which given the film is remarkable quality. That plus of course it was made by professional film makers with props, scenery, costumes etc. If you follow the link to the Canon Digital Learning Centre you can see a list of the lenses used.

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The trend towards online packages that can do everything that desktop applications continues. We’ve seen drawing packages before eg MyOats but that’s coded in Flash.

But i think Sketchpad is a remarkable example and an advance on the art. it’s fast, pretty powerful compared to some drawing packages and you don’t even have to register to save the image. Just click the save button in the top right and it opens up a png in another browser window.

Whats even better is that it’s coded in JavaScript and you can view it on an iPhone/iPad. However I think using it there would be an exercise in masochism as apps meant for a mouse don’t work so well on touch devices. A version that works with an iPhone/iPad version would be pretty clever.

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This is not about building sand castles but is a remarkable video of a live performance on “Ukraine’s got talent”. An artist called Kseniya Simonova tells a tale of love in World War 2 using just sand and her fingers and artistic talent.

She conjures up images in the sand with her fingers then wham they’re gone, wiped clean and replaced by something else. A truly remarkable performance.

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These are quite wonderful, puzzle boxes and remind me of puzzles in films. You have to solve the puzzle to open the box.

You can buy some, for example the snake box, which costs just under $700 has tessellations on the top. By moving pieces around, eventually you end up with a chessboard pattern and the box opens.

The designer Kagen Schaefer is into maths and woodworking and makes puzzle boxes for a living in Denver, Colorado.

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