Your Daily Awesome

Working with discarded paper bags from takeout joints such as McDonald’s and Krispy Kreme, commercial gift bags and post office packages, Teruya creates delicately rendered shadowboxes in which the sculptural form cut out from the container is shaped by the container itself. Using photography as the starting point, Teruya photographs trees he encounters in his daily life and then painstakingly recreates the form of the individual trees as paper cutouts that are suspended inside the bags. Light filters down through the holes to illuminate the tiny tree within each bag’s miniature interior landscape in what the Teruya describes as his attempt to return a spent consumer product back to the forest.

gallery

The process is the same in every case: culling through a collection of books, pulling particular titles, and eventually grouping the books into clusters so that the titles can be read in sequence, from top to bottom. The final results are shown either as photographs of the book clusters or as the actual stacks themselves, shown on the shelves of the library they were drawn from.

gallery
via kottke

website

via

You love the paintings; now buy the action figures!

A rug shaped after the map of Iraq features soldiers advancing from many direction into Bagdad. Through newspapers and television, the image of Iraq is continuously depicted with graphics similar to board games and action figures, giving it a game-like dimension, which somehow shifts the character of the war. The rug, with cute little felt soldiers walking on a soft and warm surface, denounces this confusion, and the way in which the tragic reality of war is somehow diluted by using these images.

link

The excellent Coudal Partners have come up with a great experiement that exploits the web in a great, hands-on, human way: the Swap Meat—part leap of faith, part art exchange, part black market.

Send us some of your stuff. Not stuff you made for clients or stuff you just have laying around. Send us some of the stuff you made for yourselves, that you’re selling or giving away. You’re going to have to trust us on this, but we’ll check out what you send and then send you back some stuff of approximately equal value. That might be stuff we received from someone else or some of our stuff, or some combination of the two.

The Four Things That Can Happen When You Send Us Something For Swapping

1. Nothing. If you send us something mass-produced or something that is generally available through mainstream retail outlets or that doesn’t fit in the general vibe of the Swap Meat, we’ll look at it, possibly enjoy it and maybe even write about it somewhere. But beyond that, nothing will happen.

2. You Get Swapped. We’ll match your item with someone else’s item and swap them. This is the most likely result and we hope you dig what you get back. That’s really what this whole thing is all about.

3. You Get Swapped & Featured. We’ll photograph and write a short profile about selected original, amazing, creative things and feature them on the Swapped Page including a link to where people can get more information or make a purchase. We’re featuring at least one new thing every weekday and if you subscribe to our blended RSS feed you’ll know when they’re posted.

4. You Get Swapped, Featured & Commissioned. When we receive an item that we totally love and that is, for one reason or another, not available for sale on the web, we may commission the object’s creator to produce a special, limited-edition to be sold through our Swapped Page.

Now get to swapping, or check out some of the selected items changing hands right now. (Or watch the project’s sweet video.)

Did anybody in New York catch Matthieu Laurette’s talk Monday night? A quick trip around the internet reveals him to be a fascinating Frenchman (even if his website is sort of a nightmare to traverse).

•In 1993, he established his artistic birth certificate by taking part in a TV game called Tournez Manège (The Dating Game) where the female presenter asked him who he was, to which he replied: ‘A multimedia artist.’

Says his Wiki:

•Since his first Apparition on Tournez Manége, Laurette has been developing an ongoing series of what he calls ‘Apparitions’ on TV and in the media. (In French the word Apparition means both ‘apparition’ and ‘appearance’). Among other shows he has appeared in La Grande famille, Canal +, TV (France), Je passe à la télé (France), Journal de 13h et Journal de 20h (France).

Laurette’s Apparition: The Today Show, NBC, 31 December 2004, (Guy Debord Is So Cool!) (2004) renegotiates the critique of mass media: amongst love message banners and goofy signs being held up by the audience of the outdoor-broadcast of the NBC infotainment show on Rockefeller Plaza in New York, Laurette held a pink cardboard sign stating “GUY DEBORD IS SO COOL!”

•Laurette’s Produits remboursés/Money-back Products (1993-2001) was his method of shopping and being fully refunded based on the basic marketing system of the major food and commodities corporations. He fed and cleaned himself for nothing by almost only ever buying products with “Satisfied or your money back” or “Money back on first purchase” offers. In 2001 at the 49th Venice Biennale, he presented Moneyback Life! a large retrospective installation combining enlargements of press cuttings, a truck with an integrated TV wall showing TV clips of his Apparitions/Appearances and a life size wax figure of himself pushing a shopping cart full of Moneyback products.

•Citizenship Project (Wanted: Financial Support to Acquire Citizenships) are a series of projects where Laurette attempts to acquire as many nationalities as possible.

Check out Laurette’s MySpace or download a free 58-page catalogue of his projects.

When the levees broke, nothing was the same for New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge is about escaping and surviving Hurricane Katrina–and what happens next in the lives of a cross-section of Crescent City residents. Told in webcomic form, A.D. is free and presented by SMITH Magazine.

A.D. tells the story of Katrina and its aftermath from the perspective of real people still dealing with the storm each and every day. A two-part prologue sets the scene and shows the storm, almost like a silent movie. In chapter one, we meet the people whose lives we’ll be following over the course of one year, with audio and video augmenting the comic itself on our active blog. A.D. is a nonfiction graphic novel, a new approach to storytelling, and a multifaceted peek into the personal tales emerging from the storm of the century.

A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge
via

via

website

1724 C.E.

Though born without the benefit of hands or legs, and standing only twenty-nine inches tall, Matthew Buchinger was a proficient bagpiper, trumpeter, and dulcimerist, as well as a talented magician and accomplished artist. Among his many impressive skills was micrographic illustration. In this four-by-six-inch self-portrait, Buchinger forms the individual curls of his wig out of seven psalms and the Lord’s Prayer.

1870 C.E.

With the Prussian army besieging Paris and all other means of communication with the outside world cut off, passenger pigeons become the primary means of transporting mail into the city. However, weighted down by even the thinnest paper, the pigeons are easy shots for German gunners and their specially trained hawks. René Dagron, a Parisian photographer, proposes a solution: to print news and letters in large sheets, which can then be shrunk using the new technology of microphotography. By this method, approximately 54,000 messages can be condensed to a weight of less than one gram, easily carried by any pigeon. On November 12, Dagron makes a harrowing escape from Paris by balloon, and establishes the headquarters of French microphotography in Tours. Over the course of the war, some two and a half million messages return with the pigeons to their Parisian dovecotes.

1894 C.E.

Miniature book collector George Salomon of Paris disperses his seven-hundred-title collection, a library that reportedly “could be carried in a moderate-sized portmanteau.” His spirit lives on today in the Miniature Book Society, an organization whose interests extend only to printed works three inches or smaller.

read the entire story

Check it out here.

*Further reading: My short interview with Miranda is published today, on the occasion of her very good new book. (The new Blonde Redhead album’s not too shabby, either.)

Humans, try as they might, are terrible at trying to be random, in fact often humans in trying to approximate randomness become quite predictable. So knowing that there is always something motivating your opponent’s actions, there are a couple of tricks and techniques that you can use to tip the balance in your favour.

1 - Rock is for Rookies
In RPS circles a common mantra is “Rock is for Rookies” because males have a tendency to lead with Rock on their opening throw. It has a lot to do with idea that Rock is perceived as “strong” and forceful”, so guys tend to fall back on it. Use this knowledge to take an easy first win by playing Paper. This tactic is best done in pedestrian matches against someone who doesn’t play that much and generally won’t work in tournament play.

keep reading

My former employers and mentors at FotoFest are gearing up for a 2008 biennial dedicated to contemporary photography from China, very little of which has ever been seen in the US. Last October, FotoFest brought their “Meeting Place” portfolio review program to Beijing to scope out some of the talent there, and have created a website with some of the best portfolios from the visit. I think I’m going to have to make it to Houston in March for this one; it looks like the perfect antedote to the tired American and European photo cliches dominating the galleries and museums right now.

Fang Er, The Sweetest Thing
Chen Nong, Beijing Opera
Yan Chang Jiang, Paper Man
Liu Li Je, Another Episode

gallery

these are always fun

Not only does Lens Culture have new color camera obscura photos by Abelardo Morell (the only color images of his I’ve ever seen), they also have a great podcast interview with the artist.

Abelardo Morell travels the world and converts full-size rooms (some spare, some ornately rococo) into immense camera obscura devices. He brings the outside in through a tiny pin-hole, and by the alchemy of optics, the outside is projected quite naturally upside down superimposing and hugging the surfaces of everything in the room. Then, he photographs the resulting “installation” with his 8 x 10 view camera and enlarges the prints to mural size.

Judge a Book By its Cover does exactly what it promises to do, with frequently hilarious results.

Dear Gd, please tell me that this cover did not just refer to being pregnant as being “in bloom”. Ack! My eyes! They’re bleeding!
Okay, sheer abhorrence against title aside, who the fuck designed this cover? Why is there a margin of white around three sides? What is going on in the inset (is that a statue of a small purple man with a large purple phallus)? Why are there no ACTUAL WILLOW TREES (in bloom or otherwise) ON THE COVER?!
I leave it to my faithful readers to make the obvious pussy willow joke.

I don’t think Lord Challmond is going to need a bride, seeing as he’s got no penis. I think this title will be going to a distant nephew. But who’d wanna pass on these genes, anyway? If Quentin Tarrantino and Jay Leno had a child, this is what he’d look like.

She looks rather happy, though. Probably thinking, “Whew, I’ll never have to do my wifely duty, seeing as my husband lacks the proper equipment.”

Please tell me this cover doesn’t feature a bunch of Aryan men in jeans standing around a fountain shooting a highly suspicious white substance in the air…Oh, shit, you can’t do that, can you? I’m all for gay erotica, but this picture is a little too much Socialist realism and a little too little Tom of Finland, if you get my drift.