Advanced Beauty

Sunday, December 28, 2008

Quite possibly my favorite communal art video project from this year, Advanced Beauty is a collaboration of video and sound sculpture.

Inspired by sound → color synesthesia, in which people experience colors in response to tones or other aspects of sounds. There are two categories of this type - narrow band → color synesthesia and broadband sound→ color synesthesia. Narrow band uses the timbre or key to provoke particular color experiences. Broadband also includes a variety of sounds such as a doorbell or a window opening that will elicit visual experiences.

I often think in color, which could be a form of this phenomenon. It's stimulating, although it can make it difficult to translate my thoughts into speech sometimes.




Advanced Beauty 12 of 18 / Directed by Paul Simpson from Universal Everything on Vimeo.


Advanced Beauty 9 of 18 / Directed by Marc Kremers from Universal Everything on Vimeo.


Advanced Beauty 8 of 18 / Directed by Universal Everything from Universal Everything on Vimeo.


Advanced Beauty 6 of 18 / Directed by Robert Hodgin from Universal Everything on Vimeo.


Advanced Beauty 3 of 18 / Directed by Karsten Schmidt from Universal Everything on Vimeo.

Khoda's psychological thriller

Friday, December 26, 2008


Khoda from Reza Dolatabadi on Vimeo.


6000 paintings.
2 years.
1 5-minute film.
Found via colourlovers.

for your thorough enjoyment

Thursday, December 11, 2008

I am impressed.

Giant's Causeway

Monday, December 8, 2008

Though it certainly looks chiseled and hewn, this incredible rock bridge is completely natural - 40,000 interlocking basalt columns which are mostly hexagonal. These basalt rocks were formed when molten lava was pushed through cracked chalk beds. As the lava cooled, the liquid basalt contracted into distinctive shapes.

Images via Reformation Tours, Aberfeldy, Travels in Ireland and Letter to America

Magic Garden


Eric Staller has done some kick ass exhibitions. I tend to use traditional items as my base, but his work is so much more intense than anything I could put on paper.

Brandberg Massif

Image via mromeijn
Like a giant, knobby mesa, the Brandberg Massif rises out of the Namib Desert in Namibia, Africa. This granite intrusion is riddled with caves full of art and is home to many unusual plants and animals that flourish in the hot, dry environment.

Rainbows

Rainbows

(Images via Daily Mail, wikipedia, wikipedia and National Geographic)

This brilliant prism of the color spectrum can be seen in everything from garden hose sprays to rainstorms and squalls.

(Image via missourisky)

They’re stunning, yet easy to explain: rays of light refract in molecules of water, causing a prismatic display of the color spectrum. The rainbow is made up of “Roy G. Biv” (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet) but the colors are actually a continuum, not distinct “stripes” of separate hues.

Light Art



I frequently get lost on the internet. I find one interesting art blog, and spretty soon I have eight tabs open for galleries and artists. It spirals from there. But I do find some wicked art, and I figured this was a way of both collecting and dispersing their art digitally. It's all very inspiring.



Lightmark - Germany




this man is a light genius.

clouds


Clouds are awesome, with their simple space patterns. The mammatus cloud can be an omen for an impending tornado.

Lenticular Clouds



Found at very high altitudes, I bet these are the source of a few ufo sightings.

Structures from Living Trees - Patrick Dougherty

Nils Udo - Artist Statement



Sketching with flowers. Painting with clouds. Writing with water. Tracing the May wind, the path of a falling leaf.

Working for a thunderstorm. Awaiting a glacier. Bending the wind. Directing water and light. The May-green call of the cuckoo and the invisible trace of its flight. Space.

The cry of an animal. The bitter taste of daphne. Burying the pond and the dragon-fly. Setting fire to the fog and the perfume of the yellow barberry.

Marrying sounds, colors and smells. The green grass. Counting a forest and a meadow.

1972: The sensations are omnipresent. Being a realist I just need to pick them up and release them from their anonymity. Utopias are under every rock, on every leaf, behind every tree, in the clouds and in the wind. The sun's course on the days of equinox; the tiny habitat of a beetle on a lime leaf; the pointed maple's red fire; the scent of herbs in a wooded gorge; a frog's croak in the water lentils; the primrose's perfume on the banks of a mountain creek; animal traces in the snow; the remaining trajectory of a bird darting through the woods; a gust of wind in a tree; the dancing of light on leaves; the endlessly complex relationship of branch to branch, twig to twig, leaf to leaf�

Everything perceivable through human senses takes part. Natural space experienced through hearing, seeing, smelling, tasting and touching. By means of the smallest possible interventions, living, three-dimensional natural space is re-organized, unlocked and put under tension. Reorganisation, of course for a finite period of time. One day, the intervention is wiped away, undone by nature without leaving a trace.

Clearly it is only in her very last refuges that nature is still intact, inexhaustible; it is only there that enchantment is still reality. On any day of the year, in every season, in any light, in any weather; in the Largest and Smallest.

These days however, people are not interested in this. Nature is no longer an issue, except to a few Greens, who mostly can no longer tell a lime tree from a beech tree.

Of course, there are many who pretend to love nature. Like the ones who claim to want peace. The fact is, they lost nature long ago. They don't see it any more, let alone hear it, smell it , taste it or touch it. When they do in fact take a look, they still don't see: they lost the prerequisites long ago for a larger, expansive and transitory overall view.

Documentation of a world experience becoming extinct. Providing evidence at the last possible moment of a life-awareness seemingly anachronistic. An attitude hardly conceivable, even to the well intentioned.

A basic idea is to achieve absolute purity. Nature performs a demonstration of itself. Every non-natural element is ruled out as impure. No other materials are used than those found in each natural space. The characteristics, the respective possibilities for processing, and the character of the natural space itself plays the major role in determining the shape of the work. Botany, collecting, preserving and displaying: the overwhelming abundance of natural phenomena can often only be catagorized under small or the most minute fragments of their inherient structures.

The element of time. Already in 1972, my first work in the Chiemgau Alps consisted of a planting. By installing plantings or by integrating them into more complex installations, the work is literally implanted into nature. As a part of nature, the work lives and passes away in the rhythm of the seasons.

Even though I work in parallel with nature and create my interventions with all possible caution, they will always remain a fundamental contradiction to themselves. It is this contradiction on which all my work is based . Even this work cannot avoid one fundamental disaster of our existence. It injures what it draws attention to, what it touches: the virginity of nature.

To unite, condense and amalgamate the specific possibilities of a landscape at a given season to form a unique pinnacle, the apotheosis of that season in that landscape. Implementing what is potentially possible, what latently exists in nature, to literally allow what never existed but was always there to become reality; the ever present - Utopia. Even one second of a lifetime is enough. The event has happened. I have awakened it and made it visible.

Make natural space into Art-space? Where is the limit on the narrow line between nature and art? Art? Life! What counts is the utopian character, the life- and art-blending character of my actions. My response to the events that mark my existence. My life. Are there art-lovers interested in my life?

A picture. A leaf, laden with flowers, drifting down a brook. Life.

Nils-Udo. Towards Nature.

Oh the Places We'll Go

Eden Cloud Chamber

2002
'EDEN CLOUD CHAMBER’, Eden Project, Cornwall, UK

Made from 120 tonnes of Cornish Slate, the work is sited on the end of a large granite wall (in ‘Wild Cornwall’), which together with a parallel wall forms a cut lane. You walk down this tunnel of a lane and into a passageway in the wall and thus into a small inner chamber with two seats. Via a lens in the ceiling a pool of clouds is projected onto a tipped screen on the floor. chris drury


The Ancient City of Matera, Italy


Beautiful, and coincidentally the setting for "The Passion of the Christ".

I Will Die Laughing

The Dancing Plague (or Dancing Epidemic) of 1518 was a case of dancing mania dancing mania that occurred in Strasbourg, Alsace, France (then part of the Holy Roman Empire) in July 1518. Numerous people took to dancing for days without rest, and over the period of about one month, most of the people died from heart attack, stroke, or exhaustion.[1]

-wikipedia