© mighty god king

© Astronomy Picture of the Day

© M. Mararian

The Superest: Who is the superest hero of them all?

What is this? The Superest is a continually running game of My Team, Your Team. The rules are simple:

Player 1 draws a character with a power. Player 2 then draws a character whose power cancels the power of that previous character. Repeat.

Ocean Sands, Bahamas

In 2002, the Library of Congress unveiled an exhibit of photos taken by the Landsat-7 satellite. Culled from over 400,000 pictures, this small set of 41 pictures (more added in 2003) represented the most beautiful of the satellite’s images. The physical exhibit is long gone, but NASA maintains an online version of the full gallery, and high-resolution prints can be obtained at the USGS image gallery.

© Jenny Heiskell

The Quest For Every Beard Type

I’ve been growing a beard every winter for some years now, and every spring, I try to see how many facial hair variations as I can check off from the chart of facial hair types. Listed below are descriptions of the 34 facial hair types from the chart, including examples of the 24 variations that I’ve been able to attain so far.

My idol? He takes the Octobeard to a new level of awesomeness.

Biggest drawing in the world

With the help of a GPS device and DHL, I have drawn a self portrait on our planet. My pen was a briefcase containing the GPS device, being sent around the world. The paths the briefcase took around the globe became the strokes of the drawing.

UPDATE: Sometimes I hate art. Yes, it’s a fake. (via cliff)

In 1890, Alexander Stanhope St George undertook one of the most ambitious excavation projects in all of history: an immense tunnel connecting New York City to London through the earth. But it would not allow physical travel from one end to the other. Dubbed the “telectroscope”, the tunnel would be a “device for the suppression of absence”, enabling viewers to visit the distant city without ever having to leave the island. Unfortunately, the project met a tragic end before completion, and was lost to the winds of history.

Until great-grandson Paul St George came along.

Now, with the help of UK art organization Artichoke (see: The Little Girl Giant), the grand idea has come to fruition. From May 22 to June 15 at Fulton Ferry Landing in Brooklyn or Tower Bridge in London, you can experience the majesty of these sister cities without ever leaving the safety of solid ground.

Oh, yes, it’s free and open 24 hours a day.

SPOILER ALERT: Yes, it is fake. It’s an art project, get it?

“Listen People” by Kim Ch’on-taek (1725-1766)

Listen people, wherever you are,
please attend to these words:
Will your youth last forever?
Will your white hair turn black again?
Life speeds by like a dream,
why not fill each minute with joy?

Jiyeon Song at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena California has designed One Day Poem Pavilion, an experiment in experiential typography. Light shining through complex perforations in a dome produces shifting lines of poetry on the ground. The poetry’s form forces the audience to reflect upon (individual) experience, time, and “the finite nature of human life.”

See the piece in motion or watch a slide show of photos up close.

Blast-Door Art: Cave Paintings of the Nuclear Era

At the back of what looks like an enclosed porch of an unpretentious ranch house near Wall, South Dakota, a steel-runged ladder leads down a 30-foot concrete access shaft. At the bottom, a massive, eight-ton steel-and-concrete door is painted the red, white and blue image of a Domino’s Pizza box, with a slightly altered phrasing of the chain’s familiar promise: “World-wide Delivery in 30 Minutes or Less; Or Your Next One is Free.” But in this case the “Next One” is a Minuteman II intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM). For almost three decades, the house was the “Delta One” Launch Control Facility (LCF) for ten Minuteman missiles armed with nuclear warheads. The massive blast door was designed to ensure that the underground launch control center survived a nuclear attack.

Welcome to the mordant, jingoistic and occasionally crude — but rarely before seen world — of “blast-door art.”

Ten Recurring Economic Fallacies, 1774-2004 - Exactly what it says, starting with myth #1: The Broken Window.

One of the most persistent is that of the broken window—one breaks and this is celebrated as a boon to the economy: the window manufacturer gets an order; the hardware store sells a window; a carpenter is hired to install it; money circulates; jobs are created; the GDP goes up. In truth, of course, the economy is no better off at all.

Wants For Sale - Christine and Justin are a couple from New York City who paint a portrait of something they want, priced to sell at however much money they need to purchase that something. Dinner at Nobu? $152. Financial security? $1,000,000. Sleep? Free.

The Observatory - The Columbia Journalism Review recently launched The Observatory, “a full-time department dedicated to critiquing the press coverage of science and the environment”. Relevant articles are light at the moment, but the archives will grow heartily as time goes on.

Overdub Tampering Committee - For about three years, this group has been downloading recently leaked albums and re-leaking them with some minor additions. A bass line here, a piano part there, and you suddenly have in your possession music that seemed to be legitimate, but was very obviously and cleverly not.

This got us thinking: what if this problem got more insidious, subtle, and widespread? What if there was a network of musicians who got a hold of albums right as they leaked, added subtle yet very much additional overdubs all over the album, and then re-leaked it to the internet?

We imagined a scenario where someone would get in a car with their friend, he would put on the new _____ album, and you would say, “Where’s all the piano parts?” to which the driver would say, “What piano parts? This album is all guitars and drums.” Finally, you would scratch your head and say, “Not my copy!”

Aviary - Still in private beta testing, Aviary is a collection of web applications “for artists of all genres”. You can (will be able to) choose from Phoenix (image editor), Myna (audio editor), Owl (desktop publisher), Horus (font editor), and a dozen others. This is likely to be astounding if it comes anywhere close to meeting expectations.

Flickr: Photos from the decapitator - Find billboard with image of person’s or animal’s head. Replace head with bloody stump. Guerilla artfare was never so much fun.

From Cabinet Magazine, Issue 27:

Pinoncelli had definitively dedicated himself to “happenings.” Combatting the society of the spectacle required that he advance on numerous fronts. In 1967, he had squirted the Minister of Culture and national icon André Malraux with red paint. Changing weapons, in 1975 he held up a bank in Nice with a sawed-off shotgun, asking for, and escaping with, ten francs (he said he was going to just ask for one franc, but the inflation of the period was so high that he changed his mind at the last minute). Inspired not only by Guy Debord but also the Cynic philosopher Diogenes, Pinoncelli continued his activities. It is said that for a time Diogenes lived naked in a barrel. In Lyons, Pinoncelli took up and then let fall the toga of the Greek philosopher. He soon grew tired of the barrel and stood next to it until he was arrested for exhibitionism. He continued to plan new happenings in his studio in Saint-Remy (his neighbor complained to the local authorities after he painted a mural on his wall, clearly visible from her garden, of Mickey Mouse giving her the finger). When Christmas time came, he stood outside an elegant department store in Nice dressed as Santa Claus. As happy children massed round him, he opened his sack of toys, emptied them on the sidewalk, and began to smash them to bits, declaiming a lesson all the while to the spectacle-loving children about the commercialization of affection. (Moments later, the tide of public opinion turned, and Pinoncelli, still dressed as Santa, was chased down Nice’s streets by a group of irate capitalist parents, a spectacle if French society ever saw one). Most radically, in Cali, Colombia, in 2002 Pinoncelli chopped off the end of his left pinky finger with an axe to protest the violence tearing the country apart (his finger tip is in the Cali Museum of Art).

I have always loved Astronomy Picture of the Day, with its stunning images and lucid explanations, but, from an artistic perspective, it can be hit or miss. Mars As Art and The Sun as Art are both informative (less so, but still) and beautiful.

The Sun as Art can, admittedly, be overwhelming at times, obscuring its beauty behind cold science, but Mars As Art never falters. Indeed, the project’s sleek layout and description assures this. (”Five thousand images were nominated by scientist; forty-five were selected by a panel of professional artists, photographers, and photo editors. Every successful Mars mission since Viking is represented in this collection.”)

Even better, for those uninterested in the artistic merit behind the shots, NASA has a large image of the day gallery. Surprisingly, Astronomy Picture of the Day is not linked to from that site, but other gems are: Great Images in NASA, Planetary Photojournal (solar system and beyond, broken down by object), Hubble Space Telescope (home of mostly every stunning image of the universe you have seen).

Thank you, MetaFilter.

From that remarkable repository of rambunctious links comes http://www.briteshine.co.uk/patchbox/, “an easy & fun way to discover online visual artists you may not have otherwise known. Each artist submits only an 80 x 80 pixel thumbnail, and if you like what you see, a clickthrough takes you to their gallery/homepage.”

Absolutely awesome.

So, yeah, this post is a big one.

To start it all off, something nice for the holidays, a la http://mi50.blogspot.com/:

a la http://alexxxcastaneda.livejournal.com/:

a la http://ptoing.net/:

a la http://manmadehorizon.livejournal.com/:

a la http://www.mousevomit.com/:

a la http://www.art-withoutwords.com/:

a la http://www.billzeman.com/:

a la http://www.flickr.com/photos/thechoclo/:

a la http://www.jrtistic.com/:

^ ^ ^ Points to whoever can tell me what movie that one’s from.

a la http://www.elizafrye.com/:

a la http://akida.freedomclan.net/:

That is all for now. Visit http://www.briteshine.co.uk/patchbox/ for more. (To all the artists: Thank you for being the awesomeness that you are. Also, please don’t get mad at me for stealing your f0t0z.)