I like ambient information devices–particularly ones that give you information at a glance in a clever way. If you’re stuck inside on a Windows machine, check out Kaze to Desktop. Kaze–’wind’ in English–moves your windows around based on the speed of the wind at your location.
Also, take a look at Drop Clock from the same group–it’s a gorgeus screensaver clock with both Windows and Mac versions.
Oh man, I really like the new visualizer for iTunes. It’s like a black hole disco ball.
It’s based on a beta from last year from the Barbarian Group–the clever folks who also made wacky things like the Subservient Chicken.
For those new to Magnetosphere, a quick tip–you can change a lot of the visualization options by pressing the ? button. I’m sure Apple buried this somewhere in the documentation, but this non-obvious trick gives you some neat variation.
I followed a short method to make a pencil in Photoshop and added a few flourishes:
Pencil Tutorial via BB
My 4 year old nephew drew my picture and gave it to me. I love it! Apparently I have CRAZY SCRIBBLE MOUTH. It kinda looks like a ghost from Pac-Man, am I right? Imagine these things following you around the maze–
Monkey: Journey to the West is a Cirque de so gay-style opera designed by the brains behind Gorillaz and featuring a full 70+ piece Chinese orchestra along with the squiggly synths and bumpin’ beats you’d expect.
The score was the most compelling part of the multisensory treat of a Monkey show I saw during Spoleto here in Charleston in May which featured not just great music but acrobatics, projected animation, and eye-bending sets. So far it’s played in London, Berlin and Paris, and will undoubtedly be back to the states eventually. In the meanwhile, the soundtrack is coming out on September 23rd.
Savini, an artist from Rome, has created these playful sculptures from bubble gum. The human subjects are more dark alley than uncanny valley; the animals, particularly the bear and crocodile, hit the mark. The gallery says:
“Also for those born in the sixties as Maurizio Savini and I, chewing-gum reaches in the mind‘s meanders at a tie with childhood and adolescence, and a light pressure of a future still to be built and dreamt and the slaughterhouse of personal and collective memories of the past which is gone, no one knows where when and with whom.“
I wasn’t around for the evidently LSD-laced chewing gum they had 60’s, but I still like these.
A few more of his pieces follow. (more…)
This rugged and crafty wooden phone rework from Berlin-based Ariel Schlesinger is lovely.
The Adventures of Mark Twain–a 1985 claymation film by Will Vinton of California Raisins fame–has an alien nightclub sequence in which the following appeared (yes, the alien wearing the shirt has 4 boobs and 3 heads). I took a photograph of the DVD
The t-shirt junkie in me had to make a reasonable facsimile on Spreadshirt.
