These are two videos of a cool audiovisual installation, Mécaniques Discursives, being developed by Yannick Jacquet (aka Legoman) and Fred Penelle. It’s an intiguing mixture of shadows and shadow puppets, unlikely contraptions, projection mapping, and edgy music.

This is cool – for The Lionheart Project, Shauna Richardson has made three giant hand-crocheted lions that will be displayed in a custom-built, mobile, glass case like a taxidermy case, and will travel around the East Midlands as part of the London Cultural Olympiad.  I like the studio photos showing the process, and the way the patterns in the crochet are used to emphasis the muscle shapes.

One Plastic Beach documents how artists Richard Lang and Judith Selby Lang find joy in collecting and making beautiful arrangements from pieces of plastic that they collect from Kehoe Beach, California. It piqued my interest because I’m still somewhat haunted by my own discovery of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, and have tried to come to terms with it through art myself.

(via Laughing Squid)

This beautiful little wing mechanism making a playful kinetic ring is made by Dukno Yoon, a jeweller and metalsmith. There are other equally lovely ones operated by various small hand and wrist movements in his gallery. (via Colossal)

I was up in Sydney for a couple of days this week, and went out to Cockatoo Island for the first time. It’s a former convict prison and shipyard, now used as a contemporary visual arts venue. This image was one of many painted on the old buildings there.

I love this interactive animation of Van Gogh’s Starry Night! Made by Petros Vrellis with openFrameworks it imagines the energy flows in the painting and offers the ability to change them with touch-sensitive gestures. These also change the ambient background music.

(via Colossal)

I imagine a large part of the attraction of letterpress printing is to do with the physical handling of the type, and it being a hands-on process. But the argument made by designer John Bonadies for LetterMPress, a proposed virtual letterpress app iPad, is that it will  ’give designers, artists, students, lovers of type—anyone—the ability to produce their own authentic letterpress designs and artwork’ when wood type and vintage cuts have become sought after and rare.

I’m not sure if letterpress artists and printers will regard this as encouraging the preservation and recognition of the aesthetic qualities of letterpress, or as an undermining of the art. But it looks like an app I would find attractive.

(via Laughing Squid)

I had a brief trip to Melbourne last week for the opening of my daughter Anna Madeleine‘s new exhibition Mind Games and Paper Planes at the Brunswick Street Gallery. It was a good night, with heaps of people tramping up the stairs to the various rooms and exhibitions. Do check it out if you happen to be in Melbourne in the next few weeks, it’s on until 20 May.

At the moment I’m entranced with drawing on my iPhone, mostly playing with the Brushes and Paintbook apps. My full set of iPhone drawings is here.

With Brushes I’m presently evolving some strange creatures in a strange environment. Above you can see the Hedgehogerus surprised,  the Hedgehogerus nest and fairy, the two-toed Chubbachubb, and the double-pouched Schweep.

With Paintbook I’ve been making some very simple two-tone faces of (mostly) imaginary people. Here are a few favourites:

It seems as if there is an exciting new field opening up as people experiment with what can be achieved on such a small screen using just your finger. David Hockney has already had an exhibition of his iPhone drawings, and The New Yorker recently drew attention to the phenomenon by featuring an iPhone drawing by Portuguese artist Jorge Columbo as it’s cover illustration. But you get a better feel for the range, quality and some sense of developing community among artists using iPhone apps, at Flickr, for instance in the Brushes gallery.

I always meant to do a post on the Institute of Figuring when I first came across it a few years ago, but now you can just watch Margaret Wertheim herself  explaining the beautiful maths of coral, crochet and hyperbolic geometry in this great talk at TED.