Visual musing on rrsCloud
I spent a little time this morning playing with the idea of rssCloud being represented by a merging of the rss icon with a Chinese cloud.
Archive for the 'fun' Category
Fail whale squirrelized
A bit of nonsense, made with the Squirrelizer! (apropo the photo crashing squirrel).
Iphone art: The Hedgehogerus & other flights of fancy
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.
Awesome: papercraft Ceiling Cat
Yes, I know now that this has been all over the web, but I only saw it today: Tubbypaws’s papercraft Ceiling Cat.
The Nano Song: puppets explain nanotechnology!
This cute Sesame Street style video won both the Critics’ Choice and People’s Choice awards in the ACS Nanotation NanoTube ‘What is Nano?’ competition for a video tutorial about nanotechnology. It was a ‘collaborative effort by a group of researchers from University of California, Berkeley including Patrick Bennett, David Carlton, Molly Felz, Nola Klemfuss, Glory Liu (singer), Ryan Miyakawa, Stacey Wallace, and Angelica Zen’.
Yay! a Fail Whale card!
I’m really happy – Yiying Lu sent me one of her cool Fail Whale cards! Here it is with my little sculpture. Thanks so much Yiying :)
Experimenting on hot cross buns
The Laucke flour mills site suggests the best place for proofing and rising dough is in an esky with some boiled water and the lid on, so that’s what I’m trying with my annual batch of hot cross buns. It will be a revelation if it works!
Update: They turned out so well – the best batch I’ve ever made, by far, and I’m sure it was because of the esky trick. The buns expanded quickly in a fluffy kind of way – they have never done that before, and have always previously taken such an age to rise. Might tempt me to try making bread again sometime.
Giant wire marionette in Vancouver
(photo credit: stephenccwu)
This huge wire marionette appeared at the opening of the new Vancouver Convention Centre last weekend; I gather it was associated with Cirque du Soleil. It was a performance by the Underground Circus, and the marionette was made by Peter Boulanger (who was kind enough to let me know in a comment below). It’s made of aluminium (I guess it’s really thick round wire?) , and at about 40 feet, billed as the tallest marionette in Northern America. The puppet moves to music and is operated by 5 puppeteers working pulleys. In this photo you can see it standing fully, supporting two acrobats: the one in the ball and one on the length of material. This is a great photo of it, too.
(influence of Royal de Luxe? Peter says not directly, though he knew of their work)
Shadow monsters
Shadow Monsters by Philip Worthington is a wonderful interactive and digital form of shadow puppets, in which the programming generates fantastic and playful extensions to the shadows of participants bodies and hands, and quirky and wild sounds. (There are more YouTube videos).
The Shadow Monsters grew from a brief about technological magic tricks. I was looking at optical illusions and Victorian hand shadows particularly interested me as a starting point. The subtlety with which a character could be created was already very magical and I wondered if there was room to experiment with these techniques. Looking back to my own childhood, I remembered the feeling of casting huge shapes in the light of my father’s slide projector, creating monsters and silly animals. I enjoy working with simple intuitive things; playful feelings that touch us on a very basic level.At the same time I was experimenting with some software for vision recognition so slowly the monsters evolved. At first I made a puppet show with coloured pencils that had hair and eyes… and this slowly grew in complexity until I had a system that could go some of the way to understanding hand posture. The rest is history.
The Lost Tribes of NYC
For those of us with a love of pareidolia, a cool short film called The Lost Tribes of New York City by London Squared Productions.
(via Laughing Squid)
