You know you are either going loopy, or your new creation has charm, or possibly both, when you find yourself taking it from room to room with you around the house, or with you in the car while driving errands. Especially when its a computer bug. And we won’t mention talking to it.
There are a few other images below. This bug was made for loobylu’s June Month of Softies. My thanks once again, Claire.
I had a lot of fun with April’s Month of Softies theme, recycled monsters; thanks, Claire. Firstly, please meet Patrick, who is channelling Patrick White:
And now Esmé (‘don’t mess with me… I play bowls’):
They were made from an old bag and belt apiece, and Esmé has half an old cricket ball for a nose. There are more detailed pictures below. And thanks to Belinda for helping me see some extra dimensions to their characters!
My friend Amy has launched Who Said?, a cool audio literature trivia game. It’s delivered as a podcast if you want to receive it that way; or you can listen on the web site. Two or three times a week, she will make an audio recording from a novel. It will be a short passage, always something a character says. Your task will be to guess the character, book and author.
Amy has been involved with online discussion since the mid nineties (she founded the premiere Jane Austen discussion site, The Republic of Pemberley in 1996, for example) so its no surprise there is an attractive discussion forum at Who Said? where you can brainstorm your hunches, make suggestions about the game and talk about the books that the audio passages are taken from.
Penguin Books in the UK is having its 70th anniversary this year. The Victoria and Albert Museum in London, that wonderful museum of arts and design, is marking the anniversary with a display of about 500 of Penguin’s iconic book covers. It runs from 8th June to 13th November.
I have been drooling over this range of mugs that feature 31 of the classic Penguin book designs. I supposethey give me pleasure because they are familiar to me from my mother’s bookshelves when I was growing up. There are tea-towels, too. Is it deeply ironic or intentionally funny to have a Virginia Woolf ‘A Room of One’s Own
Canberra has been convulsed over the naughtiness of one of the local government’s staffers who was caught doing a spot of anti-Howard stencil graffiti. You have to hand it to local politics for making mountains out of mole hills!
If you are interested in street art, take a look at The Wooster Collective: A Celebration of Street Art. They have some very cool images. For example, here is a Salvador Dali mural in Lima, Peru. They had an exclusive report on Banksy‘s activities in mid March, showing the works that he installed in four of the prestigious museums in New York.
There is also Wooster Mobile, ‘a Wooster curated art gallery of images which you can download onto your mobile phones in cities around the world’. The aim is to provide artists with a new revenue stream and at the same time generate funds for a non-profit organization called Keep A Child Alive, which provides life-saving drugs for AIDS sufferers in Africa.
Tacky but interesting: this is a huge spider garden spike that I got at the $2 shop the other day. It’s a hand span across, and the connections between its legs and body are fine springs, so that when the spike is jolted the legs have an incidental movement. The best movement you can get out of it is a kind of drumming of the legs, where, on each side, legs 1 and 3 are in sync with each other, and legs 2 and 4 are doing the opposite. Then it has the right kind of action for a huntsman spider.
I have a couple of other insect garden spikes, a bee and a dragonfly (bought out of curiosity when I was working on making giant bees and dragonflies a few years ago). They are much smaller than the spider, with bodies about 7 cm long, and the wings are on double springs. The dragonfly has much lighter springs, and a much better incidental movement than the poor bee, whose springs and wings are way too heavy.
I’ve opened a second blog, ‘monkey see monkey do’, subtitled ‘How to slice a banana inside its skin and other tricks, games, idle pursuits, and things to make and do’. :-)
Happy Christmas!
Make-a-Flake is a cool flash application that enables you to make snowflake patterns like the ones we cut out of paper when we were kids. They have a gallery of the beautiful patterns that visitors to the site have made, and you can add your own.
Playing with the snowflake maker reminded me of the work of Béatrice Coron. I particularly like her vast but finely-detailed city scapes, such as Innercity; ExCentriCity; and Chicago. Also, SagaCity, the cutting edge is a photographic account of Cororn’s installation at the Chicago Center for Book & Paper Arts in 2003.
Its interesting to see the other directions in which Coron’s book art goes. For instance, she has recently make a 9 foot high stainless steel cut out sculpture called ‘Working in the Same Direction’ to represent the first merger of the Fire Department and Emergency Medical Services in New York City, in which the design of two panels is like an open book preserving ‘the independence of the two separate entities sharing a common goal’. I also like the idea of the two weathervanes — a fireman and an emergency medical worker that ‘move with the wind, watching in all directions’.
Here are a few other papercutting links that I have been interested in:
Diana Bryan’s Shadowtown
Gerlof Smit,in particular his Delicate cuttings.
ChinaVista
Sun Erlin: A Cut Above
A Chinese Zodiac
Mr. Picassohead is a cool Flash application that lets you play around making faces using features like eyes, lips, ears and so on, drawn in Picasso style. The Ultimate Flash Face works in a similar way, but the choice of features is greater and the result is more akin to a police photofit picture.
