Constable Kenny Koala has been working out over summer and is looking like a new koala! Do you like his spiffy new jacket and cap? Kenny is a much loved community liason officer with the Australian Federal Police, and has been educating children in Canberra on a range of crime prevention and child safety messages for the last 25 years or more.
I’m catching up some blogging on work projects that I have ignored for a while. This is a big model of a Helicoverpa caterpillar and leaf that I made for CSIRO Plant Industry in Canberra a few months ago. There’s a photoset of the making process, with notes along the way. The Helicoverpa caterpillar is the main pest in the cotton industry.
I’ve promised myself to try to focus more on projects of my own, in between contract work for other people. I find it so easy to fritter time away when I’m not meeting other’s deadlines. So I’ve started back working on a big shell project I first started over 3 years ago. Back then I got as far as sculpting the shell out of clay, and making a ridiculously big and heavy plaster mold of it. It’s about a metre long. Luckily I did have the sense then to make a cradle on casters for it, so I don’t break my back trying to maneuver is around.
A few days ago I sealed the plaster with layers of shellac, which turned it this beautiful golden mustard colour.
Now I am paper mache-ing it inside with tissue paper. I want it to look flimsy and papery and almost transparent, but I don’t know how few layers I can get away with, and still have it come out of the mold intact. The idea of using very fine fibreglass is tempting, but I am sworn off working with fibreglass.
There are a few more photos at Flickr, where I’m making a photoset.
This woman is a computer generated animation by Image Metrics. Pretty amazing. Though I do wonder if being able to reproduce a real person like this is a good use of time and resources? The Times Online has more details. The makers say 90% of the work is in convincing people that the eyes are real, lending even more weight to what puppet makers and lovers know about the eyes being the window to the soul.
Previously: Uncanny Valley
Schlooop!
Photos from my studio yesterday, and the elephant drying by the fire overnight.
Prompted by seeing the movie Paradise Road again recently, I’ve been chatting to a long time friend about instances of art sustaining people in dire circumstances. In real life, and well before the movie, the women’s chorus that she used to sing with had recreated the music for the first time since it was sung in the prison camp. I mentioned the puppet play story Gary Friendman is making into a documentary, Looking for a Monster, and she pointed me to I never saw another butterfly, a book of art and poetry by children at the Theresienstadt concentration camp in Terezin CZ.
So this is how I found the The Butterfly Project, an activity being run by the Holocaust Museum Houston to try collecting 1.5 million handmade butterflies, the same number of children who died in the Holocaust. You are invited to create and send in handmade arts-and-crafts butterflies, which will eventually comprise an exhibition, currently scheduled for Spring 2012. At the moment they have about 400,000 butterflies.
Seems like an idea that the internet craft communities might like to latch onto – Whip Up!, Craft.
My little kinetic sculpture of the lovely Twitter Fail Whale, based on the image by Yiying Lu that is used when twitter.com is over-capacity. The image is called ‘Lifting up a Dreamer’. I’ve wanted to make this since I first saw the image some weeks ago.
This is a short video of it in action, complete with twittering birds!
More photos here. (Update: fail whale widget here)
I remain optimistic and supportive of Twitter in the long term, because I think the real-time courier service rationale that was the founding impetus of the service constitutes a new branch off Doc Searls’ live web, and makes our online interactions a quantum step closer to Allen Searl’s original vision of ‘a Web where anybody could contact anybody else and ask or answer a question in real time’. Twitter’s track facility, presently down but still promised, provides the real-time search of people and and what they are talking about right now.
Maybe the progression of branching-off goes a little like this:
static web > live web > real time web
google > blogosphere > twittosphere
our property > our history in time > our real-time conversation
search by sending out bots> search by listening for pings > search by tracking people and words in real time
It may be that Twitter’s primacy will be usurped by some other real-time service that gets up ahead of them in the race; I hope not. But many great progressive ideas start off serendipitously or in fun without their full implications or potential being known, and in those circumstances it’s silly in hindsight to say the founders ought to have seen further, planned better and acted quicker than they did.
FoldUScandidate has patterns for card finger puppets of the three US candidates. You print from a pdf and the assemble as shown. Check out the videos and photos that some people have submitted of their puppets.
