Jules Says

Animated Polaroids

This is a wonderfully clever film made by Rochester Institute of Technology student Jordan C. Greenhalgh. No CGI here - it's all stop motion. [via Core77]

More art lessons from YouTube

A few months back, the stunning Women In Art video made the rounds on the blogs. Now there's another marvelous video that's a bit more expansive, covering 100+ years of art. It's equally entrancing, I think. Run time is ~7 minutes. This one's for you, Dad :)

Splendor in the Grass

I was originally referring to this little collection as crop art. But apparently Crop Art is a distinct genre, and is a kind of art made with seeds. And glue. There's Land Art, but that doesn't seem right either. I don't know, but farmers certainly do interesting things in their fields :)

Oh, those fussy pagans! It seems they are not at all pleased with the donut-wielding Homer Simpson painted near an ancient fertility symbol. And of course, someone had to do an animated gif... ring-toss anyone? [via Boing Boing]

Apparently residents of Inakadate have been creating rice paddy art since 1993. This one reminds me of early Mac art. I did some nosing around, but couldn't find the piece of art I have in mind. I did order a copy of Zen & the Art of the Macintosh : Discoveries on the Path to Computer Enlightenment for $.74 from Amazon, though. It was published in 1986. I had a copy back then. I'm pretty sure I'll find what I'm looking for there.  [via Pink Tentacle, more pictures there, too]

Someone was bound to want to cash in on this kind of exposure. SwissAir did just that. Who would have though a URL could be legible from the air? And why didn't they make their lives a little easier and skip the "www"?

I'm not linking to SwissAir here because their site seems to be down. I sure hope this field has grown over.

Shadow Puppets: amazing what hands can do

VW Phaeton Shadow Plays
Uploaded by traianbasescu

I'm surprising myself by posting a commercial. When I first looked at this video, I really never dreamed it was an ad. Actually, I thought it was going to be something vaguely political, perhaps about globalization (are those walls they were building?). But no. It's simply beautiful art. Kudos to VW.

Days of Future Past

I thoroughly enjoyed Yesterday's Tomorrows: Past Visions of the American Future. I just love seeing what people imagined our todays would look like. So I was thrilled to stumble upon Paleo-Future: a look into the future that never was. Is that a great name for a blog or what? My introduction to the blog was this post, which highlights a lovely collection of 100-year-old postcards depicting the year 2000. There is, of course, the obligatory personal flying machine. The "Summer at the North Pole" and "Police X-Ray Surveillance Machine" cards are almost disturbing in their innocence. Shown: The Roofed City. I wonder what's providing all that light... Be sure to read some of the comments to this post - some quite clever.

I can't wait to waste some serious time on this site. And I see there's a Paleo-Future Google Group, too. Great! I need more distractions!

Pencil and crayon carvings

I first saw Pete Goldlust's (is that a great name or what?) carved crayons several months ago. Some of these are really intricate. He must use heated implements of some kind to get them so smooth. I'd love to see him sculpt one some time. I've kept his site bookmarked for a while, knowing I'd post about his carvings eventually.

Then I ran across these great carved pencils. The photos are from a 1990’s Japanese exhibition by Kato Jado and Mizuta Tasogare, titled “The JAD Project”. Even though it's by far the simplest of the pencils, I think my favorite is this pencil inside the pencil.

I wonder if either artist was inspired by the other.

It's for ewe, dear

Ever wonder what to do with all those old corded phones? More photos here.
Click to enlarge to 800 x 600.

Lego Escher

A couple of guys like to reproduce Escher paintings using legos. Their site shows several different rendition, as well as construction details for each one. (Click each image to enlarge)

That's a lot of puzzling

True, the artist only has to complete one side of a Rubik's Cube at a time, but this is still one hell of a lot of puzzling. Link.

Guido Danielle

Guido Danielle has an amazing portfolio of body art. The animal hand art is particularly beautiful (page 1, page 2.