Link Round-Up: May 1, 2012

Derek Gores is an American artist specializing in collage. From pieces of torn magazines and newspapers, he creates highly detailed figurative portraits.

Check out the Mondo Avengers posters. I think the style for Iron Man is “Art Nueromanceau,” but I could be wrong.

Check out these amazing pencil portraits done on old matchbooks, including characters from Creepshow and Young Frankenstein.

Cthulhu's distant cousin, the Cthonian Elephant

Sheep Invaders is a sweater and from designer Monsieur Lacenarie. But you can play an online version of Sheep Invaders on their Facebook here.

Installation: Moon Dust

"Moon Dust (Apollo 17)" by Spencer Finch, 2009.

This hanging light piece represents precisely the chemical composition of moon dust, that was analyzed on the Apollo 17 mission in 1972. Each light bulb stands for a different atom, the smallest ones represent Oxygen and the large bulbs standing for heavier atoms such as Iron and Chromium.

  

Video: Levitating Water Droplets

Making water appear to levitate usually requires a strobe light to trick the eye. If you don't have a fancy system to control water flow, you can run water through a tube taped to a speaker playing very low frequency sound, and again use a strobe light to make the water appear to defy gravity. Or you can ditch the strobe, and sync the sound waves to the frame rate of a video camera to make water drops appear to hover. [Via]

Installation: Galaxies Forming Along Filaments

"Galaxies Forming Along Filaments" by Tomas Saraceno 

Frieze: "The startling news that the universe is structured like a sponge was revealed when astronomers discovered that galaxies cluster into filaments and wall-like sheets, leaving huge voids of nearly empty space. In his dramatic installation Galaxies Forming along Filaments, Like Droplets along the Strands of a Spider’s Web (2008) Tomas Saraceno applied another analogy inspired by that finding: the comparison between our ‘spongy’ universe and a complex spider web in which groups of stars and other matter are strung like shining beads of water along invisible strands."

53rd International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia

Video: Minecraft Scientific Calculator

Yes, someone built a working scientific calculator, in Minecraft. "The calculator itself is just over 250x200x100 blocks. It contains 2 6-digit BCD number selectors, 2 BCD-to-binary decoders, 3 binary-to-BCD decoders, 6 BCD adders and subtractors, a 20 bit (output) multiplier, 10 bit divider, a memory bank and additional circuitry for the graphing function."

Specs: 6 digit addition and subtraction, 3 digit multiplication, division and trigonometric/scientific functions. (The reason these are only 3 digits is because multiplication and division would take a long time to decode/complete/encode. Also, the fraction display is hard enough to build for 3 digits, let alone 6 – 6 digit RAM would not only be massive, but a bit pointless since the curves follow the same pattern surrounding the peaks.). Graphing y=mx+c functions, quadratic functions, and equation solving of the form mx+c=0.

The screen and keypad were always meant to be the main feature of this machine. The main display boasts 25 digits. Square root signs are displayed and can change to accommodate any number of digits. Square root signs, add, minus, multiply and divide signs are displayed at appropriate times, and there is a full fraction display. The 7-segments for the fractions are the smallest possible, being only 3 wide, and stackable vertically and horizontally.

Video: ANTS in my scanner

ANTS in my scanner by François Vautier

Five years ago François Vautier “installed” an ant colony inside a scanner and scanned them each week. The resulting time lapse is perfect for the opening titles — scored by Nine Inch Nails obviously — of the next David Fincher movie.

Five years ago, I installed an ant colony inside my old scanner that allowed me to scan in high definition this ever evolving microcosm (animal, vegetable and mineral). The resulting clip is a close-up examination of how these tiny beings live in this unique ant farm. I observed how decay and corrosion slowly but surely invaded the internal organs of the scanner. Nature gradually takes hold of this completely synthetic environment.

The ants are still alive : the process will continue…

Lego Creation: Space Shuttle

My Lego tribute to the end of the space shuttle era. Proving that although retired, this machine can still fly, albeit in toy form.

The launch took place from central Germany and reached a max altitude of 35000m. A 1600g meteo balloon filled with helium was used alongside a GoPro Hero, Spot GPS and of course Lego Space Shuttle model 3367.

Crafts: Large Hadron Collider Quilts

Large Hadron Collider Quilts by Kate Findlay

Source: Symmetry Magazine

Breakthrough

  Materials: silks, synthetics and cottons, a metal ring wrapped in gold cord, metallic mesh.

The Alice Adventure
Materials: Cottons, sheers and synthetics.

Inner Eye
Materials: Silk, synthetic fabric, pvc fabric and sequins.

This piece is about scale–the vast Hadron Collider looking for infinitesimal particles. The eye was inspired by the shape of the framework holding up one part of the detector. The detector itself became the iris of the eye. I wanted a mini eye in the middle to suggest the scientists’ inward search for answers to the existence of our huge universe. 

Does the Dark Matter?

Materials: cotton, synthetics and silks.

Video: Panasonic Hollywood Labs

Panasonic Hollywood Labs - Brand Video by Macoto Murayama, 2011

Macoto Murayama is a japanese architect-turned-artist who has turned to digitally dissecting and reconstructing flowers to help Panasonic Hollywood Labs promote their technology. With a spatial awareness and attention to detail that comes from years of working as an architect, Murayama is able to reveal the the hidden elements of the inner flower.  Murayama studies each part of the plant separately in order to recreate the individual components as a precisely as possible.

Fresh Take: Chemistry Crayons

Queinteresante Chemistry Crayons Set

"Children play and draw with crayons practically every day, so why not make the experience more educational? This is a set of 64 Crayola crayons with labels so that while children are coloring, they are also exposed to the names of chemicals that will make those colors! So instead of thinking “I want green” they will think “I want Barium Nitrate Ba(NO3)2 Flame” and then when they take chemistry in high school and their teacher sets some gas on fire and it makes a green color and they ask the class what chemical it was your student will know it was Barium! Genius!"

   

Video: Bioanimation

Hybrid 2010 Reel from Hybrid Medical Animation

Bioanimation companies like XVIVO, Hybrid Medical, Random42, Biolucid, Argosy Medical, and BioDigital have been doing beautiful work for hire, freely available to watch.

Dream and think! And add some brains!

I wish you all a happy and great and astonishing new year! 

2012 is somehow a more balanced number than 2011. Yes, this is only from a graphic point of view ^^ But the last year was really a hard one. Not bad in all things, for all the bad stuff also a lot of good stuff happened, but it took its toll in energy. Changing things, especially oneself, because in the end this is the only parameter one really can change in life (it sound worse than I mean it :)), is often important. To keep oneself on the way, step for step, little ones because they are in the end the real changing ones. 

Dream and think are two words which suits me very well. Often because I dream and think too much. Can you dream and think too much? Yes... if the dreaming is more of an escape and not just for the joy of it and if the thinking starts to turn in circles and rounds and starts eating yourself from the inside. 

I learned in 2011 that life is easier than you may believe. Even in the hard times. That no matter how strange you are, there are people who catch you, stay on your side and hold you even if you are pushing them away. Strange that often this are not the people who you thought that they would be. Even stranger, sometimes they only stay in your life for the hard times...

Okay, this blog entry is going to be more sentimental than I wanted it to be. So I'll stop at this point! :)

Dream and think! And add some brains! My words for 2012 and it is okay if the extra brains are earrings! 

They were made from an ad postcard I found during a trip to Berlin.

I put a lot of glitter, nightglowing paint on the brains!

Of course also a thick layer of 3D glue (this tim it was diamond glaze).

Yes, they glow! All brains glows, didn't you know that? We just don't see it (at least I want my intern brain to be glowing ^^).

You see the lovely structures of the brain? 

Show off your work!

As some of you may already know (or have quessed), I am a scientist, better to say a biologist. No, not the one that goes through nature but the one that works with all the cool mechanisms inside the cell :)

As it happens a friend of me (also working in molecular biology) showed me some images she made and wasn't quite happy about them. I wondered why, because they looked good! 

So how do you say your friend that you like her work and that it is good? With words? We all know that we tend not to believe in words alone... and being a scientist I thought I should give an example for my view:

Your images look so good, you could wear them as earrings! 

Therefor I printed one of her images (cell culture, the blue dots are stained cell nuclei and the green dots are stained protein which is only expressed in some of the cells), glued it on cardboard, put a lot layers of 3D glue on top... that was it!

And hey, she really showed off her work! She had put them on during the local research festival where she presented her work using also THIS image! :)

And if you now think we are all a little bit strange... trust me... we are worse, way worse! ^^