This film by James Blagden feels like a cousin to the Left Field Baseball Cards by Amelie Mancini that formed the subject of my last post. I promise to return to non-baseball themed art shortly.
It is an animated telling of the story of the perfect game pitched by Dock Ellis while tripping on acid. To give you a sense of how incredible a feat that is, perfect games have been pitched only 20 times since 1900.
Amelie Mancini has created several sets of stylized baseball cards celebrating whimsical and curious details that decorate our experience of the national past time. One set collects freakish off-the-field injuries (see Glenallen Hill, above); another collects ball players who share their names with food (Darryl Strawberry, above). Get yours here.
Photographer Rachel Sussman has created a series of photos of the oldest living things in the world. Above is a South African Baobab tree over 2,000 years old and Siberian Actinobacteria that is over 400,000 years old. Awe inspiring.
My friend Dana Bunker found this painting on the street. We share an apartment in Wassaic, and this rainbow visioned buffalo now decorates our wall.
Floating islands are awesome.
Above, clockwise from the upper left:
* one of Reinhard Krug’s Floating Cities prints,
* a still frame from Hayao Miyazaki’s animated feature film Howl’s Moving Castle,
* concept art from James Cameron’s Avatar,
* and finally the influence of all of the above (and probably most of the artists mentioned on this blog): Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s The Little Prince.
Click on the images above to see them larger.
You can find more images of and writing about Krug’s floating cities on a great post from Architizer here.
Brooklyn Babylon is a live multimedia performance featuring live big band jazz and animation. It tells the story of the construction of a new Tower of Babel in the county of Kings.
This project drills into the core of awesomeness. Big bands are literally awesome, as is the sound they create. Skyscrapers are literally awesome; the Tower of Babel, reaching all the way up to God, is awesomest skyscraper of all. The animation depicting views of the city from the heights of the tower is naturally awe-inspiring as well.
Click on the images above to see them larger.
The music is composed by Darcy James Argue and performed by his Secret Society. The animation is the work of Danijel Zezelj. Brooklyn Babylon was presented as part of the BAM Next Wave Festival in 2011.
My wife Eve Biddle and I designed and painted this mural on a handball court in Jackson Heights, Queens. Queens is the most ethnically diverse urban area in the world and Jackson Heights is one of the most diverse sections of borough itself. It is the future of New York City and the future of our planet. The neighborhood is dominated by the elevated number 7 subway line - a symbol of mobility and industry.
An obsession of ours with things blasting off into space began with this mural. You can see the rest of our murals here.
The project was commissioned by New York Cares.
In Walking The Solar System Louise O’Connor illustrates the unfathomable scale of solar system by creating a walking route through London. At various stores along the route the traveler encounters yoga balls, tennis balls, ball bearings and other knickknacks indicating the correct scale of the heavenly bodies relative to the distances between them. The journey allows the viewer to feel like an astronaut while visiting the dry cleaners.
My science teacher was always frustrated by his inability to fit this diagram properly on the chalkboard. Apparently he should have been thinking outside the classroom.
I first encountered this project at MoMA’s recent thought provoking show Talk To Me.
Blu creates animation on a massive scale. As viewers sometimes we imagine “what if such-and-such came alive”; Blu makes these dreams manifest and available on YouTube.
Kim Jong-Il Unfolds Into Giant Robot. From The Onion.
This counts.
The line between popular culture and art is now blurry. When defining a 21st century art movement, creations from the popular culture will inevitably demand inclusion. Hollywood, advertising, fashion, comedy and other popular fields are generating work that is in dialogue with art. Fine artists are working on both sides of the line, so this is not surprising.
Read the whole story from The Onion here.
