Showing posts with label art/photography. Show all posts
Showing posts with label art/photography. Show all posts

Monday, September 11, 2006

Creating beauty in the midst of destruction

British artist/activist Arofish paints stencil graffiti art in combat zones- Baghdad, Palestine and most recently, Lebanon. While he was in Dahyeh, a badly-damaged area of Beirut, he was asked by locals to paint something happy to reflect the spirit of the community. He came up with these stencil graffiti works of children flying kites.



The arabic text reads:
"When Ramallah, in Palestine, is put under curfew by the Israeli Army, nobody goes outside for days. The streets look completely deserted. But from a tall building, if you look out over the city, you can sometimes see hundreds of many-coloured kites, flown from the roof-terraces by the children of Ramallah. The children you can see here are flying kites to celebrate the spirit of the people of Dahyeh. Some kites you can see are flying away. These are for the children who are no longer here; they are no longer held down to the Earth".
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Sunday, September 10, 2006

Banksy Punks Paris Hilton!

Guerrilla artist extraordinaire Banksy has made the news again for his latest prank- replacing 500 copies of Paris Hilton's latest album with his own doctored versions, complete with all-new artwork (warning: slightly NSFW) and music- in the form of a 40-minute long track titled "That's Hot", mixed by DJ Danger Mouse (the same man who produced the infamous and brilliant Grey Album- get yourself a copy here if you haven't already- and, more recently, Gnarls Barkley). You can find the track here as well as here (though honestly you can hear all the good bits in the following video, where Banksy shows us exactly how he pulled off the stunt).



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Friday, September 01, 2006

Sefer Festival 2006: Children's Illustrations Exhibition

I took photos of the cooler illustrations at the Israeli children's book illustraton exhibition down at the National Library. Unfortunately my phone's camera couldn't quite capture the illustrator's names at the bottom of each poster, so they'll have to remain anonymous for now.



















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Saturday, June 17, 2006

Mona Lisa made out of PC parts



I am oddly bemused by this reproduction of the Mona Lisa, made out of motherboards and other PC parts. Entitled 'Technology Smiling,' this art work is on exhibition in Beijing. The use of the garishly-coloured innards of our dull, everyday PCs to create a tangible reproduction of an artwork and the choice of artwork itself- the Mona Lisa, with her ever-mysterious smile- add up to a very clever commentary on our relationship with technology indeed.

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Superheroes meet Fine Art

Worth1000.com recently ran a Photoshop contest challenging people to incorporate superheroes into pieces of fine art. The results are amazingly creative and well-done.

This is one of my favourites:



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Wednesday, March 22, 2006

Red Nose Studio's fantastic puppet photography


Isn't that just sublime?

Chris Sickels of Red Nose Studio takes gorgeous photographs of hand-made puppets in beautifully realised sets. The degree of craft and skill that has gone into the creation of the physical puppets and sets is awe-inspiring, the photography makes them even more impressive. The galleries on the site are well-worth browsing. Why, there's even a couple of stop-motion animation videos on the site! They're a bit crude compared to, say, an Aardman production, but I ain't complaining. It's always good to see the fine yet dwindling art of stop-motion animation being practised.

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Tuesday, March 21, 2006

Drawball

Drawball is a large online virtual canvas for anyone and everyone to draw on as they please. Once you enter the space (by disagreeing with the tongue-in-cheek license agreement at the start), zoom in on on an area that looks suitable and start drawing away. Just don't be surprised if someone else draws over your stuff in a day, or even sooner! The Hall of Fame's got some really cool drawings- including this two-part Dragon. Best part is, by clicking on any of the drawings, you get to see the process of their creation, stroke-by-stroke. Wikipedia has an informative about Drawball. It's rather interesting to note that there have been several community efforts to create large-scale drawings- like the Korean Flag at the center of this Drawball:


Oh and the area available for any individual user to draw on is roughly the size of the 0 on the "zoom 0%" you see at the left of the Drawball. So you can imagine how many people it took to draw a huge flag like that!

At the time of this writing, there's a really cool drawing of Mario wearing a cape and riding Yoshi at the bottom of the Drawball. I say at this time because drawings tend to get vandalized pretty often on Drawball- which is pretty much inevitable since it allows any and all users to draw anywhere on the Drawball at all times. Which does lead to the sad destruction of many a fine drawing (which is why the Hall of Fame exists- to immortalize such work) but it also makes the Drawball a very dynamic space.

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Sunday, March 05, 2006

Singapore through the eyes of migrant workers

The Photo Essay is a new Asian photography project that has launched with two very novel projects:

InsideOut is a series of photos taken by foreign workers in Singapore, giving us a glimpse into their Singapore.


I like this photo by Gema T. Villacruzes, simply titled "Towel On Chair"

Dayoff is a series of photos by 6 Singaporean photographers and documents how foreign workers here spend their days off.


A group of Sri Lankan maids walk around a Bodhi tree in a Sunday prayer session in this photo by Sim Chi Yin.

What a wonderful idea! It's so cool to see a glimpse into the lives of the foreign workers here, people who are ubiquitous but fade into the background for most of us. Some of the photographs in InsideOut are surprisingly gorgeous, too!

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Thursday, September 15, 2005

Cool Flickr Set of HK Disneyland Opening

Hong Kong Disneyland's grand opening was on September 12th and here's a Flickr photoset of the event. There's neat shots of the parade too- love the Toy Story chracters, especially the happy-looking army man!

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Wednesday, September 14, 2005

My iPod sock needs one of these...


An embroidered skull!

I keep my iPod in a purple sock and I've always wanted to have a skull on it (a skull and cross-bones, to be exact). Now, this project shows me how! I'll put up a photo of my modified sock once it's done.

(via, yes you guessed it, BoingBoing)

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