design:related - naturalsphere's inspirations

Bamboo City

Tue, 21 Oct 2008 16:13:00 GMT

Los Angeles and Uruguay based The Bamboo Institute has a proposal to regrow deforested areas using bamboo. The bamboo is in turn used as building material for new eco oriented towns and infrastructure.

Banksy's Pet Shop

Sat, 11 Oct 2008 17:15:00 GMT

Just opened in the West Village, New York: Bansky's animatronics installation "The Village Pet Store and Charcoal Grill" Moving away from this stencil and street art approach, this new work is receiving rave reviews for it's commentary on our relationship with animals.

From the artist: "I wanted to make art that questioned our relationship with animals and the ethics and sustainability of factory farming, but it ended up as chicken nuggets singing."

The underground artist has been busy in New York. Several of his murals, all featuring giant rats, have popped up on walls and billboards in Lower Manhattan.

Early Babar Collection

Thu, 09 Oct 2008 14:30:55 GMT

Currently in New York at the Morgan Library,

Drawing Babar: Early Drafts and Watercolors

September 19, 2008, through January 4, 2009

In 2004 the Morgan acquired the working drafts and printer-ready watercolors for Histoire de Babar, le petit éléphant (1931), the first book by Jean de Brunhoff (1899–1937), and Babar et ce coquin d'Arthur (1946), the first book by Laurent de Brunhoff (b. 1925). Together these two collections—shown virtually in their entirety for the first time—provide an extraordinary record of the working methods of the two men, both painters turned storytellers.

from the NY Times: "For the essence of the Babar stories is order; they present a society whose cornerstones are peace, dignity and structure. It is not so much a world that never experiences disorder, in which there are no troubles or threats of chaos, as a world that knows how to control the extraordinary when it does appear. But it is also far from a militantly law-and-order civilization."

Babar had a profound effect on my youth, a world of exploration, peaceful interaction and diversity.

New Bicycle Racks in NYC

Wed, 01 Oct 2008 20:49:52 GMT

10 finalists from all over the world competing to be the new bike rack for New York City.

Top row, left to right: Next Phase Studios of Boston; Andrew Lang and Henry Dobbs of London; Federico Otero of Lima, Peru. Middle row, left to right: Stephen Jaklitsch Architects of Manhattan; Jeff Miller and Andrea Ruggiero of Manhattan; Baroni & Valeriani Architects of Florence, Italy; Ian Mahaffy and Maarten De Greeve of Copenhagen, Denmark. Bottom row, left to right: Ignacio Cocchini of Astoria, Queens; Francis Anthony Bitonti/FADarch of Brooklyn; Open Thread Design of Brooklyn.

The winner will be announced on Oct. 24 during National Design Week, an event sponsored by the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum.

Unlike.net

Fri, 05 Sep 2008 17:09:47 GMT

Spending time in Berlin, this killer app is part travel guide, diary, map, and reviews app. I great Google Maps app (finally) plus iPhone, Facebook, etc. I just need to make sure I leave the hotel instead of "Mapping" my tour from the computer all day.

Here's my Berlin tour: http://berlin.unlike.net/tours/152834

Streetsy Street Art Blog

Wed, 25 Jun 2008 21:03:53 GMT

Streetsy is a daily street art site. With the rise of Banksy and others, this is a great resource of street art from around the globe. From the site: "Street art is art created in public places, often without permission. Street art is made in a number of mediums, including stencils, stickers, posters, paint, and sculpture. In mathematical, political, criminal, and philosophical terms, streetart is a subset of graffiti."

Kenji Kamiyama

Thu, 08 May 2008 17:57:24 GMT

Kenji Kamiyama, Japanese anime director, writer, and artist. He was worked on The Last Vampire, and directed the Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex anime television series. The Ghost in the Shell Series are important because the move away from the testosterone filled plots of other Japanese anime to deal with issues such as the machine-man-spirit conflict, urban cities, and religion.

Gary Hill

Mon, 28 Apr 2008 23:34:20 GMT

Artist Gary Hill.

One of the pioneers of video art, Gary Hill has exhibited his video and video installations worldwide."Gary Hill's work is especially significant due to his incorporation of text into video art, evident in works such as Incidence of Catastrophe 1977-78. Hill began working with video, text and sound in 1973. He was influenced by the intellectual orientation of conceptual art which dominated art of the 1970s. His reading of the writings ofMaurice Blanchot, in particular, provided him with ideas relating to the way in which language impinges on phenomenological experience, and a notion of 'the other' stemming from the philosophy of Emmanuel Lévinas. Such reading informs Hill's visual-poetic explorations of the interrelationships between language, image, identity, and the body. For example in Cabin Fever he uses the binary opposition of light and darkness to convey the notion of an interaction between a self and an ‘other’. Hill's work thoroughly exploits the capacity of video to offer complex nonlinear narratives that encourage active engagement on the part of the viewer."

Batman: Gotham Knight

Sun, 13 Apr 2008 03:18:19 GMT

Summer 2008 DVD animated series by important Japanese anime directors: Yasuhiro Aoki, Futoshi Higashide, Toshiyuki Kubooka, Hiroshi Morioka, Jong-Sik Nam, Shoujirou Nishimi, Madhouse, Studio 4*C, and Production I.G. (Ghost in the Shell)

Photosynth

Sat, 12 Apr 2008 16:57:12 GMT

Imagine taking all the photos on the web to create a cummulative, accurate represenation of our visual experience.

The photos beccome actually building blocks for 3D models.

From TED (again), imagine taking all the photos on Flicker, mapping all the points and places spacially, then coming up with accurate 3D representation of those places all over the world. The future of the web is visual.

Photosynth takes hundreds — or thousands — of conventional digital photos, analyzes them, and then through clever image analysis and comparison constructs an entire 3D geometry, mapping them onto the result.