"We want to create works of joy and beauty."
Jeanne-Claude, the collaborator with Christo on their environmental art projects for the past 51 years, died last week.
Visit their website for further information about their work.
Also, the VRC holds a number of videos about the work of Christo and Jeanne-Claude. Images of their work can be found at AAEL VRC Images and through ARTstor.
Quote from interview with Jeanne-Claude and Christo, 2002. Image from their website.
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Creating hair-raising performances to convey his continual sense of lost gravity, Chinese artist Li Wei has taken his work all over the world from Italy, Spain, Korea and the USA.
Wei's photos depict him free falling from tall buildings-pictures that resemble the famous photograph of the French artist Yves Klein Leap into the Void.
Li Wei sees his art as both a mission to set the scene for the perfect photograph and a perfect performance. "I am fascinated by the unstable and dangerous sides of art and I hope my works reflect these aspects."
Johan Lorbeer is a German street performer. He became famous in the past few years because of his “Still-Life” Performances, which took place in the public area.
With his still-life performances, this German artist seems to unhinge the laws of gravity. For hours on time, he remains, as a living work of art, in physically impossible positions.
Dynamic Tower, Dubai, United Arab Emirates
"Dr. David Fisher's Dynamic Tower is the first building in motion that will change its shape and add a fourth dimension to architecture: Time. The shape will be determined by each floor's direction of rotation, speed, acceleration and the timing; with timing meaning how each floor rotates compared to the other. The rotation speed will be between 60 minutes and 24 hours for one revolution."
"Zaha Hadid's Burnham Pavilion was opened to the public on August5, 2009.Designed as one of two pavilions to celebrate the centenary of Daniel Burnham's Chicago Plan which outlined the structure of the city, visitors are now able to experience the ambiance within. The structure plays host to a sound and video installation by artist Thomas Gray that portrays Chicago’s transformation from past to future, projected onto the sides of the Pavilion's white interior."
Santa Monica Civic Center Parking Structure, Santa Monica, United States
"The parking structure by Moore Ruble Yudell Architects & Planners
designates a new gateway for a downtown Civic Center. It provides 900 parking spaces on six levels above and two below grade while visually uniting diverse civic buildings."
Mixed-Use Tower, Mumbai, India
"FXFOWLE Architects' winning design for a competition for a new 60-story (301 meter) mixed-use tower located in India’s South Mumbai centres on creating a premier international hotel, retail, and residential tower within India’s emerging new economy."
Seville University Library, Seville, Spain
"Zaha Hadid's dramatic 9,000 sq m building is set to provide residents and visitors to Seville with a state-of-the-art public library and reading rooms, exhibition hall, and conference facility."
The Wings, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
"KEO’s Wings project set to become one of Abu Dhabi’s most prestigious developments. Situated at the gateway to Al Reem Island on Najmat marina, the 23,757 sq m ‘Wings’ project will have a defining impact on Abu Dhabi’s skyline. The site is approximately 200 meters in width by 110 meters in depth and is in the shape of a curved rectangle. One tower is designated as a residential tower while the other will be office space."
2014 Winter Olympic Stadium, Sochi, Russia
"Populous has announced that it has been selected by the State Corporation ‘Olympstroy’ to design the main stadium for the 2014 Winter Olympic and Paralympic Games in Sochi, Russia. The 40,000 seat pebble-shaped design boasts clear natural references with a semi-transparent, segmented skin resembling the wings of a dragonfly."
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At Font Capture you can create a font from your very own handwriting. There's no software to download and install, all you need is a printer and a scanner. Simply fill in the font template, scan and upload it to the website, and download your completed font. The fonts you create using Font Capture can be used on both Windows and Mac computers.
FontStruct is free font-building tool that enables users to quickly and easily create fonts constructed from geometric shapes arranged on a grid—like tiles or bricks. FontStruct is also a community site; in addition to the ability to share and download their constructions, users can also collaborate on, critique and discuss them through comments and private messaging.
Learn about other font creating tools:
via xmarks
Google Image Labeler is a game in which you get an online partner who labels/tags the image along with you and both of you get points, depending on the specific labels you provide. The idea is that if two people come up with the same label, it is probably a good one and will make Google’s image search better.
"Each user who wants to participate will be paired randomly with a partner who's currently online and also using Google Image Labeler. Over a 90-second period, both participants will be shown the same set of images and asked to label each image based on what they see. They'll also be shown words that can't be used as labels. Both participants can add as many labels as they want until one of them matches a partner's label. After there's a match, they'll see a new image and continue the cycle, until time runs out. Contributors will also see points they've earned throughout the session."
via elliottback.com
You can enter your bibliographic records by hand, but you can also have Zotero extract them directly from online. It works with most library OPACs, with Google Scholar, and with some of the major article databases like ProQuest and JSTOR.
Zotero is useful to anyone who uses the Internet for research and needs a simple way to organize references. By emphasizing accurate citations and automating the process, Zotero helps students learn and adopt proper practices.
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Can you guess what this is?
Lava fields Northwestern America by Johnny Bravo
Double Rainbow by zasu at DeviantART
Other websites with aerial pictures:
Jason Hawkes
JPG
PBASE aerials
via Noupe
via Derivative Image
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Another excellent site with primary source material digitized for world use:
"The World Digital Library is a cooperative project of the Library of Congress, the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), and partner libraries, archives, and educational and cultural institutions from the United States and around the world. The project brings together on a single website rare and unique documents – books, journals, manuscripts, maps, prints and photographs, films, and sound recordings – that tell the story of the world’s cultures. The site is intended for general users, students, teachers, and scholars."
The home page presents a nifty multi-lingual search interface including a world map and a timeline.
Image of the Emir of Bukhara, 1911, by Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii. Click here to see more photos by Prokudin-Gorskii in the World Digital Library.
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Designer Paul Burgess created ColorSuckr, a color app that extracts the 12 most common colors from any images and displays each color on a new page with the HEX, RGB and web safe color. You can choose from one of the photos on the main page, search Flickr, or input the URL of any webpage to find source material.
Features:
* Easily extract colors from photos and create color schemes.
* View results in XML, RSS and JSON formats.
* Download schemes as Adobe .ASE swatch file.
* Firefox addon that makes color extraction even easier provided.
* Provides a permanent link to the color scheme.
* Option to switch between the dark/light backgrounds.
* Free, no sign up required.
via download squad
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This map shows where people watch the most films (not including short films) at commercial screenings. Of the 7.6 billion films watched at cinemas, almost 3 billion viewings were recorded in one year in India.
]]> The colours used on the maps group the territories into 12 geographical regions, and allow for an easier visual comparison between the maps than would otherwise be possible. The shading of each territory within a region is consistent throughout all of the maps.
You can view a labelled territory map with the territories labelled, and also a labelled regions map.
Here are cartograms for books borrowed
and books published
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Other "images of the day" can be found at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Wikimedia Commons, National Geographic, and The Art Gallery of Greater Victoria.
The following is NASA's description of the image illustrated above:
"In a break from its usual task of searching for distant cosmic explosions, NASA's Swift satellite acquired the highest-resolution view of a neighboring spiral galaxy ever attained in the ultraviolet. The galaxy, known as M31 in the constellation Andromeda, is the largest and closest spiral galaxy to our own. This mosaic of M31 merges 330 individual images taken by Swift's Ultraviolet/Optical Telescope. The image shows a region 200,000 light-years wide and 100,000 light-years high (100 arcminutes by 50 arcminutes)."
Image Credit: NASA/Swift/Stefan Immler (GSFC) and Erin Grand (UMCP)
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Last August at SIGGRAPH, an international conference on computer graphics, a group presented an innovative system designed to analyze images of the sky. The SkyFinder (link opens .pdf file) system automatically extracts a set of sky attributes—such as category, layout, richness, horizon, or sun position—from each image in a collection. This enables users to search the collection interactively at the semantic level using text queries, like “a landscape at sunset with the sun at the bottom left”.
Curious, by Maria Morrell, Ph.D. Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Cell and Developmental Biology (Click on the image for a description of the image on the BioArtography site)
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