Sharp geometric wallpapers for your devices.
art
new painting: Progeny, 48” x 78”, oil, enamel, and shellac on canvas, 2013, by Samantha Keely Smith.
Incredible abstract art. The atmosphere is fantastic.
Why eggs were beaten in copper bowls
Eggs were often beaten in copper bowls. Why copper bowls? Chefs might have been able to give you some kind of reason, but it would have sounded silly to scientific ears. But the modernists discovered that the ions in the copper ended up forming complex bonds with the conalbumin in the eggs.
- Aaron Swartz, co-founder of Reddit
The reason why copper bonding with conalbumin is desirable is that the conalbumin-copper complex is more stable than the conalbumin alone, so egg whites whipped in a copper bowl are less likely to denature (unfold).
Base 8: Generative art that grows and finds a home in the spaces between your fingers and hands.
Author Chris Sugrue about the work:
The title of the work was inspired by several rare languages that developed an octal counting base because their culture counted using the spaces in between fingers rather than the fingers themselves (as in the much more common decimal system).
The work uses a 19th century theater trick (Pepper’s ghost) that was originally employed to create the illusion of phantoms or spirits on the stage with live actors. In this modern adaptation of the technique, the illusion is used to create the sensation of a reactive floating world coming to life directly around the visitors body.
Incredible technology to put 3D objects and animate then inside real-life photographs
I finally figured out the rule-of-thirds
After months of wrestling with understanding the science behind the art of composition, just 30 seconds ago while watching this video, I had a moment of epiphany when it all became clear. 6 minutes and 28 seconds into the video, there’s a shot of polar bear lying on the ground and the shot is composed according to the rule-of-thirds with the polar bear positioned in the lower-right. So far, so good. But then the bear starts to get up and that’s when it all clicked into place.
Putting a subject dead-center in the frame limits the amount “whitespace” around it making the photo feel “claustrophobic’. Instead we put the subject in one of the four corners of the 2D plane of the photo. Since putting the subject exactly at, or too close to a corner makes it feel claustrophobic again, we give the subject a bit of a margin from the nearest corners and edges and these 4 locations corresponding to each corner form the positions on the rule-of-thirds window.
I should have caught on to this from the simple fact that there are four locations where subjects can be placed as per the rule-of-thirds window and there are also… you guessed it, four corners — it’s easy to see the rule-of-thirds window is closely related to the corners of the photo. Had I seen this earlier, the rest — understanding that the rule-of-thirds is merely a framing method to give appropriate amount of “whitespace” for the subject to “breathe” in — would’ve been a piece of cake. Instead it took me months of head-wringing to finally see the light.
So, putting the subject in the dead-center of a photo is like standing inside a tiny-cramped cage while framing the subject using rule-of-thirds is like standing inside a humongously large cathedral. There are some subjects that look better in tiny cramped spaces and thus suit the dead-center framing while the others look better in cathedral-like spaces and thus suit the rule-of-thirds framing.
What benefit do we get from understanding the rule-of-thirds is just a way to give the subject “whitespace”? Simple! We can now bend it and break it to create new compositions because once we understand that framing is all about allocating whitespace around the subject, we are freed from the strict 4 corners of the rule-of-thirds window and now a wide variety of interesting locations and compositions become available to us since we can roam all around the photo looking for just the right amount of whitespace to give to the subject of that particular shot.
This last part, where to use what amount of “whitespace” is still an art for me. I have some clues but some day I’ll nail the science behind the art of “whitespace” like I did today with rule-of-thirds.
Frozen
Suren Manvelyan’s “Animal eyes”
"Digital technology is programmed. This makes it biased toward those with the capacity to write the code. In a digital age, we must learn how to make the software, or risk becoming the software. It is not too difficult or too late to learn the code behind the things we use—or at least to understand that there is code behind their interfaces. Otherwise, we are at the mercy of those who do the programming, the people paying them, or even the technology itself."
Rushkoff, Douglas. Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age. New York: OR Books, 2010. (via carvalhais)
(via codelog)
Windswept is a wind-driven kinetic façade consisting of 612 freely-rotating directional arrows creating a large-scale observational instrument that reveals the complex interactions between the wind and the building. The wind arrows serve as discrete data points indicating the direction of local flow within the larger phenomenon.
Training of a T-Rex
Die-cut business cards for Ilumini Photography by Beast Pieces
High Fashion retro pixels, Sword & Sworcery style — 8-bit Fashionary
Brice Bischoff at the famous “Bronson Caves” in 2009
Check out the incredible ocean-life art by Ernst Haeckel in “Art Forms in Nature: The Prints of Ernst Haeckel”
