Artists Walter Martin and Paloma Muñoz cast life-sized candles of themselves in beeswax, then watched their waxy doppelgangers melt.

Walter Martin and Paloma Muñoz

(via Street Anatomy)

[NeoProj] (only worked in safari for me)

Apartment Therapy found a fantastic LIFE magazine photo series from the 1970s of rock stars at home with their folks. Above is Frank Zappa. Also included are the likes of David Crosby, Grace Slick, Donovan, Jackson 5, Elton John, and Eric Clapton. “Look! 70’s Rock Musicians and Their Parent’s Homes” (Thanks, Richard Metzger!)

Alexey Titarenko’s “City of Shadows” is a series of haunting, gorgeous long-exposure shots of street-scenes in St Petersburg, Russia. The long exposure-times turn the people in the shots into ghosts and suggestions of motion.

Link

(Thanks, Marilyn!)

Flickr’s Pixelsurgeon has remixed a bunch of BBC news-footage in which the anchors, having signed off, just look at one another with relief and sit silently waiting for the fade-out, calling the result, “The Day There Was No News.” The effect is nothing short of wonderful.

Mr Jalopy adds, “Somehow, this silent newscast is more eerie than normal boombastic version of the days events.”
Link

(Thanks, Mr Jalopy!)

This isn’t a sandbox with a marble in it. Sysyphus V, a kinetic sculpture by Bruce Shapiro looks like a Zen Garden. But instead of a buddhist monk carefully raking gravel, it’s an autonomous steel sphere carefully crawling over and over, making polar geometric shapes that can best be described as iterative lilies or stars. A magnet on an arm on a two axis plotter sites underneath the half-ton set up, and Sisyphus is making its first appearance here, at Maker Faire 2008. An unrelated but cool Interview with Bruce, by Cool Hunting\, after the jump. [TaoMC at Makers]

polossatik says: “Klara.be (belgium art radio/channel) did an experiment with Belgian painter Luc Tuymans (who’s paintings go for million usd). What if you take art out of its usual context and expose it in the street? Would people even notice it?”

Although everybody seems to be raving about video on Flickr, I just like to bring something totally different – yet photo-related – subject under your attention. It’s a really interesting photo project by Jonathan Harris called The Whale Hunt. For some of you, this might be old news as it’s published six months ago, but I don’t want to risk that other people miss this incredible photo series. Moreover, I think that some media art doesn’t hurt this blog. After all, our main purpose is to inspire you.

Eleven months ago, Harris traveled to the Inupiat Eskimos in Barrow, Alaska, to see how they hunt on whales. Before you ask, his project is not a political statement whatsoever, he just wanted to cover a ritual that has been going on for ages.

His photos series of the whale hunt is quite special, since it’s a new way of human storytelling:

The photographs are presented in a framework that tells the moment-to-moment story of the whale hunt. The full sequence of images is represented as a medical heartbeat graph along the bottom edge of the screen, its magnitude at each point indicating the photographic frequency (and thus the level of excitement) at that moment in time. A series of filters can be used to restrict this heartbeat timeline, isolating the many sub stories occurring within the larger narrative (the story of blood, the story of the captain, the story of the arctic ocean, etc.).

He collected the photos by making one pic every five minutes, even when he was asleep. The result looks something like this:

I think Harris discovered a new interesting way of telling a story. Imagine how this would look like when you cover a soccer match. You can tell by the heartbeat when the match turns interesting. Or a political debate. I hope to see some examples of that. Or do you know one already?

An unknown artist fashions animals out of plastic bags and fastens them to subway gratings, and the hot air inflates them and makes them puff up and wiggle.

The story we heard at dinner tonight is that there’s an artist who’s been making these animals out of discarded plastic bags. He (or she) ties the bags to the ventilation grates above the subway lines so that when the subway rushes through underneath, the animal jumps up and springs to life.

Link

(Thanks, Marilyn!)