Saw this video of jellyfish art at Beyond the Beyond:
Maker Faire on TwitterIf you couldn't make it to the Bay Area Maker Faire, you can track the event on Twitter. [Link]
Honoria's through with nice!Honoria's being a mean art teacher, insisting on critical thinking! Her blog post to that effect is pretty great. [Link]
From now on your critiques cannot start with a compliment. That means no more "That looks great" or "Your drawing blows me away."Live Art Blogging from SXSW Interactive 2008
I am making this rule because the comments are too shallow. You are not getting into observation or analysis or interpretation of the works. Just saying something is good or bad and then giving your advice is OK as far as it goes. But I would not be fair to you unless I demand a more professional level of communication. My job is to make you the best prepared you can be for your creative career!
I've been in a bazillion meetings with Honoria Starbuck since we first worked together in the 90s. An artist, she's always brought art media - lately watercolors - and made very striking, powerfully intuitive visual notes. This year she took her art to SXSW Interactive, and she's captured the watercolors she produced in a book available via Lulu Press. Whether you were at SXSW or not, this is a great book for your coffee table (and your more flexible brain). PDF download is free if you want to preview. Also check out Honoria's Livejournal for more art.
While the rest of us were watching banging out our lives online, watching mediocre television, hanging out in bars, going to political rallies, listening to trance pop, working to put ramen on the table, watching our money and our rights leak away, etc., former insurance broker Oberto Airaudi (aka Falco), along with friends and followers, was digging into a hill near Turin, Italy, bulding the Temples of Damanhur. [Link]
A house was built on the hillside and Falco moved in with several friends who shared his vision. Using hammers and picks, they began their dig to create the temples of Damanhur - named after the ancient subterranean Egyptian temple meaning City of Light - in August 1978.
As no planning permission had been granted, they decided to share their scheme only with like-minded people.
Volunteers, who flocked from around the world, worked in four-hour shifts for the next 16 years with no formal plans other than Falco's sketches and visions, funding their scheme by setting up small businesses to serve the local community.
By 1991, several of the nine chambers were almost complete with stunning murals, mosaics, statues, secret doors and stained glass windows. But time was running out on the secret.
The Illuminati route through Denver
A Denver Westword blog, "the latest 'word," pulls together several YouTube videos with interpretations of Leo Tanguma's trippy murals at Denver International Airport. The artist himself, a Chicano from Texas, says that in his art he's trying "to be faithful to my original ideal of human dignity for all people." [Link]
My interview with Randy Jewart, "The Pursuit of Green Happiness," has been published as a feature at Worldchanging.com. [Link]
We have the environmental side that we project to the community as a new thing, and internally, within the art world, we're consciously trying to create a new economic model for artists that's service-oriented instead of object oriented. We're trying to change artists' mind-sets about themselves, so that when we want to engage them to do a project with us, it's like an internship for them, where they come in, and they have their own set ideas about what their career is and what an art object is. I want them to revisit all that by meeting with developers and corporate folks, and environmental groups, who have a need. They have a campaign they're working on , they have an environmental policy that they're trying – not necessarily to promote from a marketing standpoint, but they really believe in it – and they want to make it work. And we're bringing the artist in to say, here's how you can take this idea and turn it into a project, whether it's a physical object or some sort of game, that augments it, that pushes it to another level.