UK agency PrettyGreen made this awesome sign for Cadbury’s Race Season, a challenge to find the world’s fastest racers including the world’s fastest coin stacker. The work required the expertise of several 2D and 3D artists and took five days to construct utilizing 31,010 coins. Check out the making of video to see how they did it. (thnx, andy!)
More work from Madrid today. This time from Alberto de Pedro showing an amazing interior photo pasted atop a decript doorway. Awesome. (via escrito en la pared)
(click images for detail)
Artist Sagaki Keita was born in 1984 and lives and works in Tokyo. His densely composited pen and ink illustrations contain thousands of whimsical characters that are drawn almost completely improvised. I am dumbstruck looking at these and love the wacky juxtaposition of fine art and notebook doodles. See more of his work here, and be sure to click the images above for more detail. Thanks Sagaki for sharing your work with Colossal!
It’s hard to believe that almost ten years now separate us from September 11, 2001, a tragic, world-changing day forever seared in our memories as we watched the attacks unfold on CNN or encountered it firsthand on the streets of New York and elsewhere. As the anniversary approaches and the discussion begins on how best to remember and retell the events of that day artist Ramón Espantaleón has begun work his personal response. A native of Madrid, Espantaleón not only endured 9/11 while living in the United States, but returned home to experience the Madrid train bombings in 2004.
First Apple is an ambitious work that seeks to recreate various scale models of New York City and in some cases to map these three dimensional renderings to the Twin Towers themselves. To create the base Espantaleón painstakingly constructed Manhattan in clay by forming 31,920 volumetric units each representing actual buildings, at a scale of 1/65. These volumes were then used to create pixelated city blocks from which he cast silicon molds that could in turn be used to reproduce each block with epoxy resin and polyurethane. This reproducible method allowed for a potentially unlimited exploration of space, color, material (and in some cases typography) resulting in the varied forms of architectural model pointillism you see above.
In total there are 11 individual artworks soon to be displayed in Madrid and an additional 11 Espantaleón seeks to display in New York. Learn about the project via his web site Landspot. A huge thanks to Ramon for sharing his incredible work with Colossal, and thanks to our mutual friend Jeff for making the introduction!
PLAMA Marble Run 2D is a magnetic marble game for both children and adults designed by Swiss firm Bernhard | Burkhard. The entire set consists of 12 magnetic planes that can be rearranged on a vertical surface resulting in a subtle groove that can be traversed by a marble. Via their web site:
There are thousand ways to create an individual path for the marble that can be reorganised shortly. [...] Plama may help to develop creativity and logical thinking. It can increase the understanding of two dimensional space and proportion. Using the outline of the shapes to build a well-functioning marble run is an easy way to focus on complex thinking. Marble run 2d has been produced in Switzerland in a first limited edition and is available in selected stores or on request.
Request a set via their web site. (via triangulation)
Reminiscent of Siren Elise Wilhelmsen’s knitting clock, London-based Merel Karhof has developed a fully functional windmill capable of knitting.
With the power of the wind, a knitting machine knits from the outside towards the inside of a building. The knitted material is harvested from time to time and rounded-off in individually packaged scarves. Each scarf has its own label which tells you in how much time it has been knitted and on which date.
(via swissmiss)
This weekend amid freezing and blustery conditions Chicago held its annual Chiditarod race. For those of you who are unfamiliar the Chiditarod Urban Iditarod is a combination pub crawl, costume contest and charity food drive, and if that’s not enough for you it’s all centered around a race where teams push decorated shopping carts across the city for most of the day, pausing at 11 strategically placed recovery checkpoints, that is: bars. This year the Chiditarod raised over $14,000 and collected 10,000 pounds of canned food for the Chicago Anti-Hunger Federation. Awesome. Thanks to Kirstie Shanley for the photos.
Side note. My cousin Ed Stielstra is at this very moment racing across the frozen Alaskan tundra in the actual Iditarod. So far he’s traveled 272 miles and still has all 16 dogs with him which is a great sign. Good luck Ed!
About Time is a clock by RISD grad and Fulbright scholar Louie Rigano that abstracts the precise function of hour, minute and second hands to translucent, amorphous color wheels. The accuracy and function of such a clock is somewhat debatable and I would probably consider this more of an art piece than a means of making it to an interview on time. Unfortunately this is just a prototype but according to Rigano he plans to eventually put it into production. Yes, please. (via fastco)
