Perhaps a counterbalance to yesterday’s extinction calendar, this wonderful animal video shot on location in Costa Rica by Los Angeles-based filmmaker Douglas Burgdorff. I giggled to read “you just out Malicked Malick with this” in the comments on Vimeo, as I was thinking this is what an episode of National Geographic would look like if directed by Terrence Malick. Visual poetry. Set to Time Lapse by Michael Nyman, and beware bug eating.
The Almost Extinct Calendar designed by London firm The Chase for the BBC Wildlife Fund just picked up accolades at the 2011 D&AD Awards. The calendar displays an endangered animal for every day of the year and is not something I’m particularly eager to hang on the wall, but instead a grim reminder of the inevitable fate many species will soon face due to human interference in their environment. Not too get all soapboxy, but at a time when our culture’s attention is dominated by the internet, television, and other forms of media, it seems the creation of a successful environmental campaign is nearly impossible. That’s what I love about the direct nature of this. At a single glance, without even being able to read, the meaning of the design is painfully clear. Using the interactive calendar you can click to learn more about each animal and then make a donation. (via creative review)
A new large-scale installation from artist Gregory Euclide (previously) using a wide variety of materials including acrylic, acrylic caulk, cast paper from Central Park boulders, eurocast, fern, and foam. Euclide also recently created the artwork for a Bon Iver album which you can read about over on My Love for You, or check out this video. (via behance)
Stacks is an outdoor bookshelf installation by artist David Harper made of books and wood. Via Cazenova College:
The theme for Harper’s installation: “these trees shall be my books,” comes from William Shakespeare’s “As You Like It,” but the goal of the work goes far beyond Orlando’s wish to immortalize Rosalind. Harper seeks to immortalize the love of knowledge, and the homage owed to the living things we use to create stores of knowledge for all to study. “STACKS” captures the transformation from living tree to store of knowledge.
(via fasels suppe)
Since we’re on the subject of grass today, check out Green Corner, a collaboration between Helsinki-based artists Otto Karvonen and Jon Irigoyen. Described as an “urban intervention” the idea was fairly straightforward: install a grass turf lawn in a parking space creating a temporary park that calls into question the ideas of ownership and use in public spaces.
Green corner is a spatial artwork consisting of lawn that is installed on a parking space. The lawn is equipped with some comfortable garden furniture, to provide a relaxing break in the middle of the hectic urban space. The work raises questions about public space in general; to whom it belongs and what can be done with it. [...] The project functions also as an invitation to a workshop taking place in June. The workshop explores the public spaces in Kallio [a neighborhood in Helsinki] and the future prospects of the area.
It would be fun to see this project expanded to entire street or intersection. I’ll bring the croquet set. (via pixelache)
Update: So I’ve been living in a public art cave. Apparently this project is very similar to, and perhaps even part of, an ongoing worldwide movement called Park(ing) Day in which hundreds of parking spots across the globe are converted into small recreational parks. A million kabillion good shots can be found here. (thnx, @thegcanyon)
So what did you do when you were six? I played with Legos, watched a TV show called 3-2-1 Contact, and ate Trix cereal. That was pretty much my day-to-day. But this fearless child is on a road less traveled. His name is Enal and he lives with an Indonesian fishing community known as the Bajau Laut. In this photo captured by James Morgan, he swims with sharks in a penned off area underneath his home that rests on stilts in Wangi, Indonesia. Via the photographer’s web site:
Whilst few young children are now born on boats, the ocean is still very much their playground and whilst they are getting conflicted messages from their communities, who simultaneously refrain from spitting in the ocean and continue to dynamite its reefs, I still believe they could play a crucial role in the development of western marine conservation practices. Here Enal plays with his pet shark.
The next time I tense up watching my three-year-old son do something audacious in the park or walk out “too far” into the deeper end of the swimming pool, I think this image will seriously put things into perspective. Time to get some pet sharks. The photograph won the Telegraph’s 2010 Travel Photographer of the Year award. Seriously, look at that smile! (via lustik)
Just discovered the work of German photographer Bernd Edgar Wichmann. His portfolio is chalk-full of accomplished commercial work for dozens of brands, agencies, and magazines, but it’s his landscape work shown above that’s truly inspiring to me. It’s as if his camera is hovering in the sky above the images he shoots. (via beware)
(click images for detail)
In his installation A Butterfly’s Eye View artist Eiji Watanabe eviscerates butterfly field guides, releasing the delicately cut insects and pinning them to the walls around the gutted textbooks. It’s almost as if he bestows life to these little paper creatures, and yet they often remain organized in a tight grid, an entire new species of butterfly. The images came via a number of Flickr accounts.
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© 2010-2013 Christopher Jobson, all rights reserved, unless otherwise noted. I try my best to attribute images, videos, and quotes to their creators and original sources. If you see something on Colossal that's misattributed or you would like removed, please contact me. The Colossal logo and name Colossal are the trademarks of Christopher Jobson.
