Art

Ball: A New Short Film from The Mercadantes

Ball is the latest video from film-making team The Mercadantes whose previous films have been widely shared online including Symmetry, Words, and many more. In this new clip directed by Daniel Mercadante, hundreds of ball and ball-shaped images taken from Google image search are placed in a rapid sequence creating a sort of visual poem. Very cool.

Art

Mechanical Sculptures Built from Discarded Objects by Andrea Petrachi

Milan-based Artist Andrea Petrachi creates bizarre characters and insects using reclaimed objects such as old cameras, calculators, pliers, knives, and even electric razors. Despite their sleek design, the characters are quite whimsical, often taking the persona of faces and heads removed from dolls and other children’s toys. Petrachi says his work is generally a symbol of our cultures out-of-control consumerism. See much more in his portfolio. (via daily art fixx)

Art

Call Parade: 100 Phone Booths Given to 100 Artists on the Streets of São Paulo

Mariane Borgomani

Mariane Borgomani

Mariane Borgomani

Wally Gobetz

Call Parade is an ongoing public art project in São Paulo sponsored by Brazilian telecommunications firm Vivo, that paired 100 artists with 100 street-side phone booths giving them free reign to transform the peculiar hooded fixtures into anything imaginable. The exhibition has proven to be extremely popular and Brazilian photographer Mariane Borgomani set out to capture a number of the phones, my favorite of which is the painted day/night treatment above by artist Maramgoní. (via lustik)

Art Illustration

Incredible New Sketchbook Illustrations from Mattias Adolfsson

Within the sketchbooks of Swedish artist Mattias Adolfsson (previously), strange comic book robots are seen running amok, fantastic steampunk-esque machines sputter to life, and airplane pilots find themselves facing interfaces encumbered with thousands of switches, dials, and tubes. It’s a world that is absurdly complex and meticulously drawn using only a finely controlled pen and a few brushstrokes of color.

Above are just a few of my favorites among Adolfsson’s prolific outpouring of work which you can follow on Flickr and Behance. He also has a number of original works available on Etsy including a new accordion fold picture book, and some of his larger drawings are now available as giclée prints over on Arte Limited.

Art

Edison's Cradle? A Kinetic Toy Reinvented with Light

As part of his senior thesis exhibition at Musashino Art University in Tokyo, art student Yasutoki Kariya re-imagined the ubiquitous desktop gadget, Newton’s Cradle, using a lovely sequence of light bulbs. Entitled Asobi (which translates roughly as “playing“) the 11-bulb installation creates a visual interpretation of the popular toy named after Sir Isaac Newton demonstrating his third law of motion regarding momentum: that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. However, instead of actual energy created by the kinetic force of steel balls, Kariya devised a method for using programmed light and two surreptitiously placed pistons to create this purely visual experience that’s arguably more mesmerizing than the original concept.

As an added super bonus, the team over at the Experiments in Motion blog created the animation above which easily contends for one of the most beautiful animated gifs I’ve ever seen, already racking up over 167,000 shares on Tumblr this weekend.

Asobi was nominated for the 2012 Mitsubishi Junior Designer Award. (via spoon & tamago)

Design

Lamps Made from Sawmill Waste and Tree Branches Embedded with Resin and LEDs

For his Brecce collection, Italian designer Marco Stefanelli devised an ingenious way of removing fragments from sawmill scraps, tree branches, and cement fragments, and replacing them with perfectly sculpted resin embedded with LEDs. The resulting lamps retain the organic nature of their original form yet cast a beautifully subdued light. You can see much more on Stefanelli’s blog. (via the awesomer)