ephemera
bioephemera | October 13, 2009
I don't know who commissions a steampunk wedding cake, but whoever they are, I like the way they think. Check out these whimsical steampunk cakes (including a metallic, Jules Verne-esque cephalopod) at the normally frightening Cake Wrecks. And big thanks to LindaCO for the heads up!
bioephemera | October 9, 2009One of the arguments I generally make about Web 2.0 is that, if you are an organization who happens to screw up, you should apologize and move on. Don't try to cover your tracks or shut your critics up - you'll just invite mockery and even more attention than you did before.
Unfortunately, Ralph Lauren apparently doesn't agree with that strategy. They've demanded that Photoshop Disasters and Boing Boing take down images of a Ralph Lauren ad that was so badly photoshopped, many thought it was satire.
The ad depicted a model who was so grotesquely emaciated and doll-like (her head was bigger…
bioephemera | October 7, 2009Just got in from a really interesting talk by Viktor Mayer-Schonberger, author of Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age. Mayer-Schonberger's concern is that with a shift to digital modes of storage, we've transitioned from a biologically hardwired default of forgetting information, to a default of remembering. It's literally gotten harder to erase certain types of information than it has to retrieve it. Many types of ephemera just aren't ephemeral anymore.
Why is this a problem? In addition to swamping us with unwanted, outdated information we'd all rather forget (high school…
bioephemera | October 1, 2009Okay, everyone, here is something intriguing. The following video is amateurish, bizarre, has terrible production values, and appears to be the work of either a master performance artist or someone who lacks any self-consciousness whatsoever (shades of Little Edie Bouvier Beale).
But, if you start the video, then click over to some other window (go check your Gmail) and just listen to the audio without video, you're suddenly listening to a dusty, scratchy gramophone record that documents a forgotten, eccentric self-taught Appalachian folk musician from the turn of the century. Or something…
bioephemera | October 1, 2009
A gift idea for the person who already has everything: spider silk couture! (Or the closest thing to it). It took one million spiders to produce the silk for this textile from Madagascar (although the wild spiders were released after their silk was extracted, so some of them may have been repeat donors.) The video is absolutely fascinating:
The silk is naturally golden and undyed. Each individual thread in the cloth was made by twisting 96 to 960 individual spider silk filaments together. I would love to touch it - I can't really imagine what it must be like, can you?
Via Wouldn't You Like…
bioephemera | September 25, 2009
Artist Liz Hickok makes your Friday complete with a Jell-O San Francisco, from this jiggly Palace of Fine Arts to a melting Marina. Melding the blurry, children's book perspective of tilt-shift photography with the saturated, translucent colors that define the California dream, Hickok has hit on something remarkably luscious (and fruit-flavored).
Hickok says,
I create glowing, jellied scale models of urban sites, transforming ordinary physical surroundings into something unexpected and ephemeral. Lit from below, the molded shapes of the city blur into a jewel-like mosaic of luminous…
bioephemera | September 22, 2009Consumerist.com is concerned about these Singaporean Play-Doh ads:
Ummm, well, hmmm. That's kind of creepy, isn't it?
According to the Consumerist,
These Play Doh ads from Singapore don't seem to be aimed at kids. Then again, the message "safe no matter what you make" seems to be aimed directly at parents of kids who play with Play Doh, which leads us back to our initial thought, which is wtf kind of kid requiring parental supervision is shaping eerily realistic looking bottles of pills and razor blades for fun?
The Consumerist's source, UglyDoggy, has the other ads in the series -…
bioephemera | September 20, 2009
For the bibliophile who can't bear to leave all his or her books at home: a one-of-a-kind necklace of eleven miniature leather-bound books by TheBlackSpotBooks. Via NotCot.
bioephemera | September 17, 2009
I'm not really sure what to say about this strange ad. But I'm sure my readers have some ideas. Paging Dr. Isis and Zuska!
Originally here (it appears to be about ten years old), now found here.
*Due to Sb code borkage, if you do not see comments below, go here to view and add your own. Or try viewing on Safari instead of Firefox.
bioephemera | September 15, 2009
An enigmatic photo from Morbid Anatomy's review of the Quay Brothers show at Parsons in NYC. Read all about it here.
bioephemera | September 13, 2009
Okay, if you're anything like me, you don't have time to read the blogs you already follow. But I do recommend that everyone head over to SEED's Revolutionary Minds Think Tank, where Greg Smith is guiding a conversation on visualizing science.
That's where I found the video above, demonstrating the UCSD Software Studies Initiative's application of "cultural analytics" to Rothko's paintings. When the paintings are treated as data points over an artist's career, they can be compared and contrasted in untraditional ways, revealing new patterns and anomalies. Awesome find!
Here, Smith responds…
bioephemera | September 12, 2009According to Reuters, Gunther von Hagens of Body Worlds fame is going to create an entire exhibit showing plastinated cadavers in sexual poses. He already includes two "copulating cadavers" in his current show:
German politicians called the current "Cycle of Life" show charting conception to old age "revolting" and "unacceptable" when it showed in Berlin earlier this year because it included copulating cadavers.The way a plastinate is exhibited can vary from country to country to reflect local sensibilities. A vote of local employees decided that one of the copulating female cadavers should…
bioephemera | September 12, 2009
Tyrannosaurus photoventris
Judith Hoffman, 2009
This is just awesome! It's a dinocamera from artist/photographer/metalworker/amateur time traveler Judith Hoffman:
That's a lens cap/shutter on his navel. He takes pinhole photos of the late Cretaceous using paper negatives.
Here's one of the "photos of the Cretaceous:"
The realism is mind-boggling! I feel like I'm about to be devoured by a plastic toy on the set of a B-movie!
You can see more fun photos here, at Judith's site. She also has a show opening tomorrow at the Peninsula Art Museum, 10 Twin Pines Lane, Belmont, California 94002.…
bioephemera | September 9, 2009I previously blogged about Jennifer Angus' insect installation, Insecta Fantasia, in the Newark Museum's Victorian Ballantine House. For those of you who couldn't make it to the show this YouTube video is a wonderful tour.
Note the layered interplay of 2D wallpaper patterns with 3D insects - some of which have lasercut words and patterns cut into their carapaces - and the insect-populated dollhouses. An insect house within an insect house - it's the kind of intimate yet fantastic inner world created by the best children's books. I'm thrilled that this video lets everyone experience it.…
bioephemera | September 7, 2009
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st,
'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,--that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.'
-John Keats, "Ode on a Grecian Urn"
On rereading the whole "Ode," this line strikes me as a serious blemish on a beautiful poem, and the reason must be that either I fail to understand it, or that it is a statement which is untrue. And I suppose that Keats meant something by it, however remote his truth and his beauty may have been from these words in ordinary…
bioephemera | September 7, 2009
From the 8/31/09 New Yorker: "Still, she recognized that the aesthetic enjoyment of dereliction was a recondite and ultimately unsustainable pursuit."
Perhaps. I find these touching photos of Detroit's abandoned, overgrown houses from Sweet Juniper! disturbing because they are lush and lovely. Finding aesthetic beauty in a destroyed home, abandoned by the families that once lived there, symbol of unemployment and economic depression in a moribund once-community . . . it all seems horribly inappropriate. Yet there is a calm, timeless beauty in dereliction, isn't there? Perhaps it's a memento…
bioephemera | September 4, 2009This ad for Scribe notebooks - depicting a world of doodle-covered scratchpaper - is almost entirely created with digital imaging software. Am I the only one who finds that a little ironic?
Via NotCot.
bioephemera | August 28, 2009
Blue Barnhouse Letterpress is simply awesome. I was idly coveting these classy anatomical heart thank-you cards when I discovered they actually have a special card FOR COLONOSCOPIES:
No, not even letterpress can make these brutal (and hopefully fictitious) colonoscopy implements "classy." But that's not stopping me from blogging it.
bioephemera | August 25, 2009An irreverent, sometimes wince-inducing, profoundly touching sampler of the ephemeral moments we take for granted:
Video by Will Hoffman and team, found via Scibling/author Jonah Lehrer.
bioephemera | August 25, 2009
Lovely minimalist poster design from Jordan Michael Gray's flickrstream.
via NOTCOT.