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• Treehouse Party

  Baumraum is a German company that builds mind-blowing tree houses. Before you visit The Cool Hunter to check out more of these wonderful photos, make sure you have a napkin or paper towel handy. The images might induce drooling.
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  • Date: May 16 2008
  • Posted by Patrick James

• Classic Vinyl Covers

  Earlier this week, The Aesthetic Poet linked to jl.incrowd's fantastic Flickr set: Vintage classic album cover graphics. Apparently, the whole idea for album artwork is attributed to a designer named Alex Steinweiss. Good on ya, Steiny. We especially like the Brahms pictured above.
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  • Date: May 16 2008
  • Posted by Patrick James

• Arboreal Audio

  Hugs are great but sometimes all a tree needs is a good listener. To that end, the English artist Alex Metcalf has made a device that lets passersby listen in on the internal processes—the capillary action and whatnot—that keeps trees alive. He explains:
  
  In the ‘Tree Listening Installation’ my specifically designed sensor is placed on a chosen tree, and is then linked to between 5 and 10 headphones that are then hung from the branches. This allows the public to listen ‘Live’ to the sound of the sound the water being pulled up from the roots to the leaves through the xylem tube. This water movement is what keeps the tree alive by proving the leaves with the necessary water to turn into sugar as a source of food, and as part of the cooling system on a hot sunny day.
  
  It sounds like a great way to make our ecosystem's essential functions part of people's direct experience. And we're relieved his experiment didn't turn out like Roald Dahl's creepy adult short story The Sound Machine.
  
  The Listening Tree, via BLDGBLOG.
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  • Date: May 14 2008
  • Posted by andrewprice

• R.I.P. Robert Rauschenberg

  The prolific pop artist Robert Rauschenberg died Monday at the age of 82. We first read about it on Wired News this morning. If you're interested, you should also visit NYTimes for a thoughtful and comprehensive obituary that's accompanied by this art and photo feature.
  
  May he rest in peace.
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  • Date: May 13 2008
  • Posted by Patrick James

• Intermission

  Check out this great bit of "wall-animated" graffiti from blu.
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  • Date: May 12 2008
  • Posted by andrewprice

• Intermission

  From This American Life, the television show: A funny, poignant anecdote about anecdotes, with animation by Chris Ware, the guy who does cartoons for The New Yorker and McSweeney's.
  
  Via I Watch Stuff.
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  • Date: May 09 2008
  • Posted by andrewprice

• Munition Renditions

  When we put an AK-47 on the cover of GOOD 006, we were wrestling with the relationship between design and problem solving. Paper Wars offers a similar take on the design of that weapon—juxtaposing its gorgeous aesthetic with the reality of its purpose. Previewing the show, Core77 posted these amazing AK-47 remixes.
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  • Date: May 07 2008
  • Posted by Patrick James

• Green Porn

  We mentioned Isabella Rossini's "Green Porn" series back when we first heard about it. It's now live on the Sundance Channel's website. No introduction can possibly prepare you for this Zoobooks-meets-Hustler experience.
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  • Date: May 06 2008
  • Posted by andrewprice

• Postlapsarian Russia

  Kottke linked to the breathtaking time-lapse photography of Alexy Titarenko this morning. The images have this haunting quality to them that somehow doesn't seem possible stateside.
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  • Date: May 02 2008
  • Posted by Patrick James

• Punk'd: Fine Art Edition

  In "The Tuymans Experiment," the acclaimed Belgian painter Luc Tuymans and some art-world collaborators punk the plebes. The painter—whose work sells for millions at auction and whose importance is, we're assured, beyond dispute—paints a mural on a busy Antwerp street. A hidden camera records whether passersby stop to appreciate the work of a master. It's a thought-provoking video.
  
  We're all for public art, and the modest Tuymans is a good sport. But, when only 4% of passersby stop, the narrator hopes that "these numbers will wake people up...[to] take more interest in art." We're a little uncomfortable with the suggestion that a busy student, or surgeon, or postal worker, is obligated to stop just because a Tuymans painting is there. After all, people routinely walk past entire museums full of art for perfectly good reasons.
  
  Just for fun, we'd be curious to try the opposite experiment: take a painter without critical credentials, put them in a respected gallery, and secretly tape the praise of the aesthetes.
  
  Thanks, Noella.
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  • Date: Apr 29 2008
  • Posted by andrewprice