It’s adorable to watch. The border collie in the video noticed a man lounging on a park bench in The Colony, Texas. Just like any friendly, playful dog-- whose name is Nova, by the way, she decided to approach the man to see if he would like to play frisbee with her.
The gentleman, who looked very bronze and stationary, was actually a sculpture of President Abraham Lincoln. I feel bad for Nova now. I hope someone actually played with her during her park visit!
These creations are absolutely witty. Fancy getting a vaccine-inspired alcoholic beverage? If you’re near Penang, Malaysia, then you’re in for a treat! Backdoor Bodega came up with vaccine-themed drinks, or as Vice’s Heather Chen calls them: booze-ter shots, to sell as packaged cocktail orders. The ‘boredom boosters’ can combat and eliminate any “pandemic-induced lockdown boredom and sobriety,” according to the bar’s online drinks menu:
There’s Sinosour (a play on China’s Sinovac vaccine), ExtraGineca (named after the AstraZeneca shot and combining a potent blend of gin and dry bitters) and the Pfizermeister, an obvious reference to the Pfizer vaccine.
The drinks cost around $8 and are available by delivery—part of a successful business strategy that has helped the bar avoid closure at a crucial time when many businesses folded.
“We’re thankful that cocktail deliveries have been sufficient to sustain our overheads over the past year,” said owner and bartender Koh Yung Shen, who added that the lack of in-person interaction has taken away from the experience of running a bar.
Image credit: Mohd RASFAN / AFP
I don’t know if these new trash cans would entice or scare people into throwing garbage in them.The Japanese arm of Coca-Cola collaborated with local officials and people involved with the Attack On Titan series to promote urban cleanliness and recycling. Well, these Titan-inspired trash cans certainly catch the eye:
If you wanted more people to be aware of their local urban sanitation, lifting some of the most terrifying villains in recent anime history is a good place to start. Because of their size, these trash cans and recycling bins actually give a fairly accurate idea of what titans would look like if they were real. Now we just need this AI to be able to give the complete picture.
This initiative wasn’t the first time Attack On Titan IP was used to encourage more environmentally-conscious behavior either. Earlier this year another Attack On Titan recycling bin was used to collect polyethylene terephthalate bottles. This makes me think about what exactly would resonate the same way in America... Peter Griffin? Homer? Mechanized Tom Brady?
Image credit: Change For The Blue
Well, Walead Beshty seems… inspired. The LA-based artist packaged his art pieces in FedEx boxes and shipped them across the countries to exhibitions and galleries. One would expect that extra precautions are made in delivering precious cargo for display, but Beshty intentionally designed his pieces to break. The reasoning behind this odd decision was that the sculptor wanted to obtain a ‘fingerprint’ that documented the journey of each package to its destination:
The FedEx works […] initially interested me because they’re defined by a corporate entity in legal terms. There’s a copyright designating the design of each FedEx box, but there’s also the corporate ownership over that very shape. It’s a proprietary volume of space, distinct from the design of the box, which is identified through what’s called a SSCC #, a Serial Shipping Container Code. I considered this volume as my starting point; the
perversity of a corporation owning a shape—not just the design of the object—and
also the fact that the volume is actually separate from the box. They’re owned
independently from one another.
Furthermore, I was interested in how art objects acquire meaning through their context and through travel, what Buren called, something like, “the unbearable compromise of the portable work of art”. So, I wanted to make a work that was specifically organized around its traffic, becoming materially manifest through its movement from one place to another.
Image credit: The Whitney Museum of American Art
Researchers from Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University have explored ‘hot streak--’ a period of high-impact works by an artist clustered together in close succession. Dashun Wang was motivated to discover what triggers an artist’s hot streak, and he was inspired after visiting the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. Phys Org has more details:
Van Gogh experienced an artistic breakthrough from 1888-1890, during which he painted his most famous works, including The Starry Night, Sunflowers and Bedroom in Arles. Before that, however, his work was less impressionistic and more realistic. He also tended to use somber earth tones rather than the bright, sweeping colors, for which he is best known today.
"If you look at his production before 1888, it was all over the place," Wang said. "It was full of still-life paintings, pencil drawings and portraits that are much different in character from the work he created during his hot streak."
By using artificial intelligence to mine big data related to artists, film directors and scientists, the Northwestern researchers discovered this pattern is not uncommon but, instead, a magical formula. Hot streaks, they found, directly result from years of exploration (studying diverse styles or topics) immediately followed by years of exploitation (focusing on a narrow area to develop deep expertise).
The research will be published on Sept. 13 in the journal Nature Communications.
With this new understanding about what triggers a hot streak, institutions can intentionally create environments that support and facilitate hot streaks in order to help their members thrive.
Image credit: wikimedia commons
It’s time to update those travel bucket lists! Outdoor sports and outdoor shoe specialists Zalando conducted research on the world’s most Instagrammable hiking routes. From analysing nearly five million Instagram hashtags from the world’s most famous hiking trails, they were able to produce a list of the world’s top 20 most picturesque routes. Amateur Photographer has more details:
Heather Morning, Mountain Safety Advisor with Mountaineering Scotland, says: “The dramatic landscapes, wildlife and flora, ease of access (particularly on the West Highland Way), human history and unrivalled right to roam laws make Scotland a top place to visit.
“There has been a massive increase in the numbers of people enjoying the Scottish mountains and countryside, as would be expected with Covid-19 and the associated difficulties travelling abroad. The rise of the ‘staycation’ is certainly very evident. When lockdown was lifted last summer, Scottish Mountain Rescue saw a 35% increase in the number of call-outs, compared to the same period in the previous year.
“When hiking, it’s important to be respectful and considerate to others and the environment. Solid preparation is also vital. We’ve just launched an initiative called ‘Sofa 2 Summit’, which is a free online resource for those who are new to the hills. It’s a great place for people to start when planning their adventures.”
Check the full list here!
Image credit: Vero Gnz /Unsplash
The Brook is a tiny home in Rosebrook, Australia. The 27-square meter home was designed by Small Not Tiny, and incorporates hidden storage compartments, multifunctional furniture, and expanding frames to make the place liveable regardless of its size. In addition to its features, the tiny home was designed to be a passive house with a fully off-grid solar panel system:
Designed to be a passive home, The Brook hosts a fully off-grid solar panel system on its roof stocked with batteries and a backup generator to ensure a constant flow of power when needed. The roof itself also expands in height on a telescopic frame. During the transportation of The Brook, height parameters margined the home to a height of five meters. Once transported and situated into place, telescopic framing had the uppermost walls fold in so the roof could expand before locking the walls back into place, creating a lofty sleeping area and high ceilings.
The loftiness inside The Brook was inspired by New York-style apartments, bringing expansive glazed glass windows and an industrial aesthetic with a mid-century modern flair to Australia’s regional setting. Throughout the home, recycled brass elements and metal mesh shelving add to the home’s rustic energy and multipurpose outfittings. Copper and ply louvers border the perimeter of the home on both floors and pivot doors provide access to the home’s south and west sides to offer plenty of fresh air and cross-ventilation.
Sleep is not the only way to take a break and recharge. While some of us may be working from home, it doesn’t mean that we’re not exhausted from daily chores and activities! The daily grind is draining both physically and mentally, and we need all the help we can get to recharge and power through the following days. So how do we do that? Entrepreneur’s Daniel Colombo shares different methods of resting to balance our energies. Check the full piece here!
Image credit: Toa Heftiba/Unsplash
The East London Group is a band of artists composed of mostly self-taught, working-class, part-time painters. The members of the association came to John Cooper’s classes at London’s Bethnal Green and Mile End during the 1920s and 1930s. These artists depicted different melancholic scenes in Mile End, Clerkenwell, and other areas in London:
[...] Comparisons can also be made with two other urban-inspired London groups: the earlier Camden Town Group and the contemporaneous Euston Road School—some of whose prominent figures, including Walter Sickert and William Coldstream, made the journey east to lecture to Cooper’s classes and became members themselves.
The East London Group made its mark with an exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1928 and its ascent was rapid, with artists finding their work increasingly sought after, both by national collections and private buyers at exhibitions in the West End. The group’s high point was arguably the participation of Hawthorne and Walter Steggles in the 1936 Venice Biennale.
Cooper died in 1943 during the Second World War and the East London Group’s upward trajectory was rapidly curtailed, to the point that they practically vanished from the art world’s collective memory. “To be blunt, after the war, the world was moving into the jet age, the space age, electronic age,” says Alan Waltham, the curator of a new exhibition about the Steggles brothers and the East London Group at the Beecroft Art Gallery in Southend-on-Sea. “Most likely what the group were doing pre-war looked decidedly old hat. Whatever you’re doing has to appear to be relevant, otherwise people will move on.”
Image credit: The Art Newspaper
Aerial photography is amazing. It provides a perspective that we humans cannot see on our own. Unfortunately, we can’t fly (yet, I hope), but we can take advantage of drones to get images from such a high point. The Drone Photo Awards 2021 celebrate different stunning aerial photographs, and they just announced their top picks. Terje Kolaas’ shot of birds above snow-covered ground took the top prize. Looking at the image makes me want to count the birds included in the shot, to be honest-- there were way too many!
Check some of Time Out’s favorites from the competition here!
Image credit: Terje Kolaas / Drone Photo Awards 2021
The Earth looks stunning! A new photograph from European Space Agency (ESA) astronaut Thomas Pesquet shows our beloved planet wrapped in its atmosphere, and surrounded by a background of glittering stars. Honestly, it’s like an artwork that came to life! Pesquet managed to capture the night side of Earth from the Cupola of the International Space Station (ISS):
"A few night pictures from the Cupola: sometimes star lights battle it out with city lights for who's the brightest and more beautiful," Pesquet wrote on Flickr. "I'm just lucky to get to be the judge."
The glowing atmosphere, not mentioned by Pesquet, is also astonishing. It's called nightglow, and it's created by natural processes.
Earth's sky is never completely dark, not even at night, and not even once you've extracted light pollution, starlight, and diffuse sunlight. The molecules in the atmosphere are constantly undergoing various processes, which causes them to faintly glow across a range of wavelengths.
Nightglow, which appears at night, occurs when molecules and particles broken apart during the day by solar radiation (a process called photoionization) recombine, releasing their excess energy in the form of photons. On Earth, this occurs in layers – the blue-green layer at the outer edge is oxygen and nitrogen.
At a lower altitude, the red-gold layer is called the sodium layer. This is where meteors break apart, releasing sodium into the atmosphere. Photoionization and recombination of sodium atoms then produces a distinctive golden glow.
Image credit: ESA/NASA-T. Pesquet
There’s absolutely no harm in jumping from one art style to another. Renowned abstract painter Wassily Kandinsky proves that one painter can jump from realism to vibrant abstraction and have both of his artworks from those two different styles look great. Kandinsky started his art career with a variety of landscapes that mostly present German and Russian landscapes. The artist made a sudden change with his 1903 work The Blue Rider, as Open Culture details:
Kandinsky made dramatic change come with 1903’s The Blue Rider (above). The presence of the titular figure made for an obvious difference from so many of the images he’d created over the previous half-decade; a shift in its very perception of reality made for a less obvious one.
This is not the world as we normally see it, and Kandinsky’s track record of highly representative paintings tells us that he must deliberately have chosen to paint it it that way. With fellow artists like August Macke, Franz Marc, Albert Bloch, and Gabriele Münter, he went on to form the Blue Rider Group, whose publications argued for abstract art’s capability to attain great spiritual heights, especially through color.
Image credit: wikimedia commons
Well, that’s a new way to reuse plastic bottles! Outdoor dining spaces are more prevalent around the world because of the pandemic. Outside Peaches Kitchen & Bar in Brooklyn, New York, one can spot some unique outdoor dining cabins which are made out of interlocking plastic bottles. The bottles, called Friendship Bottles are used for these spaces:
Called Friendship Bottles, the building blocks of these dining cabins are a specially designed type of container that is intended to bring a practical second life to plastic bottles. Notched and flanged with connectable forms, the bottles are LEGO-like plastic bricks that can be reused as building materials after their initial use as liquid containers.
Currently in the prototype stage, Friendship Bottles are a new approach to the plastic bottle. Produced by a factory in Toronto, the bottles are made like typical plastic products, but with a physical shape and strength that allows them to be upcycled into buildings and other structures.
It’s an idea that’s been bubbling in the beverage industry for decades. In the 1960s, the beermaker Heineken developed an interlocking and stackable glass beer bottle that was intended to be reused as a building material post-consumption, but the concept never made it to market.
Image credit: Jody Kivort/Friendship Products LLC
These tiny landscapes are amazing! Meet the Kei Truck, a tiny vehicle used in Japan for construction and agriculture. Now, the truck is also turned into a canvas for gardening contests! The Kei Truck Garden Contest is an annual event sponsored by the Japan Federation of Landscape Contractors in which contractors from Japan spend hours transforming Kei Trucks into wonderful and intricate mini gardens.
Image via The Colossal
Don’t worry, it's merely an artistic interpretation of a religious figure being hit by a meteorite, not an actual pope who survived after being struck by a celestial object. This installation, titled La Nona Hora, is Maurizio Cattelan’s most controversial work-- which comes as no surprise. The sculpture depicts Pope John Paul II moments after being knocked over by an errant meteorite. It seems comedic and cartoonish at first glance, too. However, the subject matter of the artwork is actually complex and ambiguous at the same time:
[...] Initially, the artist tackled the subject of Pope John Paul II in a very different manner: more serious, less slapstick. “In the beginning, he was supposed to be standing, with the crucifix in his hands,” Cattelan toldSculpture magazine in 2005. “When it was finished and I stood in front of it, I felt as if something was missing, that the piece was not complete. What it needed was very simple: It lacked drama and the capacity to convey the feeling of being in front of something extraordinary and powerful. It didn’t have the sense of failure and defeat.”
[...]
Melanie Holcomb, a curator in the department of Medieval Art and the Cloisters at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. “I’m not ready to definitively label the piece sacrilegious,” said Holcomb. “It’s an ambiguous work to be sure, harboring elements of humor, cruelty, and irreverence, but one can also read it as paying tribute to the power of forces and institutions larger than ourselves. There is of course the awesome power of the meteor, but I’m also struck by how the Pope and the cross he carries have survived undamaged. His face remains serene, his torso is square and the cross, unbent. In the medieval world, a miraculously preserved body was a sure indicator of saintliness.”
image credit: Chesnot/Getty Images
