The last time I tried to sculpt something was when I was in High School. I got as far as making a sort of ‘bowl’ to store my paper clip collection. Next time you visit your favorite art museum take a few minutes to look at the sculpture. Try something by Bellini or Michelangelo. Take a look at the hands. Now look at this video…
Sculpting The Hand
Philippe Faraut | PhilippeFaraut.com | 17 Mar 13
________________________________________________________________________________ Philippe Faraut received his degree in woodcarving and the construction of French fine furniture from Germain Sommeillier in Annecy, France, his boyhood home. An avid traveler, Philippe’s destinations have allowed him the opportunity to study the cultures of many countries in Europe, Asia, Africa and the Caribbean, thus influencing his work in portraiture sculpting. After establishing residence in the Chesapeake Bay area of Virginia, he developed an interest in modeling the head in clay. Soon thereafter, he relocated his studio to New York State and began teaching sculpting classes.
The image below was created by Chris Jordan, a Seattle-based artist who focuses on the impact of human behavior on the environment. The piece depicted here is called “Unsinkable”. In the chilling text accompanying this piece Jordan describes the nuclear time bomb sitting under the remains of Japan’s Fukushima power plant. You can view this piece and others in Jordan’s remarkable collection at ChrisJordan.com…
Unsinkable
Chris Jordan | ChrisJordan.com | 2013
Depicts 67,000 mushroom clouds, equal to the number of metric tons of ultra-radioactive uranium/plutonium waste being stored in temporary pools at the 104 nuclear power plants across the U.S. These waste pools must be cooled with hundreds of thousands of gallons of constantly circulating water, and many plants have inadequate or nonexistent backup cooling systems in case of power loss. In the U.S. and around the world, the waste pools are under-protected, over-filled, and vulnerable to earthquakes, storms, malfeasance, and human error. In 1997 the Brookhaven National Laboratory estimated that a calamity at just one of these waste pools in the U.S. could cause 138,000 American deaths (more than the number of Japanese who died in the 1945 bombing of Hiroshima), and contaminate 2,000 square miles of our land.
Currently, the waste pool in Reactor Unit 4 at Japan’s Fukushima-Daiichi plant is at risk for collapse. The building is unstable, and the cracked and leaking pool contains 262 tons of ultra-radioactive uranium/plutonium waste. For months, Fukushima has been experiencing numerous earthquakes from magnitude 4.1 to 6.2, sometimes several per day. If a magnitude 7 earthquake were to occur, causing the Unit 4 waste pool to rupture and drain, the resulting meltdown and fires could release ten times more airborne radioactive material than was released by the Chernobyl disaster. At that point humans could no longer enter or operate the facility, potentially leading to a chain reaction of meltdown events at Fukushima’s five other units, releasing 85 times as much radiation as the Chernobyl disaster.
The United States lies downwind of Fukushima, only a few days across the Pacific via the jet stream. The jet stream would carry radioactive material into the interior of the United States, eventually circling the globe and reaching the entire northern hemisphere within weeks or months. The amount of radiation released “would destroy the world environment and our civilization,” according to Robert Alvarez, former Senior Policy Adviser for National Security and the Environment at the U.S. Department of Energy.
________________________________________________________________________________ Chris Jordan is an artist based in Seattle, Washington who is best known for his large scale works depicting mass consumption and waste, particularly garbage. He has been called “the ‘it’ artist of the green movement”. Chris is currently working on “Midway”, a feature documentary on the impact of pollution on bird populations, including albatrosses, in the pacific island of Midway.
Massoud Hassani grew up in Kabul, Afghanistan at a time when kicking a soccer ball in the sand could get you killed. So like artists everywhere he used that experience to create a solution which was both beautiful and useful. Hassani is planning a show at MOMA in New York. Strange how even war can produce remarkable art…
A Sculpture That Clears Mines
Massoud Hassani | TED | Nov 12
________________________________________________________________________________ Massoud Hassani is an artist and designer who grew up in Kabul Afghanistan. Mine Kafon will be part of the collection MOMA (New York) and Hassani will also have an exposition in there in March 2013.
How do you read a two-thousand-year-old manuscript by Archimedes that has been erased, cut up, written on, welded with Elmer’s glue and painted over? With a particle accelerator, of course. Specifically the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource at Stamford University in Palo Alto, CA. And that was after scraping off all the wax. In an age when more and more of human communication is generated and stored in the form of electronic digital bits and bytes it’s useful to consider what the archivists of 3012 will do to unearth what we said and wrote in 2012…
Revealing the lost codex of Archimedes
William Noel | TED | May 12
________________________________________________________________________________ William Noel is the Curator of Manuscripts and Rare Books at the Walters Art Museum. Since 1999 Noel has spearheaded the conservation of a manuscript known as the Archimedes Palimpsest. The palimpsest is a unique Byzantine prayer book made up of parchments which contain hidden writings from three original previously-unknown texts: treatises written by Archimedes; works by the 4th-century B.C. Attic Orator Hyperides; and 3rd-century commentary on Aristotle’s Categories, by an unknown author. Using a powerful particle accelerator Noel and his team were able to uncover the hidden texts and publish all their images and findings on the Internet, available to anyone for free under a Creative Commons license. Noel currently lives in Baltimore, Maryland, where he curates at the Walters, working to ensure that the public has free digital access to his collection.
Flying in a motorized paraglider over one of the most diverse continents in the world, George Steinmetz captures in his photographs the stunning beauty, potential and hope of Africa’s landscapes and people. See the project at http://mediastorm.com/publication/african-air
________________________________________________________________________________ A self-taught photographer, Steinmetz has traveled through more than 30 countries in Africa photographing its diverse wildlife, landscape and culture. For the past decade much of his work has involved flying a ultralight aircraft to photograph remote landscapes. His foot-launched aircraft consists of a backpack motor and paraglider-style wing. It is the world’s lightest and slowest motorized aircraft and allows a unique and more intimate style of aerial photography.
His photographs have appeared numerous times in National Geographic magazine and in the German edition of GEO.
Here is an extraordinary collection of images of Russia taken around 1910 by a Russian photographer who used a special camera to capture three images which he filtered to create color images. What is astonishing about these pictures is how they make what are normally seen as “archaic” views of a long-past era come to life. Aside from their dress and some haircuts, these people could have been photographed a week ago, not a hundred years ago. It also shatters a common misconception we have of Russia as a drab, frozen place. This Russia is green and lush and beautiful. Very interesting indeed…
Russia in Color, a Century Ago
Click (HERE) to go to Boston.com to view the complete collection
Now students, this video shows the manufacturing of a book. That’s “book”, defined as a written or printed work consisting of pages glued or sewn together along one side and bound in covers. A book is something you read in order to gain knowledge, learn about history or ideas, to experience another’s dreams or share personal experience. Books are not a a digital gadget. They do not glow in the dark. They come in millions of colors and forms and they are often full of marvelous illustrations, drawings, photos or diagrams. If you ever have an opportunity to hold a book in your hands you should take the opportunity to see what a joyful invention they are. Unfortunately the opportunities for doing that are coming to a close…
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