Multi Medium

Giant Chinese Snow Santa!

You heard me.

China’s freezing northern city of Harbin is building what organizers say is the world’s largest Santa Claus ice sculpture.

The giant Father Christmas, 160 meters (525 ft) long and 24 meters high, centers on an enormous face of Father Christmas, complete with flowing beard and hat.

(…)

Every year the city plays host to a world-renowned ice festival. But the effects of global warming are taking a toll as the snow and ice now melt more rapidly than in the past.

Organizers said they had to artificially make snow for the Santa Claus sculpture.

Still, the sculpture has attracted thousands of tourists from all over the country who want to enjoy a white Christmas despite worries over the economic downturn.

I think the war against global warming has just merged with the War On Christmas.  Talk about strange bedfellows.

Add comment December 30th, 2008 at 08:45pm Posted by Eli

Great Moments In Robot Acting

Ohhh dear:

First there were dancing robots, then house-sitting robots and now a new breed of acting robots is making its big debut on the Japanese stage.

The play, which had its premiere at Osaka University, is one of Japan’s first robot-human theatre productions.

The machines were specially programmed to speak lines with human actors and move around the stage with them.

Playwright Oriza Hirata says the work raises questions about the relationship between humanity and technology.

The play, called Hataraku Watashi (I, Worker), is set in the near future.

It focuses on a young couple who own two housekeeping robots, one of which loses its motivation to work.

In the play, the robot complains that it has been forced into boring and demeaning jobs and enters into a discussion with the humans about its role in their lives.

So far, the play is only 20 minutes long but it is hoped to become a full-length production by 2010.

This can only end badly.

(h/t Engadget)

Add comment November 27th, 2008 at 05:30pm Posted by Eli

Somewhere Under The Rainbow

My ridiculously talented almost-cousin Malcolm’s view of the GOP and McCain-Palin ticket.  Works for me.

(Click on image for full-size version)

Add comment September 1st, 2008 at 04:59pm Posted by Eli

Image Of The Week

“No Joke,” by Drew Friedman in Vanity Fair. Wow.

(f/t Attaturk)

2 comments July 30th, 2008 at 09:36pm Posted by Eli

I Approve.

So there’s this guy in Japan, Ken Ohyama, who takes pictures of highway interchanges, mostly at night.  Damn, I wish I had thought of that.

(I do have some Newark Airport photos which are kind of similar, tho.)

A coupla more of my favorites:

Ooo…

(h/t Pink Tentacle)

2 comments May 24th, 2008 at 11:53am Posted by Eli

Other People’s Photoblogging

This is just amazing. Some HDR (high dynamic range) photos from Japan:

Nihonbashi (Tokyo) - Photo by Altus

No.6 (Kanagawa prefecture) - Photo by dokool

Machinery (Tokyo) - Photo by heiwa4126

Unbelievable, especially that last one. More Japanese HDR photos here.

(h/t Pink Tentacle)

3 comments January 18th, 2008 at 11:48am Posted by Eli

Icy Romance

Whoa.

Rising out of the snow, this magnificent sculpture is the centrepiece of the Ice And Snow Festival, held annually in the northeastern city of Harbin, China.

Called Romantic Feelings, it is a staggering 115ft high and 656ft long - the largest snow sculpture ever created.

It was made by joining together 15ft square blocks of natural ice and snow, taken from the nearby Songhua River, which have been compressed to withstand blows from hatchets, saws and shovels.

600 sculptors from 40 countries have used 120,000 cubic feet of snow and ice to create the Olympic themed landscape - a vista of Russian churches, French cathedrals, Chinese palaces and, of course, an ice Acropolis.

There is even a version of Stonehenge to celebrate the London Olympics in 2012.

At night they are dazzlingly lit by coloured lasers and lanterns, creating a multicoloured translucent display.

Just amazing. Unfortunately…

Harbin, which is in Heilongjiang Province on the edge of Siberia, is one of China’s coldest places and winter temperatures can drop to -35C, which you might think cold enough for preserving snow sculptures.

However, organisers are increasingly concerned about the effects of global warming on this year’s sculptures.

Many of them are melting rapidly in the midday sun and emergency repairs have already been carried out to stop them collapsing completely.

The festival traditionally runs from mid-December to early February, but it is feared that the rising temperatures - last winter it reached a record 6.6C - could see it significantly shortened.

Well, crap. Probably not the most pressing reason to fight global warming, but you can add it to the list.

(h/t the shadowy & mysterious Codename V.)

5 comments January 13th, 2008 at 06:25pm Posted by Eli

Chock Full O’ Awesome

This is just amazing:

French city of Nantes recently became host to extremely strange and fascinating sculptural display: “Les Machines de l’Ile Nantes”, designed by François Delarozière and Pierre Orefice. Claude Joannis has a few photographs that’ll give you some idea about how extraordinary cool this exhibition is (the first on my list of museums to visit, if possible!)

Lots more awesome photos at the link.

(h/t spiiderweb)

4 comments January 8th, 2008 at 11:41am Posted by Eli

Quote Of The Day

Photographer Lee Friedlander, quoted in an NYT story about his exhibit of photographs of parks designed by Frederick Law Olmsted:

We photographers don’t really make anything: we peck at the world and try to find something curious or wild or beautiful that might fit into what the medium of photography can hold.

This is about right for me. I have a hard time viewing photography as a creative endeavor in the same league as actual Art; I see it more as a scavenger hunt, trying to uncover the beauty hidden in the mundane (or not-so-mundane - but the mundane is usually what I have to work with).

And as Friedlander alludes to, oftimes scenes that are beautiful to the naked eye become dreary and boring when photographed. But, happily, the converse is also true.

Add comment January 3rd, 2008 at 11:58am Posted by Eli

Echoes Of War

World War I is the gift that just keeps on giving…

YPRES, Belgium (AP) — The summer plowing season in Flanders Fields is a good time for Ivan Sinnaeve.

Known as ”Shrapnel Charlie,” he keeps alive memories of one of history’s bloodiest battles by melting down the World War I shells harvested by farmers and transforming them into toy soldiers which he calls ‘’soldiers of peace.”

The 54-year-old Belgian history buff has a huge following among war pilgrims visiting Flanders Fields, the battleground of 1914-1918.

Sinnaeve, a retired carpenter, is busier than usual this year, the 90th anniversary of the phase of fighting called the Battle of Passchendaele which saw some of the war’s worst trench warfare and its first use of mustard gas.

A half-million Britons, Australians, New Zealanders, Canadians and Germans were killed or wounded, fighting among villages and farms over five miles of muddy Belgian terrain. Drawn out over five months from June to October of 1917, Passchendaele became a symbol of senseless killing.

(…)

He was commissioned by local and Scottish organizers to make the six-inch tall Scottish Black Watch Regiment figurines from shells found in fields where the regiment fought.

He said he always asks the farmers where they found the metal they bring to him, ‘’so I know which regiments were involved.” He thinks some of the iron may be from the shells fired at the regiments he is now commemorating as ‘’soldiers of peace.”

(…)

Few battlefields in the world still yield so many bombs, guns and bones — 200 tons a year around Ypres….

”You never know what my husband brings home; you can bet it’s not a bunch of flowers,” farmer Charlotte Cardoen-Descamps says, chuckling as she shows a fresh crop of shells, gas shells, grenades, and an unexploded basketball-size aerial bomb her husband Dirk plowed up.

Farmers have to use extra care, because some shells still leak toxic gases. However explosions are rare because the farmers have become experienced at handling the iron harvest.

”We got 17 pieces this plowing season, but we can expect even more later this year,” said Cardoen-Descamps. The ammunition is neatly stacked around the farmyard ready to be collected by bomb disposal experts.

”The nasty shells for us are the gas shells of course, because we can’t identify those anymore,” she said. ”The color code which gave away the content has rusted away, so if we shake it gently and we hear something slushing around — well, be careful.”

(…)

In Sinnaeve’s cramped townhouse, the living room, dining room and kitchen are littered with model soldiers, molds and tiny paint cans.

He has been making his models for 14 years, and says he earns no profit, happy just to know that ”I have soldiers all over the world.”

He got his nickname, Shrapnel Charlie, from a Canadian visitor who couldn’t pronounce his surname.

He makes nearly 2,000 soldiers a year, German and Allied, and is almost halfway to his goal of 55,000 — the number of missing on the famed Menen Gate memorial in Ypres.

Piet Chielens, head of the In Flanders Fields Museum in Ypres, said the region is ”like the laboratory of war.”

”It was all out war, for the first time in its most absurd form,” he said. ”There was no real reason for doing this and there was no real strategy.”

Hopefully the iron harvest in Iraq won’t be as fruitful 90 years from now.

1 comment July 11th, 2007 at 11:53am Posted by Eli

Mama Don’t Take My Autochrome Away

Color photo by Edward Steichen. From 1908.

At first glance the two pictures seem to be gorgeous anachronisms, full-color blasts from the black-and-white world of 1908, the year Ford introduced the Model T and Theodore Roosevelt was nearing the end of his second term.

But they are genuine products of their time, rare ones, among the few surviving masterpieces from the earliest days of color photography, made using a process developed by the Lumière brothers in France and imported to the United States by the photographer Edward Steichen a century ago this year. They were taken by Steichen, probably in Buffalo, and are thought to be portraits of Charlotte Spaulding, a friend and student who became his luminous subject for the portraits, which resemble pointillist miniatures on glass.

(…)

Eastman House has a substantial collection of Steichen works, including 22 of the same kind of color photographs, known as autochromes. But when Anthony Bannon, the museum’s director, received a call last summer from a Buffalo lawyer, who said his client, Charlotte Albright, a 96-year-old painter, wanted to donate three examples of what were probably antique glass-plate negatives, Mr. Bannon assumed they were the works of her mother, Charlotte Spaulding.

(…)

Mr. Bannon said that because the photographs had sat for so long out of the light, their colors remained particularly vivid. “They’re in just as perfect a shape as you could expect from something from almost a century ago,” he said.

Autochromes are positive images, meaning they are unique and not negatives that can be used to create prints. They were made using a complex process in which tiny dyed grains of potato starch were spread across a piece of glass and light was passed through them to a photo-sensitive plate.

The three colors of the starch grains — bright blue-violet, bright orange-red and Kelly green — worked together to produce a wide range of realistic-looking colors, in the same way that combinations of red, blue and green dots produce a color-television picture.

“If you did it right, you had the basic colors you were looking at when you took the picture,” said Mark Osterman, the photographic-process historian at Eastman House.

Very, very cool.

4 comments May 21st, 2007 at 11:17am Posted by Eli

Sweet Jesus!

This is much tastier than wafers:

A New York gallery has angered a US Catholic group with its decision to exhibit a milk chocolate sculpture of Jesus Christ.

The six-foot (1.8m) sculpture, entitled “My Sweet Lord”, depicts Jesus Christ naked on the cross.

Catholic League head Bill Donohue called it “one of the worst assaults on Christian sensibilities ever”.

(…)

“The fact that they chose Holy Week shows this is calculated, and the timing is deliberate,” Mr Donohue said.

(…)

Mr Cavallaro, the Canadian-born artist, is known for using food ingredients in his art, on one occasion painting a hotel room in mozzarella cheese.

He used 200 pounds (90 kg) of chocolate to make the sculpture which, unusually, depicts Jesus without a loincloth.

Me, I would have titled it “Jesus Pieces.” Of course, I’m going to hell.
(h/t Glenn and Ol’ Froth)

5 comments March 30th, 2007 at 09:49pm Posted by Eli

OMGami

This… is origami. From a single sheet of paper.

And there’s plenty more where that came from (check out the Gallery link in the top left).

In fact, there’s even a video…

Teh Awesome.

From Japan Probe, by way of Pink Tentacle.

10 comments February 10th, 2007 at 03:42pm Posted by Eli

Is Art Dying?

Interesting op-ed piece in today’s NYT by presidential biographer Edmund Morris, wherein he argues that art and the creative process are becoming sterile and impersonal because artists and art are becoming increasingly “hands-off.”

He waxes poetic about the violent physicality of Beethoven and Bernard Dufour’s creative process and the way they literally attack the paper or canvas, as compared to “video recording, performance art and installations farmed out to contractors….”

I’m not entirely sure how to feel about this as a photographer who can’t draw a straight line to save his life. And not just any kind of photographer, but a digital photographer, so my idea of photo “processing” no longer involves chemicals or film or timers or darkrooms. My only interaction with the physical (apart from the actual picture-taking) is when I print the photos out, which is still a far cry from the film-based print-making experience.

To me, this is simply a time and expense saver. There may be some value added by using film, as some of my old-school photog friends insist, but they have always couched their arguments in terms of the quality of the media itself, never in terms of the process of spending hours in the darkroom, personally developing their own negatives and prints and coming out smelling like chemicals.

On the other hand, my girlfriend is a genuine drawing-things-on-paper kind of artist who would never dream of creating her art electronically. Scanning the finished product for display on the web, sure, but to my knowledge she’s never used an electronic app for anything artistic beyong doodling or graphic design. Is it quick or convenient? No. But it’s the only way she can achieve the quality she requires. Digital is simply not an option for her, and I believe it is likewise not an option for a large number of artists who create images from scratch.

As I ponder the validity of Morris’s two basic premises, that A) “Physical” art is dying out, and B) That this will suck all the life out of our cultural discourse, I find that my conclusion is that my disbelief in Premise A almost validates Premise B. I can’t imagine the demand for physical art ever drying up, because people in the market for art want something tangible, something created by the artist’s own hand. There’s a uniqueness and a prestige to that which electronic, infinitely reproducible and essentially virtual works of art can never equal. And this is why no-one will ever pay thousands of dollars for any of my photos.

I admit, I don’t really have a profound point or insight to make, but I’m intrigued by the questions that it stirs up, and the whiff of traditionalist snobbery evinced by Mr. Morris.

3 comments October 16th, 2005 at 10:52pm Posted by Eli

Architecture Marches On…

As a regular New York Times reader, I have been casually following the sad saga of the “Lollipop Building” at Two Columbus Circle, which has been deemed an eyesore and is slated for a complete renovation. Maybe I just have an inordinate fondness for the bizarre, but I rather like the Lollipop Building just the way it is.

What’s not to love? If it’s the architectural equivalent of plaid, so much the better.

4 comments October 4th, 2005 at 06:55pm Posted by Eli

Truly Fascinating Website

I can’t believe I forgot all about Foundphotos - I only remembered it because Mike mentioned something similar at Pittsburgh Blogfest/Drinking Liberally last night.

Basically, this guy uses filesharing p2p software to download whatever image files he can find, and then posts the ones that are the most interesting. It sounds simple, but the results are hypnotic. Check it out!

2 comments August 12th, 2005 at 09:48pm Posted by Eli